When i previously blogged about Vista, i had just spent a few hours working with it on my girlfriends new laptop.

It was my first real chance to get Vista to myself for a few hours.

I didn’t like it. It was trying to widgetize windows XP and fatten it up with tubs of gloss and polish. That was, and still is, my opinion on it.

But i noticed how people’s faces light up when they see the sort of ‘cool’ factor involved… running Vista and Media Centre, all the little touches of class when scrolling etc..

Very smooth, very easy on the eye.. Now that sort of stuff doesn’t really interest me much as a heavy user of computers. I want something to just do the job i want without any fancy effects or diversions along the way.

But then i started thinking… if this sort of stuff WOW’s average Joe’s and gets them interested in computers and multimedia, surely that’s an achievement, surely i shouldn’t be criticising something that can attract more people in to IT.

After all, the more people we have that use computers, the bigger the internet becomes, the more content we have, the more readers we have, the more money people spend etc.. Vista does look cool i suppose to an outsider knowing nothing really about computers. I guess it’s pretty user friendly too..

So with that in mind, i have to change my view on Vista slightly. It’s still fat and too fancy in my eyes, but in a ‘promotion of IT / attracting people to use computers/internet’ sense, i think it IS perhaps more valuable than we may think as webmasters/tech savvy people.