Windows Vista Beta 1 Press Highlights

A lot of the press comments we've recieved on Beta 1 of Windows Vista
have realy exceeded my expectations. In general, I expected to see a
tone of "it's ok, but wait for later betas" with respect to the user
interface work we're doing. There's definitely more work in the pipe,
but even we shipped this week seems to have generated some really nice
words. Here are a couple of my favorites:

John Clyman of PC Magazine did a write up on the UI changes alone. He wrote:

Our first impressions of the Aero interface are positive. We were particularly
pleased to find that the visuals were engaging but not gratuitous. In fact, they
often add information that makes using the PC faster, easier, and less
error-prone, as well as more aesthetically satisfying.

This was really great to see - one of the biggest challenges we have
with updating the look of Windows is that we want to make it rich and
engaging, but becasue such a broad set of people use Windows literally
every day, there's a huge risk of going "over the top" and really
turning a lot of people off to the UI.

David Coursey at eWeek wrote:

Windows Vista is the best-looking OS Microsoft has ever produced and is
competitive with, and in some ways better, than Apple's recently-introduced Mac
OS X 10.4, aka Tiger.

Wow. Getting compared to Tiger is inevitable these days, given all
the buzz Apple has been generating around the Mac over the last few
years, we knew someone would say something about where we stood
relative to OSX, but "competitive with, and in some ways better" at
Beta 1 is really nice to see.

Of course - there are lots of opinions out there... I picked two of my favorites. What do you think of Beta 1?