A growing awareness of the inextricable connection between emotion and cognition sparked Microsoft’s push toward aesthetically pleasing software. For many years their products were the virtual equivalent of the barren cubicle mazes of many modern offices: functional, but devoid of life, of personality. Neglecting aesthetics might have made a kind of cruel sense in an older, assembly-line context, in which work revolved around mindless, repetitive labor. Factory owners didn’t want to inspire creativity among their employees; they wanted to drill it out of them. But the keyboard jockeys of the information age—precisely the people using Microsoft Windows—do their best work when they’re rewarded, rather than discouraged, for creativity and mental agility.

You can see the beginnings of the company’s new appreciation for the mind’s appetite for beauty in its default background image for Windows XP: a vista of rolling, grassy hills, with puffy white clouds hovering against a blue sky overhead. Evolutionary psychologists have long suspected that the human perceptual system has an innate fondness for landscapes with wide, open views, thanks to the millions of years our forebears spent on the savannas of Africa. Re-creating that ancestral homeland on our computer monitors evokes a primitive sense of well-being and contentedness—particularly compared with the screens of old, with their garish corporate logos or monochrome emptiness. The monitor goes from being an empty vessel to a room with a view.

But some computers running Windows XP, Microsoft’s most stylized effort to date, force us to sit through a series of unappealing command-line screens during the start-up routine, as if we’ve time-traveled back to the text-only displays of the early 1980s. We wouldn’t accept this kind of visual disruption when we sit down to watch television—The West Wing doesn’t begin with a string of time codes and copyright notices—but somehow we’re supposed to take it for granted on a computer screen.

Part of Microsoft’s goal with its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn, is to eliminate such discontinuities. “We want to make the OS much more seamless aesthetically,” says Tjeerd Hoek, head of Microsoft’s user experience design group. “We want things to flow.” This aspiration is apparent from the moment you log on to the system. An opening screen offers you a set of user names, each with an attractive icon beside it. Select one and the icon appears to drift across the screen, depositing itself in the bottom left-hand corner as the rest of the screen fills with applications and documents. Instead of those jarring opening images you can get from Windows XP, the Longhorn opening sequence has a charming fluidity; it’s as though the two initial screens are melding into one another.

There are limits to the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure, of course. The Longhorn demo includes screen images that pulse with glowing patterns, like the shimmering, translucent sea creatures in James Cameron’s movie The Abyss. They are quite lovely, but if you want to concentrate on anything else—your work, for instance—the repetitive movement would no doubt be distracting. This, too, is a side effect of biology: The neural circuitry for peripheral vision is weak at detecting fine-grained information but adept at detecting movement. You can be staring intently at an e-mail message, but your peripheral vision wants to draw your pupils toward that moving shape on the other side of the screen.

The most fascinating new Microsoft software tools are a marvelous fusion of aesthetic charm and genuine utility. Microsoft research scientists Curtis Wong and Steven Drucker showed me one prototype of the photo-manipulation software that automatically arranges photos into clusters based on the date and time they were taken. If you take 10 consecutive shots of a sunset, the software will recognize that all those pictures were snapped within a matter of minutes and pull them into a single stack. The organizational scheme is logical enough, but what makes the software impressive is the visual appeal of all the images flying across the screen to stack themselves up into an orderly pile. (The effect is not unlike that created by an expert blackjack dealer plying his trade at a table in Vegas.) File management is not normally something that brings a smile to my face, but Wong and Drucker’s photo tool had me leaning into the screen.

That pleasure is not to be underestimated. If you want people to use their computers for creative ends, then you might as well start by giving them something beautiful to look at. “We’ve got all this graphics-processing power on modern PCs that we’re not using most of the time,” Wong says. “It’s a waste not to do something fun with it!”