I took my time to let the Microsoft Surface storm quieten. Delicious entries and blog re-posts seems to have calmed down, so we can now relax and think.
Microsoft is smart, very smart, as ever. With the multi-touch bubble inflating every week, and no serious player but Jeff Han who claims he’s not going to mass market, Microsoft arrives and annonces its technology.
Not only, Microsoft chooses the best seat and says: "guys, you like multi-touch, well, we are the platform!".
The technology is convincing, the concept has enough hype, the interaction metaphors are there.. to be catched… and MS is the best system and idea integrator on this planet.
I wonder if Bill Buxton, MS research evangelist, did know about this secret project and team before the announcement… or if the team was assembled in the last 6 months cut & pasting previous research by Wilson and friends.
In the meanwhile, Leopard comes out of his shelter, and we see Jobs’ WWDC Keynote… nothing so special. It’s a carbon copy of one year ago, Jobs seems tired, not enthusiastic and somewhat disappointed to my eyes.
About what?
Without trying to foresee the man’s inner world, i imagine him illustrating the 10 key features of Leopard, cool toys (and in fact "pretty cool" is the sentence he uses most..), indeed, but at the end of the day.. that’s just another OS improvement.
Microsoft, instead, has a new computing paradigm.
I understand how you feel Jobs, and wonder that feature number 11 was some multi-touch related technology, and maybe a platform sitting somewhere that couldn’t ship in time… and MS did stole the scene, as ever.
But the ones of us who are not so interested on the giant’s fights (sorry to be so metaphoric today) can start thinking that a new world in computing is around the corner, new ideas can be expressed through this medium, and this is going to happen very soon.