David Flynn25 June 2009, 9:33 AM
Microsoft has added another bullet point its brag list of Great Things in Windows 7 – the redesigned box containing the OS can be opened without needing an instruction sheet!
If you’re looking for proof that Windows 7 is Vista done right, you don’t even need to install the OS – just open the retail box. Or, in the case of Vista,
try opening the box.
Eye-catching as it may have been, Vista’s snazzy plastic case was a perfect example of over-engineering and design trumping common sense. (Ironically, you could say the same about the OS itself – it’s as if the packaging was a physical manifestation of the software).
When you get right down to it a box is
meant to be opened, and ideally quickly and easily, so you can get to the thing you actually paid for.
Vista turned that on its head, with a needlessly complex and counter-intuitive mechanism which made opening the box more like solving Rubik’s Cube.
So it was almost inevitable that the retail packaging would find itself on the hit list of Windows 7’s many overhauls and back-to-basic processes. And that being the case, it was just as predictable that Microsoft would trumpet the redesigned box.
In yet another breakthrough for Microsoft, the Windows 7 DVD case now opens like – well, like a DVD case.
It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sadly true, but over at the
Windows Team Blog Microsoft spruiker and former Windows fanboy blogger Brandon LeBlanc has revealed that the Windows 7 boxes are now officially ”easy to open”.
“The plastic case opens easily like a standard DVD case and it will have a single easy-to-remove seal at the top - and that’s it!” puffs LeBlanc.
Microsoft has also slimmed down the retail package to just three elements: a lighter plastic case, the paper sleeve and a simple Getting Started Guide.