When you had been hired by Microsoft to create the Windows encounter less bothersome, what would be on your to-do listing?Mark Hamburg, the Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom guru lately hired by Microsoft, is tasked with determining easy methods to boost the way Microsoft;s operating program works.Hamburg didn;t recently join Microsoft to function on SmartFlow, Microsoft;s alleged competitor to Lightroom, as I guessed yesterday. Rather, he;s operating on long term OS interface ideas, according to a posting on the ProPhotoHome blog that a reader forwarded to me. Based on the publish:“Mark was invited by David Vaskevitch to come lead a team working about the future of OS User Encounter at Microsoft.“This is the way Mark phrased it:“Now, given that I find the current Windows experience really frustrating and yet I keep having to deal with it, this opportunity was a little too interesting to turn down. I can’t imagine doing serious imaging anywhere other than Adobe, but, I needed to do something other than imaging for a while.”This begs the question, what, exactly, is Vaskevitch working on? Vaskevitch is a Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Microsoft, who has been working with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates “to develop a focused and unified strategy and architecture for long term Microsoft platforms.” Vaskevitch is also quite the digital-photography buff.Given Vaskevitch;s charter is to focus around the long term, it;s not a complete given that Hamburg will be focused on improving Windows. Windows is Microsoft;s one and only running system today. (Windows Mobile, based on Windows CE, isn;t technically “Windows,” but for all intents and purposes, it is still is part of the Windows family.)However, there has been scuttlebutt around rumored Microsoft efforts to build a new running system that isn;t Windows at its core. And is Windows Live or virtualized Windows still “Windows”? Maybe, maybe not.“User experience” doesn;t translate exactly to “user interface.” It;s also about the applications which customers use to achieve a task. But it;s more UI than anything else.So in case you were to provide Hamburg with a SHORT listing of suggestions as to what you;d like to see changed in the Windows UI,
Windows 7 Download, where would you start?Update: News.com;s Stephen Shankland has additional speculation on what Hamburg might bring to the Windows UI table.