Windows Vista goes on sale at retailers today

After more than five years of development, over 50 million lines of software code, a $6 billion investment and a few headaches, Microsoft Corp's Windows Vista finally reaches consumers this week.

But the extent of success of the new operating system may depend more on large corporations, looking for different things than the multimedia bells and whistles aimed at home users and who have more discretion about when to buy the software.

Computers running Vista go on sale at retailers today, two months after Microsoft made it available to corporate, or enterprise, customers. This is the first major upgrade of the Windows operating system since Microsoft first released Windows XP in October 2001.