Apparently not. 

The Saturday after PDC some of my colleagues on the Academic team met with a group students to discuss “digital lifestyle”.  Chris Avis was there and took some good notes.  A couple of things strike me about this;

1) Windows is not cool.  These kids clearly don’t remember the world before GUIs for personal computing.  Shall I walk you through what it was like to boot up my Commodore 64? :)  Vista will change a lot of minds about this.
2) Office is not cool.  Hmmm…business and personal productivity just isn’t “cool” no matter what the product is.  What IS cool is being able to use tools like Office to blast through work that you HAVE TO do so that you can go do fun things that you WANT to do.  That said, they clearly don’t remember a world when the kinds of apps that are in Office were a) non GUI based (Lotus 1–2–3 on an MS-DOS machine…enough said) and b) stand-alone with no interactivity.
3) Microsoft is for “grandma.” Grandma’s company and grandma’s operating system.  Though I disagree with this, I think I’m ok with this.  Windows works for grandmothers AND students—which is what it’s supposed to do.  I wonder how many students’ grandmothers can use Linux?  I would guess that is a small number. 

Like Chris, I think that these kinds of session are the best part of this job—there’s nothing better than listening to customers.  But I would say that Microsoft doesn’t get credit for some things that are very cool.  I predict that the next year will tell a different story however…