A lot of the press comments we've recieved on Beta 1 of Windows Vista have realy exceeded my expectations. In general, I expected to see a tone of "it's ok, but wait for later betas" with respect to the user interface work we're doing. There's definitely more work in the pipe, but even we shipped this week seems to have generated some really nice words. Here are a couple of my favorites:

John Clyman of PC Magazine did a write up on the UI changes alone. He wrote:

Our first impressions of the Aero interface are positive. We were particularly pleased to find that the visuals were engaging but not gratuitous. In fact, they often add information that makes using the PC faster, easier, and less error-prone, as well as more aesthetically satisfying.

This was really great to see - one of the biggest challenges we have with updating the look of Windows is that we want to make it rich and engaging, but becasue such a broad set of people use Windows literally every day, there's a huge risk of going "over the top" and really turning a lot of people off to the UI.

David Coursey at eWeek wrote:

Windows Vista is the best-looking OS Microsoft has ever produced and is competitive with, and in some ways better, than Apple's recently-introduced Mac OS X 10.4, aka Tiger.

Wow. Getting compared to Tiger is inevitable these days, given all the buzz Apple has been generating around the Mac over the last few years, we knew someone would say something about where we stood relative to OSX, but "competitive with, and in some ways better" at Beta 1 is really nice to see.

Of course - there are lots of opinions out there... I picked two of my favorites. What do you think of Beta 1?