Last week was the official launch week of Windows Vista and Office 2007. I guess lots of people around the world are aware of that. Here in The Netherlands there was a lot of publicity around it, official launch events, coverage in national newspapers and on national radio and TV. Probably this makes a lot of sense, especially since Vista will have an impact on many computer users. Tjeerd Hoek, Microsoft’s Design Director Windows User Experience flew over to Holland to talk about the appearance of Windows Vista. Immediately he took away one of the jokes I have frequently used since the introduction of Windows 95. They removed the start button. Well, actually the button is still there, but now it only consists of a Windows logo. Unfortunately it means that this old joke of mine is no longer valid. With Windows it used to be that you had to click on the Start button in order to shut down the operating systems, something I always found extremely funny. From now on this is history. The new look and feel of both Vista and Office 2007 got lots of attention. That makes sense; after all, the product appearance is very important for day to day usage. I am sure people have to get used to it, during the first few days or so. I have been using both products full time for over 6 months now, and after the first 5 minutes of using both products, they felt intuitive and much nicer to work with than previous versions of Windows and Office. Even though it is a matter of taste, I think that Windows Vista looks beautiful. The changes in Microsoft Office are probably even bigger from a user experience point of view. It takes guts to change the entire look and feel of a product and to dramatically change its menu structure. That is exactly what happened with Office. The minute you start an Office 2007 product, Word for instance, your first reaction might be like mine. Initially I had this feeling that I couldn’t find those menu entries anymore that I was so used to work with. But, indeed, after some time it turned out that I hardly use menus anymore. All the things I need to write a document are available in a newly designed toolbar. Whatever I am doing, it always feels like Word “knows” what I want to do. Word also provides immediate feedback, allowing the user to see changes in a document being applied in real time. Working with Outlook 2007 is even a bigger pleasure. Like a lot of people, I spent a significant amount of time reading emails and responding to them. The way I can organize my mail and maintain my task list and calendar in Outlook 2007 definitely saves me a lot of time. At a glance I can see what my work priorities are, what mail I need to response to, on what tasks I need to take action and of course, what my calendar looks like. This might be functionality you expect, but the way Microsoft changed the appearance of Office 2007, they give me more screen space to see relevant things, they organize things for me to become more productive and last but not least, they actually brought back fun for me to use these products. I guess it now is about time to start requesting all new cool Vista features to be applied to Windows CE as well. I am pretty sure that I am not the first one asking for a Vista look and feel on Windows CE or on a Windows Mobile device.