Thanks for the interesting interview. With the release of the VPC 2007 beta, I've really been able to play with Vista and I'm really pleased with what I've seen thus far. It's a little sluggish (which I suspect is largely due to virtualizing on a fairly
limited laptop) and there certainly are some niggling inconsistencies, but overall it's great.
One thing I do want to chime in on though is the confusing "inheritance" model in the desktop and start menu. The problem I'm having is that icons can come from either the the user's own folder or from Public (on the desktop) or Default shared folders (in the
start menu). Just by looking at it, it isn't at all clear what's coming from where and it's really rather confusing. It can also make it hard to do relatively simple things. For instance, I like to remove a lot of the marketing verbage from Start Menu entries
to keep it clean (e.g., "Windows Media Play" -> "Media Player" and so forth) and I'm finding I have to do a UAC elevation each time.
I'd like to see this move to a more prototype-based model in future versions--e.g., rather than merging a user's icons with the Default icons, give the users local copies of the icons that they can modify or remove as they see fit. Default could be seen as
a sort of "broadcast" folder for admins and new applications that install for all users. Of course, there could be GP policies to restrict user control when it really isn't desirable (e.g., public computers). Anyways, just a suggestion...
Also a few questions: Since "Documents and Settings" is now "Users" could you rename "Program Files" to "Programs" or maybe "Applications"? And why, in "Public" are the folders named "Public Documents", "Public Music", etc. instead of the more obvious "Documents",
"Music", etc.?
Thanks.
