>>And the Vista on my laptop doesn't even look... it's dead :).
>
>Like Ken Levy once said: "Stability is a feature". :) Interface looks stability IS a feature that increases (or at least does not decrease) the productivity.
>
>Why do I have to learn where all the familiar menu options did go in a new interface version? Just because somebody in [younamethecompany] decided that the new version has to looks 'cooler', so they could sell it better? My impression that this kind of features fall into "other 10%" of features that nobody really uses.

Right. Just after being pis*ed off at Windows Vanishing Menu system for, what, only a dozen years, now they've invented the new whachamacallit thingies in Office, so the selected area of the menu would actually STAY visible.

>If they would just make database oriented file system available, that would be THE Feature. :) So far we still have only the promises, and I find it easier to find and download the needed file from the Internet, rather than try to find it on my hard drive.

So true. How many files named setup.exe do we have, and how do we know what do they do? Even with all the indexing (which, so I heard, finally works in Vista - can't really try it anymore :) nobody can tell me that.

>If I want to look at the pretty cool interface, I could just run one of the games.

I've often considered the games a good (pardon the pun) playground for experimenting with GUIs - and while they do have a lot of cool and quite nonstandard things, I've sort of changed my mind. Not much of that can be applied in the real world.

A game is pretty much a closed system, the user is bound by the rules of the game and can't do in it what it's not designed for. A game doesn't have to interact much with the rest of the world. So most of the licentia poetica which can apply in a game's GUI won't necessarily apply outside of it. OTOH, some of the gems can and should be stolen from there.

>May be I just get more conservative with the years?
>:)

I wouldn't say so... maybe fed up?