The Windows Vista Industrial Design Toolkit

[evoWalo]

Sometimes the headlines just write themselves Everyone's gonna use a poofter machine in the future!


MSNBC.com
Microsoft: PCs need a major design makeover
Company's designers want hardware to have 'Vista sensibility'
BusinessWeek Online

Updated: 8:08 p.m. ET July 27, 2006

A how-To kit for the ideal PC has been making the rounds of leading design shops. It calls for "accelerated curves" and "purposeful contrast." The preferred colors include a shade of black called Obsidian and a translucent white dubbed Ice. "We want people to fall in love with their PCs, not to simply use them to be productive and successful," reads the enclosed booklet. "We want PCs to be objects of pure desire."

Doesn't sound much like Microsoft, does it? But it is. BusinessWeek has learned that a team of 20 in-house designers has been working quietly for the past 18 months on an elegant new look for PCs that will run Microsoft's next operating system, Windows Vista. It's a major departure for the company, which historically has left design to the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. Persuading the hardware guys to embrace the toolkit won't be easy. They're already working overtime to build better-looking gear on their own.

(MSNBC is a joint Microsoft - NBC venture.)

But Microsoft feels the PC world needs a major face-lift, and one way to do it is through better integration of software and hardware. No one does that more effectively than Apple Computer, and the folks in Redmond may be worried that their resurgent rival is getting too much traction in the race to dominate the digital home.

Whole new level
What's more, a slick new look can only help the debut of Vista, which will reach consumers in January, years late and lacking many of the features it was supposed to have. "This has always been the issue with Vista: Who cares!" says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, an industry analyst. "So they're going to try to pull all these elements together, to make [the launch] into a major event."

Microsoft is no newcomer to hardware design, of course. The company has made PC mice and keyboards for years. The Xbox game console has been a hit. Microsoft is working on a music player, Zune, that it hopes will rival the iPod. And the company routinely gins up ideas for PCs, including a small liquid-crystal display screen on the outside of a laptop to display appointments and e-mail.

But trying to transform the PC ecosystem—even peripherals makers such as Logitech received the kit—takes things to a whole new level. It reflects the fact that the economics of the computer business is changing. The PC world used to be divided into two camps: those who made lucrative software and the poor schlubs who built the low-margin hardware it ran on.

Echo of Apple ethos?
Apple has turned that model on its head. From the beginning it has managed to create a unified design for its products by building everything itself, first with the Mac and then later with the iPod. Although Apple sells one computer for every 20 PCs, the iPod's success has proved how crucial it is to create a seamless experience for consumers, who are buying much of the gear these days. Says a top PC design executive: "You're going to see more and more of this desire to integrate hardware and software."

Even if it means borrowing from Apple. Microsoft denies doing that, saying it's simply responding to demand for good design. Yet its approach has more than an echo of the Apple ethos.

"We're decomposing the look and feel of Vista and bringing it into a language that hardware designers understand," says Steve Kaneko, design director of Windows hardware innovation. And here's another Apple-esque detail: The Zune player will work only with Microsoft's planned music service, sources say. In other words, it will be part of a closed system, like iPod and the iTunes Music Store.

Soft sell
So far, Microsoft is using a soft sell with PC makers. The Windows Vista Industrial Design Toolkit, hand-delivered to about 70 designers, contains everything a PC maker needs—color palette, suggested materials, even graphics for icons and power buttons—to create computers, laptops, and peripherals that hew to Vista's look. A separate booklet exhorts hardware makers to eschew drab, utilitarian boxes. Microsoft is providing the toolkit for free and vows not to strong-arm any company into incorporating the concepts.

Will hardware makers take the hint? Those most likely to use the toolkit are upstarts with tiny design budgets and little brand identity. One is A Living Picture. The British startup plans to launch digital picture frames in October that use Wi-Fi to display photos stashed on a PC. The first two products rely heavily on the toolkit, from colors and materials to suggestions for geometry. In the end, Microsoft saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Jesse Grindeland, president of A Living Picture. "The question of using it wasn't really why," he says, "but why not."

Big PC makers such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo won't dive so deep. "This will look to [the hardware makers] like another way for Microsoft to take value from them and move it back to Redmond," says NPD Group analyst Steve Baker. "If they can't offer a unique look and feel, that takes away a lot of the value of being a hardware company."

Cool reception
In other words, if everyone uses the same design, a market with razor-thin margins will be further commoditized. Lenovo received the toolkit but is cool to the notion of implementing its concepts. "Our ability to differentiate ourselves comes from our industry-leading innovation," says a Lenovo spokesperson. "And design is a big part of that."

Trying to influence PC design is a no-brainer for Microsoft, since doing so costs the company almost nothing. That it's bothering at all shows that having a software monopoly isn't enough anymore.
Copyright © 2006 The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14066894/
© 2006 MSNBC.com

[Sir_GT]

Brilliant. Now MS can brag about making poofta PC's that are bloody expensive but aren't optimized to run modern multiple-core processors...

A rotten cake will always be rotten cake, no matter how much icing you put on top. The end.

[evoWalo]

i wouldnt put it past microsoft making a better product this time around. what with having a very good example to draw "inspiration" from and them junking most of the legacy code and replacing it with something with a bit more consistency. all the same i'd wait until Vista SP1 comes out before i'd ditch my XP box. Just wish Vista only ran on multicore PCs so it wouldnt be that bloated, heck you need a new machine to run it efficiently anywayz.