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Microsoft Hires GUI 'Design Guru'
overpayd writes "ZDnet is reporting that Microsoft has hired 'user interface guru' Bill Buxton to work as a senior researcher. Will this move help focus the design teams for Vista, Office, etc? From the article: 'My sense is that Microsoft is in transition from an engineering-led company to as much a design-led company ... There are more designers at Microsoft on any single team as there were, not too long ago, in the entire company. It's a wonderful change.'"
Showing the developers a copy of KDE 3.5 would have been cheaper and equally effective.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
In fact, maybe they'll change the color to fuschia or something more... stylish.
Wow, this is just one step closer to everyones goal and wish that Microsoft will be better, more user friendly, and eventually in a world with _fewer_ competitors. Soon we'll not only be giving Microsoft credit for being the most innovative and greatest producer of software innovations and technologies, but we'll have a deeper psychological connection to Microsoft. I mean, as Buxton said, "Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have."
But, really, I think the ideal world would be if Microsoft, Apple, and Intel combined forces into one giant mega-corporation. This way we could have beautiful looking machines and interfaces from Apple, machines that people feel a deep and unique social and cultural connection to Microsoft products, and they could build optimizations into the chipsets for specific things. How perfect would that be! Eventually we could even move all of our factories over to the third world, and all the rest of our filth and dirtiness and poverty too, so that we can have the most perfect materialistic iPod culture that we all desire. O proprietary disposable culture how I adore you!
In fact, those that are there are hired based on their willingness to perform double duty.
When their designs are being reviewed, they are kept busy driving the shuttle vans, getting coffee for the programmers that matter, crawling under desks to hook up switches for programmers with 5 or more computers in their offices, and wash the windows of those who rate offices on the windowed side of the hall.
It aint a glamor job in Redmond.