I see that I am not the only one who reacted in a not entirely positive manner to Scoble's recent rhapsody on the Longhorn interface, Meeting Infragistics' VP drew out a story about sitting in the $250,000 Maybach .
Mike Gunderloy, Meeting Infragistics' VP drew out a story about sitting in the $250,000 Maybach produces the memorable insight quoted here:
" It's hard to believe anyone other than a paid shill for Longhorn could write stuff like "Note that Longhorn's window borders evoke the emotion you feel when looking through that moon roof's window." "
Mike then goes on to announce:
" one developer wasting time on that crap is one too many "
I can't identify with Mike's comment just quoted.
Achieving a high quality user interface is crucially important for Longhorn.
A good interface is not "eye candy" but rather should provide an efficient and effective way to access the complexity that is, by the nature of Longhorn, hidden underneath.
If the interface looks good then that's great. But to my mind it is more important to avoid the interface nonsense that appeared in Windows XP and some earlier versions of Office. For my recent rant on some aspects of that see Longhorn - Scoble has me worried .
And, of course, just as Mike wasn't impressed by Scoble's rhapsody, at least one of those who commented on Mike's rant responded in a style at least as pithy, ShowComments .
So what was Scoble feeling as he looked through the moon roof's window? We just have to hope that it wasn't something like, "Why did I spend so much money to buy something glitzy that doesn't actually do the job!".
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 27, 2004 09:51 AM