Aero UI discussion on Channel 9

I spent some time this evening reading through the feedback from a recent video interview I did on Channel 9. Lots of great discussion going on.

I clarified one of the remarks I had made in the video in an earlier post, but I'd like to take a moment to respond to one of the other comments...

"on" writes:

I really respect Kam VedBrat but i was disappointed when i saw him in the video @ 27:06 when Robert asks "Is this skinnable?" And Kam grins sardonically in front of the monitor. He is a very nice guy but i wonder if he despises the customization scene. A few months ago Kam replied my e-mail and he described that customization is against branding. It's okay. I'm not really a skin-guy. I don't use skins - i use the classic look in XP but i have an exact customization philosophy. I think not every default UI settings are suitable for both novice and advanced users.

This remark really tugged at my heartstrings.

I love the customization scene that exists around the Windows PC. I think it's really incredible to see the lengths that people go to in order to really make the Windows PC experience their own, both in hardware and in software. I think the folks who spend time and energy customizing their installation of Windows and the hardware they run it on are amongst our most valuable customers, since they are the ones who care enough about the time they spend using the pc to make it really fit exactly what they want.

Here's the thing - despite the seemingly vast amount of dollar-resources we have at Microsoft, the truth is there are a limited number of people-days we can spend on any given problem... this number is a function of things like when we want to get a product into market, the number of people we have around who are well-versed in the problem space (or the rate at which we can hire/train additional folks), etc. So we always try to get the most bang for the buck in features we build.

When it comes to customization - I think of bang-for-buck as delivering built-in features that impact the broadest set of customers possible, and as the audience gets smaller, either add options in control panels, or API's for further customization. And do it in a way that allows me to come back a year later (or two years, or three years) and continue to innovate in the space that I'm working in. This mindset manifests itself in simple features like letting you select your desktop background, that literally anyone can take advantage of. No image editing software, knowledge of XML, or Visual Studio, etc is required.

But what about folks who want to go beyond picking a picture? There are some great ISV's out there who do a great job serving this audience, and should continue to be able to do so when Windows Vista ships.

The real challenge for us is finding ways to allow folks to customize the experience while still leaving enough degrees of freedom for us to innovate in Windows itself for future versions.  I'll take give you a very simple example from the video - Robert asked why don't we ever do a "real 3d" user interface. In answering the question, I mentioned the issue of compatibility. If you have API's that allow you to get a window's screen coordinates, or let you draw outside the area of your own window using some 2-d cooridnate system, how do you maintain compatibility in your new 3d world?

Similar problems exist with customization - what happens when we introduce a 4th caption button in a future version of Windows, and a customer installed a skin for a previous verison that only included images for the three that existed there? This is a relatively minor example, but I think it illustrates the point.

There is also the issue of supportability - how does the guy on the phone doing tech support, or working at the helpdesk tell you to click on the big green start button to open a program, or the red button in the corner to close a pop-up add if the skin you installed replaced your start button with an alien-head and turned the close button black? This might not be an issue for someone who authored the skin themself but once you make it a broad-reach thing that anyone can download and install (maybe even accidentally) you run the risk of really making things worse for people.

Don't get me wrong - I love the fact that people can do this stuff with their pc. But it is far more invasive than it may appear to be on the surface. Think of cars as an analogy - one of the most successfully selling cars in the United States is the Honda Civic. And a huge contributor to its popularity, especially amongst younger buyers is the vast array of aftermarket parts that are available for it. Honda lets you do some customization at the factory - you can pick your paint color, maybe tint the windows, etc. If you want your car to look more like something that you saw on "Pimp my ride" you can get it done, but it also voids your factory warantee.

Our stance is somewhat similar - if you're going to do simple stuff, we have some options for you. And for a very large percentage of the ~700,000,000 people running Windows, what we offer in the box is fine. If you want more customization, it's available (and will continue to be in Windows Vista), but depending on how much you do under the hood, you might void your warantee.