Microsoft’s VISTA: More Intuition
Posted on June 29, 2006
Filed Under What's New |
I was at a Microsoft presentation day, Tuesday, all gearing up for the November launch of the new operating system VISTA, Office 2007 and Microsoft’s collaboration tools and as I’m a user of IE7 Beta, we can throw that in for good measure.
Sure the headlines are going to say it’s a make or break for Microsoft but I don’t buy that one at all. These products are Microsoft’s mature market and there is no make or break. Only on Internet Explorer do I sense Microsoft is vulnerable but IE is hardly a cash cow.
First though VISTA. I’ve already written about Vista in the Irish Times. What you see on your PC screen affects your productivity and as a journalist what I want to see are icons that my intuition responds to. I think this is true of any creative worker (and there are more and more of us). We’re not organised and we expect flashes of inspiration, and moments of mysterious connect. I’m hopeless with files and folders, too and want a sense of discovery in my work.
The aero-glass look and feel to Vista is a feature I enjoy. Semi-transparent views mean you can half see a lot of what lies behind any particular screen you might be looking at on the desktop.
Other admirable features are the sidebar where you can keep live applications or desktop gadgets like a weather forecast, and the bottom of screen menu which with a mouse-over gives you a view of all or any live window.
Your activities, then, are accessible in a number of ways.
Aesthetics are going to be increasingly important in screen communications and Vista is a step forward. It’s a comfortable environment for people like me who rely on intuition.
Still, I felt MSFT could be doing more. People want to enjoy their time at a computer and the PC’s functions are migrating to the TV where aesthetic appeal is far more important, so a few jolly features like being able to do something with a buddy on another PC across a broadband network could have been built in at the operating level, particularly by a company that owns Groove. But so far so good.
Microsoft’s information retrieval philosophy in Vista is a step to applaud. I’ve been keeping an eye on Fast company, originator of web search engine Alltheweb but now a highly focused enterprise search company. Fast’s philosophy is simple. Forget people organising data. Index and search it and then present it in ways that make intuitive sense.
Microsoft is trying to do that with its stacks. You can still be an old fashioned heirarchal person and use tree-structure folders to organise your data in Vista, but you can also leave the organising to the search engine.
It will return documents of all kinds in a variety of stacks. Stacks are reminiscent of Mac’s early hyperstack tools. The search engine will organise information for you by, for example author, document type, subject, date. You name it. They all constitute what is in effect a different stack.
The benefit of a stack is it gives you a way to change your relationship with data. Having searched for a document (or rather, having organised your documents) by author, you can create a different stack (date) and drill down to find the document you are looking for, at the same time creating a different context (timeliness, for example).
Great. And it looks good. But here’s the rub. Microsoft doesn’t have an aesthetic philosophy. They talk about listening to customers and rightly believe that to be progress. It means they build features cutomers have asked for. But the consumer world is after more that. Stacks could have been dressed up in a number of different and appealing visualisations. Stacks could give a multitude of visual clues to users. To devise and develop those visual clues you need to be thinking aesthetically and you need to understand the relationship between images, understanding, and pleasure.
This is where MSFT falls down and where Vista is in need of attention from artists and designers from other fields. Perhaps I am quirky in insisting that an operating system needs to be more beautiful. Vista is progress and I think it will move Microsoft forward. Where Microsoft is though is a hard place. Stuck between old engineering disciplines and the new aesthetic world it is slowly entering (IPTV, X-Box, Media Centre). You cannot easily port engineering values to those walks of life where people’s first priority is to groove… did I say Groove? Maybe Ray Ozzie is the artist to Bill Gates code-geek.
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