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If you look at how the xbox dashboard has iterated over the years, this most recent version represents concepts from their Windows 7 UI. That to me is the sign of a company trying to simplify it’s product identities across the board. Just keep an eye out for the next version of windows, I’m sure it will pull in all those ideas.

I think the PS3 UI is much better. Its simpler and more streamlined. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lKSt5Motxw

Have you ever used Media Center in Windows 7? In my opinion it’s the best thing Microsoft have ever produced, and the UI is amazing. I do all my TV watching through it and I keep being impressed by little features I find, much like on Apple products.

by the way … on the background you can see he actually uses a mac for his work ;)

I was very impressed as well with specifically the in-game dashboard UI. Its amazing how simplicity in diesng can be such a giant improvement for companies even as large as Microsoft.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, though not in the devices and entertainment realm. If you think that the company is “silo’ed,” I don’t think you’re paying enough attention to it. Indeed, UI concepts and an overall look have really spread all over the company (even the campus shuttles use the same font of the “Metro” UI). As mentioned above, the WP7 UI is really quite good (I reviewed it here) and there’s a lot of mix between it and Xbox right now. Where the differences come is in the ways you interact with it. Kinect is so different from touch, for example, that you now have the interesting problem of trying to build cohesion between two different paradigms.

But yes, Xbox UI has come a very long way. The current dashboard is the third version since it launched about five years ago, and it seems just as fresh and new as it did then.

Does Microsoft move fast enough? Not for my tastes, but what criticism there has been over the new phone OS does illustrate the company overcoming one of my biggest complaints, about them not iterating fast enough. Its release and development was such a departure from the average long Windows product cycle.

I agree. Some pockets of great innovation.

One thing that erked me was how the menu items would drop off to nothingness as you scroll through.

Xbox UI is ported as open source media center framework called XBMC (www.xbmc.org) and some serious experimental interfaces are available for download there.

This is the single MS product that still surprises me about interfaces. Looking forward to Kinect gestures adaptation after the resolution increase which is expected in 2011.

As a former Microsoftie, I think that MS is the most open software vendor out there.

The fact that they were the first software vendor to deal with EDI and XML and to go big with XML web services before everyone . Just this move has mode them 70 % more open,