As noted by Sean Alexander, Director of Silverlight, on his blog, Microsoft.com (US) has become one of the first high-traffic websites jumping on the Silverlight bandwagon. The new page published just a few hours ago features a Silverlight-powered video showcase for the XBOX 360 Elite. Here is a video capture of the webpage in case you don’t have Silverlight or missed it over the weekend.

The video which it plays is a 1.5MB WMV video file streaming from the Microsoft.com servers. By looking through the XAML file, you’d find a link to the WMV file it references, which upon analysis contains a video encoded at 878Kbps with the WMV9/VC-1 codec as well as audio encoded at 128Kbps encoded with the Windows Media Audio 9.2.

Even though this is not a technical feat by any means, the same video could have been delivered in Flash, however it might help the adoption of the Silverlight runtime by exposing it to the largest number of users possible.

Did you know? There are just short of 100 different regional variations of Microsoft.com. Above is a collage of all the (unique) Microsoft.com websites available – some smaller countries shared duplicated websites amongst its neighbors. Almost all are individually maintained and updated with local content and native language. Only about 10% of the sites are updated to the latest version, mostly western countries with large markets.

Weirdest regional website? Microsoft Pakistan. A website clearly showing its age. Still promoting Internet Explorer Release Candidate 1, Windows Media Player 10 and Office 2003.

In 1981, the GUI as we know it today was born out of the Xerox Star – an unfortunate investment by Xerox that only ended in legal turmoil, yet 26 odd so years later we’ve progressed only as far as the capability to have windows overlap each other instead of tiled. During these years, we’ve mastered the ability to open, close and move them with all known combination of genie and transparency wizardry, but every application still resides in a window and objects are still represented by icons. Today, we can’t even live with a cellphone that’s months out-of-date, so why are we stuck with something invented 26 years ago?

To put 26 years into context, below is an example of 26 years worth of difference in the field of graphical user interfaces compared with advancements in video game technologies. How little things have changed and how far things could have changed.

Left: Castle Wolftenstein, released in 1981, is a steal-based action game for the Apple II.
Right: Crysis, to be released in 2007, is a first-person-shooter PC game by EA Games.

Left: The graphical user interface of Xerox Star Workstation (image credit Neovis), released in 1981, an operating system by Xerox. Right: The graphical user interface of Windows Vista, released in 2007, an operating system by Microsoft.

The reality is, “a window is really an artifact from around 1979, when we had character mode, not graphics. Every application assumed that the screen was 40×24 characters.” Then the graphical user interface stepped in, and introduced “virtual screens to run multiple applications at once.” In the beginning, “they were just tiled. Eventually that became Windows”.

Creative Director for Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Center in Beijing, David Vronay hopes to “get rid of overlapping windows all together”. Dave is a researcher at heart, but he has an abundance of experience working on retail products such as Windows Vista. He is leading a new design team in China to come up with new solutions to some of these decades-old problems.

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Last year, one of the greatest games of all time had a commercial of equal status – “Mad World” for Gears of War. Even though the advertisement was undeniably just a well-crafted machinima video, it worked on so many levels. Beautiful cinematography (by Joseph Kosinski who also worked on the Halo 3 ad), touching storyline and the perfect song. Some claim it worked because it was so different to what we were used to in video game commercials – loud gunfights and corny techno-music.

It caught up so well with the enthusiast community that it propelled “Mad World” straight to #1 on the iTunes chart, and sparked a massive remix contest on YouTube. Some replaced the song with other songs of similar style, others took the song and plastered it over other game machinimas. All in all, it was a huge success from a marketing standpoint.

But today, Mich Mathews, Senior Vice President of Central Marketing at Microsoft has come out admitting that they didn’t intend to create the mashup phenomenon it generated. Speaking at the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit, Mich was discussing the effects of building reach through information sharing by the customer. “The ideal campaign may get two times, four times, even ten times more of that reach via pass along and remixing.”

She then used the Gears of War commercial as an example. “We got more than 700 community-created mashups that are being posted on YouTube that have now been viewed over a million times. This type of passionate engagement with the brand we think helped make Gears of War the No. 1-selling videogame last holiday season and, indeed, has helped to make it the fastest selling videogame of all time.”

She then goes on to spill the beans. “Now, one dirty little secret here that I have to confess, we didn’t create this ad for this kind of customer-generated content, and I have to say, though, it’s something certainly now that we factor in when we’re going through that creative process.”

But as the way things are, the more you try the less it will happen again.

Last Friday, a not very well known company called AMD generously hosted a bloggers-only webcast event with Henri Richard, executive vice president of AMD, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer and self-proclaimed gaming enthusiast, to discuss his feelings about the first 100 days inside a world with Windows Vista. Everything aside, props to AMD for building a very strong relationship with bloggers through these exclusive non-press events that can only be compared to the bonding experience you find in public saunas.

First Henri announced that AMD will be rolling out a gold master image of Windows Vista for deployment throughout the company as a sign of their confidence over the stability and performance of Windows Vista with a combination of their hardware and software support. Intel on the other hand plays chicken until the over-exaggerated Service Pack 1 – which for some ranks on par with the second coming. But much of this one hour session evolved into a nice Q&A session with Henri spanning across a variety of topics from a bunch of familiar names including Mary Jo Foley, Robert McLaws (who also set a new questions record?) and Scott Fulton from BetaNews who asked some great questions.

Unfortunately because I was 17 hours in the future, I wasn’t able to participate live. However, with the help of AMD’s Scott Carroll, the questions I had were also asked during the conference (if not better than if I said it myself). The questions concerned the state of Windows Vista drivers, the price and more specifically price drops of AMD processors and the Fusion.

Here are clips from the webcast where Henri answers these questions. Instead of regurgitating what Henri said in writing, I thought it would be cool to post clips from the recording to let Henri explain it in his own words and to show you what an event like this looks like (I didn’t know either). I don’t want to steal anyone else’s thunder so these are only segments from my questions and the introduction.

Special thanks to Henri, Scott and Eric for organizing this event. Looking forward to future events like this.

As much as I hate the Apple “Get a Mac” campaign for its obvious inaccuracies about Windows Vista’s features and Windows in general, I bow before the talented advertising professionals and writers who have developed an almost genre in advertising. The fun starts with an informal “hi”, ends with a picture of the product and everything in between is ingenuity.

The latest of these is “Hiding” which I first saw on Engadget. I suspect this was a made-for-web ad as it exploits the very nature that the user is online. Very clever use of the ‘pikaboo’ analogy.