The event swag bags on Microsoft's 50-city rollout tour contain, among other things, black "ready for a new day" gimme t-shirts with all the tour cities listed in a splashy design on the back. But the shiny silver disc in the bag held the latest release of the company's "Office 2007" software instead of heavy metal or top-40 pop, and the 7 a.m. registration time was definitely not rock and roll.

While not as cool as a rock concert, this week's rollout event for the Windows Vista operating system, Office 2007, and Exchange Server 2007 had a respectable crowd of business folks and their technical wunderkind filling rooms to capacity in the Rochester Riverside Convention Center on Tuesday. Those who showed up late, even some who'd pre-registered, found themselves literally out in the cold. Tuesday was so chilly the garage staff eventually moved inside the Convention Center's connecting tunnels to avoid getting frostbite while collecting the parking fees.

Those who got in on time were treated to three hours of product demos. Despite my generally jaded outlook toward software demos, Microsoft's latest operating system and productivity software releases actually had me sitting up to get a closer look. Features they've been struggling with for years, like reduced boot-up times, system-wide search, and approachable interfaces, are really showing improvement in this new-generation software. One of the problems with Microsoft's software has been a wealth of power hidden away in features that lie deep beneath the surface, a point I've often made to my own user-interface design students at RIT.

Most of you have used Word, for example, and you've always known that there was more under the hood than you could get your head around. The demonstrator Tuesday announced that the product has more than 1,500 features. The last time they tried to make this complexity apprehendable --- in the last round of Office software --- they used a collapsing menu structure that hid not only what you didn't use, but also much of what you wanted to use: a noble design impulse gone wrong. This time, with a new "ribbon" style interface organized by function, it looks like they've finally hit the right approach. It's worth a look in your local computer store, if you aren't one of the 3.5 million beta testers who tried it out or one of the early-adopters business members who bought it the first day.

For me, and some younger Rochesterians, the best part of the event was one that was off-limits for most. Microsoft's regional reps and education evangelists got together with about 25 students from RIT to talk about the current state of the art and to open themselves up for the students' questions. The discussion went back and forth from the students' evaluations of Vista ("It's Mac pretty" was one student's assessment) to answering technical questions about the design and architecture of the new OS itself. A constant theme from the company reps was in what high esteem Microsoft held the quality of the college students in Rochester as a whole, and RIT in specific.

As a community, we've known this for a good long time. All we need to do is to figure out how to keep some of that talent pool here, instead of gong back across America to Microsoft.

After the academic session ended at 11:15, I made my way back to campus for a 12 o'clock, actually looking forward to giving some of the new Microsoft software a try, as soon as the department upgrades me to an Intel-Based Mac laptop next year.

Tech columnist Steve Jacobs is director of the Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT.