Blast-Off

I attended Microsoft's launch party for Windows Vista ("The Wow Starts Now") and Office 2007 the other day, in New York City (which I live not far from).  Unlike the XP launch, there were no giveaways -- at least none that I knew of -- and there were also, amazingly, no technical glitches.  One of the product managers took the stage and played a session of Uno with his son on the West Coast via XBOX Live, and after a brief delay people in the audience started to nudge each other.  Then the game kicked in, and so did the applause.

And then there was something that floored me in a completely unexpected way.  One of the things they played for the attendees was a clip about how they selected 100 families from around the world to work as beta-testers -- families, so they could get feedback from the families as a whole about how things worked in Vista. When they showed clips from one of the families from Israel, I heard this squee! of glee from behind me.  I turned around and the father and mother being interviewed on the screen were standing ten feet away from me.  Nice.