Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

Continued...

Apparently the behemoth from Redmond has locked away a team of twenty designers for over a year and told them to rebirth the design of the PC. Ouch - that sounds painful. Even though Vista may have its issues, it does look a lot more modern and elegant that previous versions of Windows, so it's only right that they want to make sure that the machines people install Vista on will be as visually appealing as the OS. The efforts of these designers have resulted in The Windows Vista Industrial Design Toolkit. By the way, can we all just agree on the fact that Microsoft should never name anything? For something that's supposed to get the creative juices flowing, that name is unbelievably inappropriate. Either way, this toolkit contains a number of suggestions for the designers behind the PC cases that we see. Microsoft has suggested color palettes, materials, and even graphics for things such as the power button.

This attention to details is unique for Microsoft, but it's a welcome development. They may have put some major resources into this, but it doesn't mean that what they have created is any good or will even be used. Since so much time was spent by a rather sizable team on this, I would love to see what they came up with. You would hope that it would be unique and satisfying, but we'll just have to wait and see before we make any judgment. Whether these designs get implemented or not is another big issue. Just because this research has been done, it doesn't mean that hardware manufacturers are going to bend over backwards to accommodate Microsoft's wants. After all, they've seen what type of success they're famous for in relation to design. I'm sure some of the recipients of this kit would rather ignore it and be creative on their own. Besides, who wants a stuffy software company telling them what great hardware design looks and acts like?