On January 30, 2007, it was released globally and made available for purchase and download from the Windows Marketplace, the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform. Development was finished on November 8, 2006, and over the following three months, it was released in stages to computer hardware and software manufacturers, business customers, and retail channels. At the time, this 5-year gap was the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft's Windows desktop operating systems.
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft as the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released in 2001.
