Microsoft Ice House: Plan for Friday

[Borden Rhodes]

Evening, heroes,

I took a second gander at the MS house and tried to go to as many
demos as I could before they forced us outside for the Vista & Office
draw at 6:25.  There's definitely plenty of room to set up a 10 foot
penguin but I was thinking on my way home that we should think about
lighting because even towards 6:00 it was getting pretty dark out.

The content of the demos is nothing new if you've familiarised
yourself with the Vista homepage.  There are six 'rooms' in the house
each with its own theme.  I summarise them so we know what sort of
questions to expect if people ask us:

- The kitchen emphasises Internet Explorer's tabbed browsing, ability
to print only selected text from web pages, and anti-phishing
software.  Also pontificated were Vista's tablet support and One Note:
a clipboard made bigger and more complicated.
- The dining room emphasised Vista's apparently easier media handling
abilities and, specifically, the ability to tag media for searching
(which I think just makes things worse).  Also demonstrated was
Vista's DVD creation software where you could drag and drop media into
place for burning.
- The living room emphasised Vista's abilities to replicate a TiVo -
download live TV to the hard drive, set up recording shows up to two
weeks in advance, and find all of the movies being broadcasted that
day with only a half dozen awkward clicks of a remote control.  The
guide also noted XBox interoperability and the ability to control
Vista wirelessly and remotely (which we already know is far too easy)
- The bedroom showed off Vista's DreamScene desktop (which I'll
concede is actually pretty cool albeit practically useless), desktop
widgets, BitDefender software, and the Media Center [sic] dashboard
where you can see all the pretty album covers of the music you can't
play because you haven't bought the rights to it.
- The kid's room showed off the new games organiser (which basically
downloads games and dumps them in a prearranged folder) and parental
controls to stop kids from playing things like Doom 3 (the usefulness
of which is a bit of a paradox).
- Finally, the office advertise, surprise surprise, MS Office 07.
Apparently it has has all sorts of groundbreaking features like
formatting previews and on-the-fly font changing.

The house's emphasis, and what seems to sucker most of the visitors
from their money, is the eye candy and simplicity.  We should,
therefore, be ready to respond with our own eye candy and show how
many things in Ubuntu can be one with only one click (like Synaptic,
for example).

I hope that this is of some use.

Borden