Jet-lagged Gates opens a new Vista

The Microsoft Windows Vista roadshow pulled into London yesterday as a jet-lagged Bill Gates, chairman and figurehead of the software behemoth, attempted to "wow" observers with a flashy presentation at the British Library.

"The wow starts now," Mr Gates told the London crowd as he hyped up the "revolutionary" aspects of the software platform. Vista has been designed for ease of use and to be Microsoft's most secure system ever.

The operating system was launched across 70 countries yesterday and Mr Gates has been on a whistle-stop tour to promote Microsoft's biggest launch since Windows 95 over a decade ago. After making a presentation at the US launch of Vista, Mr Gates appeared on The Daily Show, presented by the comedian Jon Stewart, on Monday night before flying to London.

The Vista launch has been a long time coming and attendees at the London event had to wait a little longer still after Mr Gates took to the British Library's stage around 15 minutes late as a result of traffic delays.

He described Vista as "the foundation to take things to a whole new level" and predicted that the software platform would be on 100 million computers by the end of the year. He said the system would revolutionise the way consumers watch television, use telephony services and listen to music. He also said that it has wide-reaching implications for education as students can "interact and share in different ways".

Mr Gates also had a trick up his sleeve to "wow" the London audience. Along with the British Library, he unveiled a plan to put two of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks online for consumers to interact with. Mr Gates paid $30m for the Codex Leicester manuscript back in 1994 while the British Library holds the Codex Arundel in its archives. Using improved online reading tools from Microsoft, the library will reunify the texts and put them online over the coming months.