Demo 07, the technology showcase where start-ups deliver six-minute pitches to would be investors, potential partners and the media is off and running here in Palm Desert, Southern California.

Second up on stage was Zink, a technology spinout from the old Polaroid instant photo company. Zink, which stands for ‘zero-ink’ has developed a new way to print full colour digital images without the need for ink cartridges or ribbons. The secret sauce is in the special paper that uses proprietary formulated layers of colour-dye crystals embedded in the paper that change from white to one of three basic colours – yellow, magenta and cyan – when a precise dose of heat is delivered by a low-cost thermal print head. The resulting prints are bright, high quality and durable..

Zink believes the first application for the new technology will be to enable camera phone and digital camera owners to carry a small business-card scanner around in their pocket, load up packets of 10-sheets of Zink paper and liberate some of those 300bn images that would otherwise probably never see the light of day.

Zink’s founders claim the price of the resulting prints will be about the same as regular ink-jet prints and that pocket-sized printers should cost around $100.

So, you’re not rushing out to buy Windows Vista? Why should you? It’s only an operating system, and that’s about as exciting as plumbing.

Judged as plumbing, though, it’s easy to forget what a big deal this is for Microsoft. Deep in the guts of Vista are some pieces of the technology that will play a key part in its longer-term battle against Google et al. They include the drably-named Windows Presentation Foundation (once known by the codename Avalon, and the first overhaul of the Windows graphics technology in 15 years) and Windows Communication Foundation (the subsystem formerly known as Indigo, which lets applications "talk" to each other when they are running on different machines.)

Why does this matter? Well, through the new APIs (application programming interfaces) to these technologies, Microsoft is giving developers the chance to build applications that run smoothly, and look great, even when they are running over a network and working on many different kinds of devices. Remember, Microsoft is first and foremost a platform company, and these are important building-blocks of a Web-based computing platform that extends well beyond the PC. They are showing up first in Vista, but the same building blocks will be embedded in the Windows Longhorn server software when it comes out later this year, and in future Microsoft services over the internet.

Microsoft’s bet is that the sort of "computing in the cloud" represented by Google will always be an incomplete picture. Only the company that spans PCs and other "client" devices, servers and services (ie, Microsoft) can stitch it all together. When it comes to the best way to meet a particular need through software, or the best way to charge for it, there will be "many ways to mix and match," Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategies, tells me: it will depend on the task at hand and how the user wants to pay for it.

"The world will be a giant mash-up of software and services," says Fitzgerald.

We’ll see. By finally launching Vista, though, Microsoft has at least been able to make what it considers an important move in the longer-term chess game against Google.