« Google Finance | Main | Trackspam solution »
March 21, 2006
The big winner?
The big winner? I'm at a break between sessions, here at Microsoft's MIX conference is Las Vegas, catching up on email and reading what people have to say. Something that I realized this morning, during the keynote on Windows for computers, Windows for home TV, and Windows for game consoles is that the people who have really triumphed through all this are... [drumroll, please].... the designers who have been creating interactive experiences with Director and Flash the last ten years. If you look at the new Microsoft interfaces, they all embrace the "engaging experiences" aesthetic pioneered by this renegade coding/design group in CD-ROM and then WWW development in recent past. Just as Photoshop designers have forever changed the imaging we expect to see, and just as PostScript users changed the very nature of static design, so have interaction designers of the past ten years changed the nature of operating system experiences in both Microsoft and Apple systems. (This makes sense, because Microsoft has been hiring many of the top designers out of the Flash community the past few years, but it's still a triumph.) Sure, the engineers at the new Adobe Systems successfully created the enabling technologies, but I think it's the designers who have really changed the way the game is played, the way consumers expect to interact with their electronic devices. You did it, you changed the rules, you forced the mainstream to comply. Now, well... now I guess we have to move onto the next round, huh...? ;-)
Posted by John Dowdell at March 21, 2006 2:11 PM