SteveB (yes, the real SteveB) was in Toronto for the last couple days and gave 2 back-to-back one-hour talks Wednesday evening - one for MCSPs and the second to an MSDN audience.
During Q&A, when one partner commented that “My client hasn't moved from Windows 2000 Workstation Pro to Windows XP but they don't like the interface, it's too “cute””.
Steve replied that customer feedback to Microsoft is that UI changes are one the the most expensive upgrade costs customers experience because of the amount of end-user re-training and re-familiarization required. He went on to say that Longhorn will support both the new Longhorn UI as well as the current Windows XP UI as options.
...and with his usual big smile, told the partner “That being said, unfortunately for your customer, Longhorn isn't going to support the Windows 2000 UI”.
This of course is interesting in terms of my recent comments about “Longhorn and Metadata: The answer is in the shell and how people will work (aka metacrap, meta-crap - two nice searchable metadata values)”.
p.s. “I wonder what else Steve had to say?”
- Security is number one and Microsoft is extremely focused on it [with real and believable evidence]. Hundreds of thousands of partners and customers are going to receive security training from Microsoft in addition to Microsoft's internal efforts.
- MS had a very deep understanding of where and how different server o/s's are being used in organizations. .NET (specifically ASP.NET) and security training are key to winning in the web applications space.
- Deep, deep commitment to the Microsoft partner model: “Say it takes 20 years to build a 100,000-person professional services organization - why do that when we already have 700,000 partners worldwide? ... many of them true entrepreneurs with a level of creativity, innovation and risk taking you will never find or be able to create in a traditional services organization. It would be crazy.“
Have a great Friday.