Corvillus

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Zune media player, Microsoft released a new “Vista Industrial Design Toolkit” to Windows PC vendors. The toolkit focuses on how to design computers to be visually appealing “objects of desire”. The main idea is that all Vista PCs should have a somewhat unified look and style to them. I suppose this is Microsoft’s next step in copying being inspired by Apple, who is known for having a unique but uniform look and style to their products. Personally, I prefer the plain old rugged PC look such as that of Lenovo’s ThinkPad, which screams function and quality over form, rather than the attempts to make a flashy looking curvy case, which usually ends up conveying cheapness rather than the intended style. Thankfully, this is implemented at the discretion of the OEM, and one can choose not to implement it at all, so those ThinkPads will most likely keep the rugged style they are known for.

Microsoft ships “Vista Industrial Design Toolkit” to PC manufacturers [ArsTechnica, via Slashdot]