PDC2008 Design Principles for Windows 7... some comments and reflections

For those of you interested, you can see the actual presentation here: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC22/

Over and over while listening to this thing I keep thinking: wow, do they actually listen to themselves? Do they realize how ironic they're being?

At this particular moment, I'm listening to the presenter describe the idea that computers "should meet your expectations". Okay, we're on the same page here. Yes, computers should meet the expectations, the common assumptions, the intuitively obvious minimum behaviors that we would expect them to. Insert a movie: watch the movie. Insert a game, play the game. But the irony here, is something like this: The example he uses is "you put your movie DVD into your laptop. What do you expect to happen?" Well, it depends on how savvy of a Windows user we are.

If we're a total novice, and have never tried this before, then we might think that it should do the most obvious thing: play the movie.

But if we're even just a a little bit savvy, just a little bit experienced with Windows, then we immediately think: who knows?! Maybe its going to pop up a cluttered list of possible things to do, with icons of the software that's associated with those actions (which themselves are more about marketing their corporations and not really helpful in terms of giving one a solid sense of what they actually do or mean), of which the most obvious choice (play a movie) might or might not actually be present depending on what software we've installed on this laptop, what horrible software came preloaded by whatever godforsaken laptop company we bought this thing from, and whether Windows itself is even currently functioning properly for playing a movie, not to mention what crappy for-PC-software there might be on this DVD from the movie company (including the possibility of malware or a root-kit). But really? Who knows what it will do. This is a Windows PC.

But all of those things - the real list of what a laptop is actually likely to do - read like some insane horrible nightmare. Yet they're the likely outcome. And again, if this was not a laptop, but something less retarded like a DVD player, then it would actually play the DVD as expected, would not become infected with malware or a root-kit, and wouldn't be too damn dumb to figure out what to do with a movie DVD!

But will Microsoft ever listen to its own rhetoric? Or do you like the way it works now?