#1, we went around that one a great deal and actually have two more we came up with later.
Bob himself didn't like it much, but again, the idea was to rough out a direction. We wanted something clean, but bold and strong. So it's by no means final and any ideas or designs are welcome.
The layouts are actually de-tuned and only present design concepts we knew were going to be imperatives - for example, how best to integrate ads in effective, but not dominate ways and how to use color to group areas of interest - these tiles may be selected from a collection and sized and positioned to suit each person's individual tastes and depending upon platform/desired experience, executed without a post-back.
The final designs are even more compelling, but we are very reluctant to tip our hand(s) - design and our coding wise.
A big part of our work has been to set the standard for all web applications (I know, not possible) - but we set the bar so high for ourselves that we knew it would be a very big challenge and that in many cases, the technologies used had not been invented, or developed yet. (If you saw the requirements list, you'd understand that we intentionally asked for even the most wild of features and ideas). So you take guys with 30 and 40 years in this business and turn them loose on the impossible, or seemingly impossible... which candidly, we said several times a week... then someone would come up with an idea and we'd try it and it would work... and onto the next mission impossible. The entire idea was to make it so hard that it would be harder than anything we had ever done - knowing that even if we failed in some ways, we'd still have set something of a standard. We'd then expose that to the hard cold review of younger guys and they'd shred it in the context of what younger people would want. Things like pinning, where young non-enterprise oriented people who use BB's over iPhone, or SMS, PIN each other - the new age of non-geek, geeks that simply use technologies. Some things so out there and revolutionary, that they will render many sites simply irrelevant.
Finally, there will be a code-plex and tools for all - showing how we did it and offering people the use of the same stuff. Similarly, we're opening our battle books and sharing with people how we do things and how to leverage the "what's ours is yours" distributed data and calculations centers Microsoft is building. (call that a partner's survival guide in the SaaS (services and software) era where MS eats its young), http://blogs.msdn.com/jvast/archive/2007/07/11/hey-hey-get-off-of-my-cloud.aspx
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