Surface business up and running

 

“The future is here right now; it’s just highly distributed.”

So quipped my friend Bill Buxton, one of the doyens of surface computing here @ Microsoft. In a lot of ways, we’re trying to offer a twist on that with Microsoft Surface, our first product in this exciting category. It represents years of focus and passion by a small legion of really smart people around the globe bent on doing one thing; cherry-picking all of the little features that make technology so cool and delivering a user experience that’s fast, easy and, natural.

Business and Pleasure: The Leisure and Entertainment Sector

Through these posts I’ll be filling you in on the details of how we’re taking Surface from the Lab into your Life. We have a nice squad of bloggers here, each with their own angle on things. My team’s angle is business. That means bravely charting a course where few in our company have gone before. We are creating a new category and putting together the right plan to grow value. We have a lot of “partners” in the value equation; leading brands in leisure and entertainment like Starwood Hotels and Harrah’s Entertainment to name a couple. We’re also partnering with best-in-breed ISV’s from Web 2.0 shops to accomplished game developers.

As we enhance our focus on the Leisure and Entertainment sector, we’d love to hear you think about venues that would be appealing to have your first Surface experience!

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  I work in the education field and I would love to see the applications for Surface computing.

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Education is a very interesting vertical for us.  There are a number of people on our team who come from the edu background.  And MSFT has a lot of passion around edu. what applications would you like to see in education + Surface?

• Anonymous
  November 15, 2007
  I'm heavily involved in university education and most of my consideration of Surface has been from the educational perspective. It's a very difficult field because I don't feel the surface in its current form fits the dynamics of a classroom. You see, Surface as it exists today can fascillitate interaction between 3-5 people, but even the smallest university classrooms today have about 30 people. So then you might think "well we need more surfaces" but then there's the problem of where do I put them and how do we get everyone in the class on the same page etc etc. So Surface in its current incarnation only works if there aren't 100 people who wants to use one and you don't need 30 of them in a room, and this is largely the situation we encounter in higher education. So the best solution I came up with was to shift the focus from the hardware itself to the software, then you apply the software in sort of a distributed surface experience through tablet pcs which each student posesses. Maybe the instructor has a Surface and he can interact with it in a presenation mode which sends what he's doing to it to all the students. And maybe he can call on students and they can interact with their tablet and send what they're doing to his surface. Maybe when students break off into groups their surface tablets can identify and recognize eachother and interact with eachother physically, such as if I want to transfer a file from my surface tablet to my group mate's, all I have to do is flick it in his direction and it pops out on his tablet. Or maybe a group can go to the library where there is a surface, and they can all pair their surface tablets with the surface table and all their report information, books, slides, etc, becomes available on the table. Then they can bring any book from the library to the surface and plop it down on the table to get a digital version, or put it face down and get a scan of a page. I think there are some real possibilities in the educational field, but I feel the hardware is too limiting at this point and really you've designed the hardware around a particular businesses model which has lead to difficulties in moving the hardware to new businesses which don't fit your original model.

• Anonymous
  November 17, 2007
  The comment has been removed