Don Norman Consulting on Longhorn?

According to Computerworld, Don Norman, the design engineer famous for such works as “The Design of Everyday Things,” is consulting on Longhorn UI design. Cool! I especially love this statement:

“This is not the ‘computer age’ any more; this is the age of very smart chips hooked into a huge worldwide network. Infrastructure is about sharing.” This means two or more incompatible ways of doing things is counterproductive.

I love his characterization of client computers as “smart chips,” i.e. storing services and data production on the server, although the “smarts” of the client is important, too, i.e. data visualization and manipulation (which is death with a round-trip per click).