As someone who officially became a desktop OS interface nerd while playing with Dynapad (http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab/dynapad.htm), it frustrates me how risk averse the big OS vendors are. They have all the market share, infrastructure, marketing, and engineering talent to pull of something really incredible, but they opt not to do so.
I understand that they don't want to disrupt their user base with something too radical. That makes sense to me. However, with the next version of Windows, Microsoft had nothing to lose. Everyone hated Vista and most people avoided upgrading to it. Why not treat this failure as a huge opportunity to do something new and interesting?
They could have pushed the state of the art of desktop operating systems way forward, and possibly taken away that smug feeling of superiority us Mac users have enjoyed for years. Instead they just polished up a subset of Vista's warts. Oh well.
Look at how much crap they got and get over the Ribbon, something which almost all of the people who use it regularly love.
Changing things that people are invested in is hard. They don't like change, and don't like it when you force it upon them.
Also, most large changes need to be done slowly. If they make a big (risky) change from Vista->Win7, it will seem much larger (and much riskier) from XP->Win7.
I want to second this. I know people who are new to the ribbon seem to hate it, but I love it. And just today I installed a new scanner at work and was pleased to see that it also has a new ribbon interface. Replacing the old windows menus the company had two product generations ago.
Bad pdf links and no screenshots at that website. Dissertation on same here from 2006 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1195569 but it's behind a paywall. It does sound interesting - if the project has gained a new name or other resources exist I'd like to know more.
You're describing Microsoft's Longhorn project, at least in the beginning. It was going to be a whole new everything, with advanced features like WinFS getting shelved as the project schedule kept slipping, ultimately ending as the half-baked XP facelift known as Vista.
Longhorn was never slated to be nearly as revolutionary as what I had in mind. However, Longhorn's fate might prove wrong my statement about Microsoft's engineering (management) talent.
I understand that they don't want to disrupt their user base with something too radical. That makes sense to me. However, with the next version of Windows, Microsoft had nothing to lose. Everyone hated Vista and most people avoided upgrading to it. Why not treat this failure as a huge opportunity to do something new and interesting?
They could have pushed the state of the art of desktop operating systems way forward, and possibly taken away that smug feeling of superiority us Mac users have enjoyed for years. Instead they just polished up a subset of Vista's warts. Oh well.