Another theme of the PDC

The phrase I'm hearing again and again from Microsoft staffers is, "We want to hear your scenarios." You get the impression that having got this far with the technology, they're almost frightened that it won't meet third-party developer needs.

I guess this is why they're previewing the technology so early in the product cycle and so widely. The foundations are there, now they need to know which direction to take it to get developer buy-in. One of the Aero guys remarked that "the hardware manufacturers love it already," but if they want to get the user base to upgrade then they need the software manufacturers to fall in love with it too, and they're not sure they can figure out what's needed to do that from focus groups and privileged private betas alone.

What a change from the Hailstorm PDC.