With Windows Vista set to make its appearance on retail shelves this week, the ball will start rolling as all new PCs will come with the OS pre-installed, and will eventually become commonplace - despite of several reports that indicate otherwise, I'm on the side of those who see a worthwhile improvement with Vista and believe it will be a success.

Along with Vista's new Aero Glass user interface, there are many elements that round up the experience to ultimately make for a more elegant desktop. Windows Vista will ship with a nice collection of desktop wallpapers, some of which you have probably seen already from the early beta builds. Interestingly enough however, unlike with previous Windows versions not all wallpapers and pictures were taken by hired professional services, rather Microsoft's Creative Director, Jenny Lam reportedly also went through a bunch of Flickr galleries and contacted professional and amateur photographers to see if they were interested in contributing to Vista. As a result, about a third of the wallpapers that will ship with Vista come from that research initiative. For sure those eager Flickr users did not see it coming, now that's Web 2.0.