Take the venerable keyboard arrangement. Legend has it that the QWERTY layout was adopted by typewriter vendors to keep users from typing too fast and jamming their mechanical machines. Despite the creation of better layouts that would facilitate faster typing, we're still using the old layout. It might not be efficient, but it's familiar and it works.

Microsoft is trying to make some changes in the way we interact with our PCs. It's not a new effort. It started with Windows 98 and the ability to open new windows with one click instead of the customary double click. Most users didn't adapt well and turned off the feature. Now, with the imminent release of Windows Vista and Office 2007, it looks like we're going to see even more changes to the way Microsoft wants us to work with our machines.

You know the feeling. Your work space might seem cluttered to others, but you know where every item is. If someone cleans up your space, you can't find anything. That's how I feel using the betas of Office, Windows, Internet Explorer and Media Player. The current paradigm for GUIs isn't perfect, but I have a lot of time invested in it. I've got six years invested in XP and even more than that in Office. I know where everything is and can get there in a moment.

With the new versions, nothing seems to be where it belongs. Several decades' worth of GUI guidelines were tossed out. Worse, it seems I'm required to have a fine degree of mouse dexterity in order to hit all the tiny targets on the screen that need to be activated. And I have to wonder, who thought putting the menu bar under the address bar in IE was a good idea? Why is the zoom command in Office buried at the bottom of the screen?

In contrast, when I switched from Mac OS 9 to OS X, I found a lot of things that were different, but everything made sense. All the core functions still worked the same. The result was a design that worked, and for some reason my mouse ends up making the correct choice when I need to do something that's different. At the moment, Vista feels very alien, Office even more so, and I've banished IE7 from my XP machine because working with it feels so foreign.