Simple is Beautiful

We have been invited by the, otherwise, lovely folks at Microsoft Hellas to Bill Gates keynote speech, entitled something like 'The World of Tomorrow: Microsoft's Vision for the Future of Technology'. My brother, Dionysis (a beloved phaistonian) and yours truly took advantage of the precious invites and attended that said event.

Once we managed to enter the conference hall ('Music Hall', whatever its called), we found ourselves among a million strangers, looking sharp and always hungry, devouring anything those catering folks would dare place on the buffets in zero time -- that's a typical Greek trait; love for food and free stuff.

Bill Gates seemed tired and somewhat not that excited to be there, talking to mere mortals. He was nice though, he expressed his condolences on the passing of Archbishop Christodoulos and even took the time to demo something for us. He demoed Microsoft Surface, which didn't impress me at all. His hands driven actions suffered from latency and the whole thing seemed not much alike to what all Microsoft products, save the Xbox 360, to me. Ugly and almost deliberately engineered as to be hard to use by every day Joes. Bill Gates's vision of tomorrow is not different than just about everyone's vision. Break down software to services and components, move everything on the Net, come up with new ways to interface with software ( hand-writing, gestures, speech recognition,..), take advantage of the Cloud. Again, everything looked ugly. The slides ( stupid color themes and font text colors ), the screenshots and applications demoed by some Sr.Tech.Evangelist, .. Microsoft products are so freaking ugly. Perhaps I spent too much time drinking the kool aid, using Mac OS-X and apple products that I can't "tolerate" that kind of ugly UIs. I dare-say I like Microsoft, they may luck the cutting-edge tech of Google, the amazing usability and looks of Apple products, but that doesn't make any less important in the grand scheme of things.