Beta fun and bye-bye "GUI"

Some interesting product peeks this week:

• AOL released a beta of an integrated communications/media product, Streamliner.
• Microsoft release a public beta of their new "Live" desktop mail client.
• And Adobe released the latest public beta (now for Windows, too) of LightRoom (think iPhoto or Picasa on steroids for Professional Photographers - or at least, that's basically the pitch).

The particularly interesting thing to me (from a "tech trends" perspective) is how much each diverges from any real compliance with the underlying OS "look and feel". Increasingly, VMWare and DOS would seem to provide about the same value that Windows does to these apps... so is that (a) consumers embracing/demanding these differences, or (b) that companies feel more and more pressure to differentiate (or maybe some combo thereof).

Used to be that "consistency" was the great boon of the GUI era - whoops.

Good news, bad news, who knows?