Email Marketing series: Preview Pane Design (from Lyris)

One of the best ways to learn about effective design is by actually seeing the design in action. In this article, we'll show you seven real-world examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to preview pane design, highlighting both preview pane pitfalls and successes. Consider these samples as you work to improve your recipients' own preview pane experience, as well as your open and click-through rates.

The preview pane, also known as the ‘reading pane’, is the part of the email client typically on the right hand side or at the bottom. It gives recipients a sneak peek at what the email is about. And the way an email displays in the preview pane can make the difference between the recipient opening and interacting with the email, or quickly hitting the 'delete' button.

Especially Important for Welcome, Reactivation Campaigns

Certainly, mature email lists are less likely to encounter ongoing preview pane issues--after all, long-term customers have ostensibly added your email address to their whitelist and are seeing your emails as you intended. But the preview pane is especially important when you're reaching out to first-time customers or attempting to re-engage customers who may not have responded in some time. The first impression (or re-impression) you make will help recipients decide whether to pay attention to your brand or search for the unsubscribe link.

Preview Pane Pitfalls to Avoid

Understanding how your email appears in the preview pane is one of the keys to email design success. Realizing that many email clients block images by default, ignoring how your email looks with images turned off can end up turning off recipients. It is vital that you test your emails in a variety of different email clients, and that you use a separate account that doesn't have your sender address added to its whitelist. By doing this, you'll have the most accurate view of how a first-time or reactivated recipient may experience your email. (Note: Click on images to view full size)

Single-Image Emails Leave Recipients Uninformed

Many emails that appear in the preview pane look very similar to the example above: a large blank square with a red x in the upper left-hand corner, indicating that the image has not been downloaded. Outlook will also populate the 'Right-click here to download pictures' message by default--not exactly the most welcoming, customized message your brand could deliver.

Emails like these rely solely on the subject line and the hopes that the recipient recognizes the 'from' address as the incentive for the email to be opened and fully viewed. When an email looks like this in the preview pane, it's easy to see why a recipient may make the decision to hit delete.

Centered Images Miss the Mark, and Negative Text Sets the Wrong Tone

We see a similar situation with this email. But instead of one red x showing up in the left-hand corner, all that is being displayed is the black background color of the message. The images are actually centered and therefore the 'can't download image' message simply falls off the right-hand side of the screen. When you fully open the email, it displays just fine, but in the preview pane recipients don't get the full effect--and may reach for the delete key as a result.

Notice too the 'Having trouble viewing this email?' message at the top of the email. This is the only text that recipients can read, and the tone of it is negative. Consider a more neutral statement like 'View this email in your browser' as a way to help set the proper tone for your interaction.

More Images, More Potential Issues

Whether you're using one large image or a series of small images, one thing remains the same: if there is no HTML code that is supporting the email, then you simply don't have a lot that you can do to make a good impression in the preview pane. In the email above, you see a handful of red x's--not exactly an invitation to explore further.

This very common design practice also has another potential downside: if your email has an unusually heavy ratio of images to text, many spam filters interpret it as potential spam and score it lower, which may have a negative impact on your inbox deliverability.

Personalization and Relevant Text Provide Incentive to Open

My personal inbox sees between 200-300 emails per day, so I have a vested interest in quickly browsing through emails to see what needs my attention and what can be deleted. The email above was one that was opened rather than tossed, because it did a good job of giving me an incentive to open. How?

First, they've addressed me by name--'Dear Andrew' shows me that there's a good chance that I've interacted with them at some point. Secondly, with a quick glance at the text below I can see that this email has to do with cricket, a sport that I love. Yes, this is definitely an email I intended to receive and want to open and read. With a design that considers the preview pane, this sender is quickly showing me what this email is about, even though no images are displayed.

The Power of HTML to Add Brand Triggers

The example above looks different than other emails we've seen thus far, but how did they get their logo to display in the upper-left hand corner? They didn't. The headline at the top may look like an image, with the attractive colors and the bold font, but it isn't. It's actually a hard-coded HTML that reiterates the site's brand name and mirrors the color scheme used in the company's Web site design. Using HTML code to add brand triggers to your email designs is an excellent way to ensure your emails make it past the preview pane.

Navigation Elements Invite, Capitalized Text Informs, Coupons Inspire Action

The email above does an excellent job of giving recipients an incentive to open and further explore. Notice that the email has navigation elements that are similar to those that may appear on a Web site, and that the navigation elements are repeated as inline links within the body copy. This provides recipients with a very subtle but compelling invitation to browse the site even if they are not responding to a particular offer.

Another technique that this retailer has used is simple, but very effective. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft adds alternative text to the images reminding users that images are not automatically downloaded. But the designer's alternative text also appears. The designer of this email very cleverly decided to capitalize his alternative image text (GREAT CHRISTMAS OFFERS) as a way to help it stand out from the text that the software automatically generates.

Finally, pay attention to the special offer and coupon code in the red box. The bold color helps draw the eye to this very important call-to-action, and showing the coupon code within the preview pane shows the recipient that this is a legitimate offer.

Text-Only Email Can Offer an Effective Alternative, Especially in the Follow Up

After seeing a slew of red x's, one can see how effective a text-only email is when it is displayed in the preview pane. Not only are they effective, but text-only emails are also relatively easy to produce--just put together some compelling copy and go.

One smart way to use text-only emails is as a follow up to HTML emails to capture additional opens and click-throughs that you may have missed. Use your email marketing software to segment your mailing list, sending a text-based version of the HTML email to recipients who did not open. This is something that we've done in our own campaigns: sent an HTML-based email on a Thursday, and then on Friday sent a text-only follow-up message to those who didn't open Thursday's email. Our results have been impressive--our follow up text emails achieved open and click-through rates of between 3-6%.

Preview Pane Design Gives a Competitive Edge

For marketers wanting to fully optimize every possible aspect of your email campaigns, the preview pane offers the potential to maximize often overlooked territory. Through testing, designers and marketers can work to create a preview pane display that meets both marketing and design goals, and gives recipients a good reason to double-click.

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About the Author

Andrew Robinson is the director of international professional services at Lyris, located in the UK office.

Essential of a Viral Video (From AdAge Digital)

Ad Age talks about the elements of a successful viral campaign. In a nutshell, Martin Lindstrom, former global COO of British Telecom/LookSmart, a former BBDO executive and the author of the books "Buyology," "BrandSense," BrandChild," "Brand Building on the Internet" and "Clicks, Bricks & Brands," talk about the 3 key elements:

1. Talk value: The viral needs to have something that will make people talk about it to others.
2. Sensational: The viral needs to do something never been done before, and NOT fit for regular TV viewing.
3. Soap: To have a successful viral campaign, you can't have a one-hit-wonder. The idea has to travel several videos.

See the video interview at http://adage.com/brightcove/lineup.php?lineup=1182767334&title=35574733001.

From Mashable: Do You Pass the Social Media Recruitment Test?

Boris Epstein is the CEO and Founder of BINC, a Professional Search Firm that specializes in the Software Marketplace. Boris shares his thoughts about the recruitment industry, job hunting and career advice at AskBinc.com.

With the emergence of social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and their user bases growing by the millions, one would think that a headhunter’s job just got much easier. I mean let’s face it; nowadays we can find anybody whether it’s on one of these social networking sites, on a blog, discussion board, alumni list or via true and tried headhunting techniques.

But it’s not that simple. In the golden days of recruiting we would hunt for days to find a candidate with a degree from a top university who worked for a top notch company who of course was considered priceless and absolutely worth contacting. Today however, we run a simple search on LinkedIn and find hundreds that match that exact profile. Or we run a quick search on Twitter for anybody discussing a specific keyword and we now have hundreds more to contact. But with only a set number of hours in a day, we just don’t have the bandwidth to contact everybody.

The problem of today completely flipped from the one of yesterday where we went from candidate scarcity and limited information to an overabundance of candidates and even more information available on each one.

So in today’s world of information overload where talent is literally available by the truckloads, I thought it would be relevant to write a post about how we evaluate a candidate’s social media footprint to determine (when all else is equal) which candidates we would contact and which ones get left by the wayside. I posed the following question to make it simple:

If all else were equal, like education, work history and general skill set, and I had to evaluate the social media footprints of two candidates to determine which one of them I would contact, which one would I contact and why? In my experience, I would contact the one who:

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On LinkedIn

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1. Has genuine recommendations from peers, managers and colleagues
2. Has the more complete profile
3. Is a member of more groups pertaining to their respective field
4. Has a picture
5. Lists interests, hobbies and other information related to their life outside of work
6. Participates and highlights their involvement in non-paid projects related to their field (open-source, community, volunteer, conference)
7. Updates their status more often
8. Asks and answers more questions
9. Links to their employer, blog and other projects of interest
10. Has the larger network

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On their blog

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1. Has interesting things to say about their respective profession and industry
2. Provides glimpses into their life outside of work – family, friends, hobbies, etc.
3. Does not bad-mouth their current or previous employer
4. Provides links to their other social networking profiles
5. Includes a link to their current resume
6. Updates with new posts regularly
7. Keeps it non-controversial – minimal discussion of sex, politics, religion and other such controversial topics.
8. Is more genuine and honest
9. Has a blogroll with link to other interesting blogs

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On Facebook

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1. Respects the overlap between their personal and professional lives
2. Updates often
3. Posts pictures of friends and family but keeps them pg-13
4. Keeps it non-controversial – doesn’t take extreme positions on sex, drugs, religion, politics or other topics that could cause an employer to be wary of hiring
5. Is a member of groups relevant to their profession

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On Twitter

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1. Tweets often (between 2-10 times per day is considered reasonable)
2. Has a healthy followers/following ratio
3. Has the biggest network
4. Keeps a healthy balance between personal and professional tweets
5. Doesn’t just update, but also responds to others and generally seems to get Twitter

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When Googled

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1. Does not lead to something controversial like arrests
2. Leads to profession-related discussions and commentary on other social media sites
3. Leads me to their online blog, webpage or social media profiles
4. Doesn’t come up blank

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Why it matters

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Now you might be asking yourself, if somebody has the skills that an employer requires, why are all of the above criteria important? The short answer is that nowadays employers rarely hire just skills and are looking for much more of a complete package – skills plus a well-rounded individual that fits well with their team and company. And a person’s social media footprint gives employers (and others) the best insight into your passions, interests, communication styles, work habits, work/life balance and all sorts of other valuable information.

Simply put, it helps an employer get to know you and get comfortable with you before a single word has even been exchanged. So think about it, if you had the choice to consider a cold bland resume or an actual person with common interests, passions and work/life style, wouldn’t the choice be obvious?

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New to social media?

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But what happens if you’re new to the world of Social Media and aren’t quite at the same pace as some of the veterans out there. Not to worry, just follow a few easy steps and you’ll be right into the thick of the game in absolutely no time.

1. Start ASAP!
2. Create fully completed LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles.
3. Shed your preconceived notions of keeping your work and home life separate. Companies want people, not resumes. Start portraying yourself as the well-rounded individual that you are.
4. Use social media to its fullest – update often, connect with others and stay active.
5. Don’t stop ever (even if you’re happily employed and aren’t looking for new work). Establishing and maintaining a social media footprint is not an act, it’s a process. Just like your career evolves, so should your Social Media Footprint.

Boris Epstein is the CEO and Founder of BINC, a Professional Search Firm that specializes in the Software Marketplace. As a professional recruiter Boris shares his thoughts about the recruitment industry, job hunting and career advice at AskBinc.com.

Bad Client Briefs = Bad Marketing or Low ROI

I got this from Jake who got this from Rock. It's so telling about the state of agency-client relationships nowadays. It's like a SONA for marketing. Read on.

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Want More Out of Your Agencies? Write Better Briefs
Execs at Top Shops Say Clients Are Unclear About What's Expected, Leading to Lots of Wasted Time

Posted by Rupal Parekh on 08.17.09 @ 08:00 AM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Marketers trying to wring the most out of their ad budgets will find massive waste in a place they might not think to look: their own request-for-proposal and briefing process to agencies.

Casey Jones
That's the sobering takeaway from a survey last month of more than 250 senior executives at a variety of top marketing agencies. Agency executives reported that at least 30% of their staffs' time is ineffective or wasted due to poor communication from their clients. For large marketers, that could mean millions of dollars in needless agency fees and misguided ad campaigns.

It's an insight also gleaned from the experience of the person who commissioned survey: Casey Jones, former VP-global marketing at Dell, who now runs Jones & Bonevac, a marketing consultancy that counts among its clients Microsoft and Walmart. Mr. Jones left Dell in late 2008 after an eventful two-year tenure in which he drove the creation of Enfatico, an agency intended to be a stand-alone Dell shop that became the target of widespread industry criticism. Enfatico was folded into WPP's Y&R Brands division this year.

Mr. Jones said his firm's first study was spurred by observations from his time at the computer maker. "A lack of commitment to tight and coherent input to the agency was a major contributing factor to the struggles between Dell and WPP," he said, adding that that some of his marketing peers at Dell assumed having a single agency partner made it less important to provide formal instruction to the agency.

The study was fielded by Emeryville, Calif.-based Greenberg Brand Strategy, and included feedback from shop such as JWT, Razorfish, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Martin Agency, MediaVest, BBDO, Publicis, Deutsch, Carat, Interbrand and Wunderman. More than half (54%) of respondents said fewer than 40% of client briefs give them clear indication of what's expected from their agencies. Of that number, 30% said only 1% to 10% of briefs provide clear performance expectations.

Where agencies ranked the quality of client input highest was in identifying budget parameters and communicating the desired image and brand positioning. Client briefs were ranked poorest when it came to providing competitive information and describing how a client's offering ranked in the competitive landscape.

Another problem agency execs cited is that the briefs are constantly changing: 75% of respondents reported that client briefs go through an average of up to five significant revisions after a project has begun. Eight percent of respondents said they've seen briefs go through a whopping 45 or more iterations.

The changes might have something to do with agencies' belief that there are too many cooks stirring the marketing pot. They said ideally fewer than three client decision makers should provide an agency with direction during the course of a project, compared with a current average of more than five.

Without clear direction, many agencies say they wind up devising much of their clients' briefs themselves. Wrote one agency exec who responded to the survey: "The client rarely has a fleshed-out brief when we first begin to discuss a project. At [name withheld] the routine has been for the agency to actually write the client input or project input brief for them. I am not kidding!"

According to Mr. Jones, agencies' view that clients provide them with inadequate success metrics could lead to lackluster work and questionable payment practices -- particularly as giant marketers such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola lead the way to performance-based compensation agreements. "How can the corporation fairly compensate an agency for the impact of work on an assignment for which they were poorly briefed?" he asked.

For copies of the survey, contact Jones & Bonevac .

from Adage Digital: What You Need to Know About Facebook's Buying FriendFeed

How Turning a Frenemy Into a BFF Could Make Social Searching a Snap

Posted by David Berkowitz on 08.10.09 @ 04:46 PM

David Berkowitz

FriendFeed, the social-identity aggregator that never seemed to gain much market share beyond early adopters, is suddenly hitched to one of the biggest digital growth engines: Facebook. Marketers and consumers have a lot to cheer about Facebook's acquisition.

After a late 2008 growth spurt, FriendFeed's audience leveled off, according to Compete data, hitting 902,000 unique visitors in January 2009 and attracting 918,000 in July 2009. During the same span in 2009, Compete says Facebook added 54 million U.S. visitors. That growth has led a lot of marketers to ignore FriendFeed, and it's hard to blame them for fishing where the fish are.

Aggregating social identities
It's a shame, though, because FriendFeed is a valuable service, and it will only be more valuable as consumers participate with more social-media properties. On FriendFeed, users can aggregate updates from 58 services including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, SlideShare, Pandora and Amazon. Those users can follow each other across the range of those services to get all of their updates in one place.

Another View: Is FriendFeed Facebook's Twitter Killer? Ian Schafer: This Move Is About Social-Media Conversations

For marketers, aggregating identities is just one part of the value. Some have used it well, such as the Travel Channel, which pulls in updates from six different services, including Delicious, Digg and Mixx. The New York Times has also used it well, reaching nearly 1,600 followers -- but a mere one-thousandth of the reach it has through its main Twitter account.

The bigger part of FriendFeed is its search functionality. A marketer, without even registering on the site, can search every FriendFeed user's updates from the site's home page. It's not a fully representative search, as FriendFeed reaches only a niche audience. But it can be a great way to search users' updates across dozens of services so that the marketer won't wind up searching each network individually. Marketers have a hard enough time remembering to search Twitter, so this is a great way to get a taste of what certain consumers are talking about.

The Travel Channel's FriendFeed

Facebook, meanwhile, has been making it easier for its users to share updates from other sites. It wants to be more of that aggregator, a social portal. It doesn't exactly need FriendFeed to make this happen. What it's doing instead is stressing the importance for consumers and marketers to have a way to share all of their digital and social updates in a single place.

Real-time social search
Hopefully, through the FriendFeed acquisition, Facebook will make it easier to search these updates. It's hard enough to search for anything on Facebook, though the network has indicated that it plans to focus more on that experience. Now imagine if on Facebook you could search what consumers are publicly sharing anywhere; that search functionality would make Twitter Search seem like a kid's plaything.

Steve Rubel, director of insights at Edelman Digital, was an early FriendFeed user and thinks it could change the way consumers search as well. Last summer he wrote about that aspect of FriendFeed in these virtual pages:

"Social contextual search addresses Google's Achilles' heel: superfluous content. When users scour the web, they can't easily separate content they trust (i.e., content that has been created by their friends) from everything else. ... However, if you can just search what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine."

Smaller opportunities
Lastly, this acquisition is a reminder for marketers that there's a lot more going on in smaller places on the web. Go to usernamecheck.com to see dozens of such examples. All of these places present opportunities for brands. When there's not a reason for a certain brand to take part, those brands should still seek to secure their trademarks and identities to make it harder for consumers to hijack those brands.

The web's much bigger than Facebook, and Facebook knows that, which is why it wants to incorporate updates from wherever consumers and brands live on the web. Now it all goes back to Facebook, which should grow even more useful for marketers thanks to the acquisition. And if FriendFeed improves as a destination in the process, all the better.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Berkowitz is director of emerging media for 360i. He blogs regularly at Inside the Marketer's Studio and 360i's Digital Connections. He also contributed to the just-released Social Marketing Playbook.

Windows 7 Review: You Can Quit Complaining Now

By matt buchanan in Gizmodo.com.

Could Windows 7 accomplish everything that's expected of it? Probably not, but it makes a damn good attempt. We've tested the gold master, the final version going out on October 22. Upgrade without trepidation, people. With excitement, even.

Windows 7 is not quite a "Vista service pack." It does share a lot of the core tech, and was clearly designed to fix nearly every bad thing anyone said about Vista. Which ironically puts the demon that it was trying to exorcise at its heart. What that means is that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been in the public eye—a solid OS with plenty of modern eye candy that mostly succeeds in taking Windows usability into the 21st century—but it doesn't daringly innovate or push boundaries or smash down walls or whatever verb meets solid object metaphor you want to use, because it had a specific set of obligations to meet, courtesy of its forebear.

That said, if you're coming from Windows XP, Windows 7 will totally feel like a revelation from the glossy future. If you're coming from Vista, you'll definitely go "Hey, this is much better!" the first time you touch Aero Peek. If you're coming from a Mac, you'll—-hahahahaha. But seriously, even the Mactards will have to tone down their nasal David Spadian snide, at least a little bit.

The Long Shadow of Windows Vista

The public opinion of Windows Vista—however flawed it might have been—clearly left a deep impact on Microsoft. While we've got final Windows 7 code, it's hard to look 2 1/2 months into the future to predict what the Windows 7 launch will be like. However, based on this code, and the biggest OS beta testing process in history, it sure won't look like the beleaguered Vista launch at all.

If you installed Vista on your PC within the first month of its release, there was a solid chance your computer ran like crap, or your gadgets didn't work, since drivers weren't available yet. That's not how it shakes down with Windows 7. The hardware requirements for Windows 7 are basically the same as they are for Vista, the first time ever a release of Windows hasn't required significantly more horsepower than the previous one. And it runs better on that hardware, or at least feels like it does.
We ran real-world benchmarking on two test machines, a nearly two-year-old Dell XPS M1330 with 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, an Nvidia 8400M GS and a 64GB SSD, and an 18-month-old desktop with 3GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, an Nvidia 8800GT and a 10,000rpm drive. Results suggest there's little actual difference between Vista and Windows 7 performance-wise on the same hardware.

Ambiguous benchmarking aside, our experience during the beta period was that Windows 7 actually ran beautifully, even on netbooks that made Vista cry like a spoiled child who'd had its solid gold spoon shoved up its butt sideways, so the difference isn't based entirely on "feelings." Even Microsoft never attempted to market a Vista for netbooks, but is gladly offering Windows 7 to that category.
Installing XP, Vista and Windows 7 on the same hardware over the space of a week also proved that point: Hardware just worked when I booted up Windows 7 for the first time, while my machines were practically catatonic with XP until I dug up the drivers, and gimped with Vista until I dutifully updated. Hitting Windows Update in Windows 7, I was offered a couple of drivers that were actually current, like ones for my graphics cards. Centralizing the delivery of drivers is huge in making the whole drivers thing less over whelming. (It helps that manufacturers are actively putting out drivers for their gear this go-around, rather than waiting until the last minute, as they tended to with Vista.)
Microsoft has even corrected the pricing spike that Vista introduced, even if they didn't fully streamline that confusing, pulsating orgy of versions. A full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is $200, down from $260, and if you were lucky, you could've pre-ordered an upgrade version for $50. (Microsoft says that deal has sold out, but we wouldn't be shocked to find it re-upped in the near future, possibly even as we head toward the October 22 launch.) So yes, most of the early Vista problems—performance, compatibility and price, to an extent—will likely not be early Windows 7 problems.

What's Good

Windows 7 is the biggest step forward in usability since Windows 95. In fact, over half of what makes it better than Vista boils down to user interface improvements and enhancements, not so much actual new features.

Its fancy new user interface—the heart of which is Aero Peek, making every open window transparent except the one you're focusing on at the moment so you can find what you're looking for—actually changes the way you use Windows. It breaks the instinct to maximize windows as you're using them; instead, you simply let windows hang out, since it's much easier to juggle them. In other words, it radically reorients the UI around multitasking. After six months of using Aero Peek and the new launcher taskbar, going back to Vista's taskbar, digging through collapsed app bars, or even its Peek-less Alt+Tab feels barbaric and primitive. I wouldn't mind an Mac OS Exposé ripoff to complete the multitasking triumph, though.

Windows 7 brings back a sense of a tightness and control that was sometimes missing in Vista—there's a techincal reason for this relating in part to the way graphics are handled—moments where I've felt like I wasn't in control of my PC have been few and far between, even during the beta and release candidate periods. The more chaste User Account Control goes to that—the frequency with which it interrupts you was grating in Vista, like standing under a dripping faucet. But it actually works as Microsoft intended now, with more security, since you're less likely to repeatedly hammer "OK" to anything that pops up, just so it leaves you the hell alone.

Other super welcome improvements are faster, more logical search—in the Music folder for instance, you can narrow by artist, genre or album—and more excellent file previews, though they're not quite as awesome as what OS X offers up. (And why aren't they on by default?) There are lots of little things that make you say, "finally" or "that's great," like legit codec support baked in to Windows Media Player, Device Stage when you plug in your gadgets, or the retardiculously awesome background images.

In short, Windows 7 is what Windows should feel like in 2009.

What's Not So Good

There are a few spots Microsoft rubbed polish on that still don't quite shine. Networking is much, much better than Vista—the wireless networking interface isn't completely stupid anymore—but the Network and Sharing Center still doesn't quite nail it in terms of making networking or sharing easy for people who don't really know what they're doing. I wouldn't turn my mom loose inside of it, anyway. The HomeGroup concept for making it easy to share files sounds good in theory, but in practice, it's no slam dunk. I imagine regular people asking, "What's up with crazy complicated password I have to write down? Can I share files with PCs not in my HomeGroup? What's all this other stuff in my Network that's not in my HomeGroup?"

Not all parts of the user experience are sweeter now. Microsoft, just fix the unwieldy Control Panel interface, please. (Hint: Steal OS X's. Everything's visible and categorized.) And Windows Media Player's UI while you're at it. If it makes iTunes look simple, it's got problems. I'd really like to be able to pin folders directly to the Taskbar as well, not simply to the Windows Explorer icon in the Taskbar. It's kind of confusing behavior, actually—why can you pin some icons (apps or files) and not others (folders)?

Internet Explorer 8 ain't so great, either. It's better than IE7, sure, and actually sorta supports modern web standards. But you'll be downloading Firefox, Opera, or Chrome as soon as you get Win 7 up and running, since IE's not better than any of them. And while you could argue you wouldn't be so inclined to use Microsoft's own mail application either, you might, but you'll have to download it first. Instead of being app-packed, Windows 7 gives you an optional update for Live Essentials, with apps like Mail, Photo Gallery and MovieMaker. Some people might like the cleaner install, but this is a fairly senseless de-coupling—not including a mail app with your own OS? I know those European regulators are ridiculous, but come on.

I suppose the biggest thing missing from Windows 7 is any sense of daring (psychedelic wallpapers aside). It's a very safe release: Take what was good about Vista, fix what people bitched about, and voila. We get it, people want a safe operating system, not an experiment in behavioral science. But even as Windows 7 restores some of the joy in using Windows, you get the sense that it could've been more, if it hadn't been saddled with the tainted legacy of Vista. I wonder what Windows 7 would have been without Vista.

The Verdict

Windows XP was a great OS in its day. Windows Vista, once it found its feet several months in, was a good OS. With Windows 7, the OS is great again. It's what people said they wanted out of Windows: Solid, more nimble and the easiest, prettiest Windows yet. There's always a chance this won't be a huge hit come October, given the economy and the state of the PC industry, but it's exactly what Microsoft needs right now. Something people can grab without fear.