Hiya JimN.

On a purely philosophical note, I wonder if the pendulum is swinging back the other way on UI vs. power/reliability? Look at the rising popularity of (mainly) non-GUI Linux. Linux kicks NT's butt in speed and, in most studies, reliability....but no one would ever accuse it of being end-user friendly.

It makes me wonder; is it possible that future desktops will be designed with multiple CPUs, one to handle user interactions with the big, fat, friendly GUI and another backend CPU(s) running a much more simplistic OS divorced from the GUI to do the brute processing? Sort of an internal client/server architecture. Now THAT would be an intriguing architecture IMHO.