I did a couple of interviews with various program managers and developers from Windows Vista related features that I thought you all might be interested in, or not. But in the grand scheme of shameless self-promotion, here's a compilation.

• Oliver Scholz - Vista Speech User Experience Program Manager
  "We’ll focus on taking advantage of speech recognition’s potential to make speech a more efficient way to interact with your computer than the mouse and keyboard are today. For example, wouldn’t it be cool if you could say “Send an email to my mother about lunch next week”, and the computer would open your email program, fill in your mother’s email address, fill in the subject line with “Lunch next week” and put the cursor in the email body so that you could just start to dictate?"
• Stephen Coy - UI Strategy Team & Screensavers designer
  "During my time away from MS I had written a bunch of graphics hacks that I thought would make good screensavers so I dusted them off and wrapped them into an updated screensaver framework. These eventually became Aurora, Mystify, Ribbons and Bubbles."
• Andrew McGlinchey - Vista Control Panel Program Manager
  "It’s a classic design tradeoff, where there are contradictory requirements: change it while keeping it the same! So within those constraints, we’ve worked hard to make Vista innovative while still being a continuation of what came before. We’ve made choices that we think should delight most of the people most of the time."
• Dave Vronay - AERO UX Compliance
  "In the future, we really need to think of Windows’ UI as a large content-centric project, like a game. And manage the visual quality the same way. After all, we have about the same number of assets as a game; thousands of icons, bitmaps, etc."
• Matthew Goldberg - Guided Help development lead
  "Not everybody has a friend who works at a computer company who can help walk them through the steps they need in order to solve their problem. Well, that’s where Guided Help comes in. We wanted to build something into the system, that could help walk you through the confusing parts and give you that assistance you needed automatically. While we were at it, we wanted to make it fun, intuitive, and really cool-looking."