Much press has been devoted to the new Surface computer from Microsoft, and today I got a chance to see one, up close and personal. I went to the internal Microsoft presentation today, and I was shocked for the entire hour long presentation. Several factors struck me as revolutionary.
Computing now forces individual experiences. It is nearly impossible to share an experience with someone both on the computer and in person, at least not at the same time. When was the last time you and a friend sat around a computer for hours, just checking out your iTunes library? Doesn’t happen. With this, though, everyone an interact with at once. You can do everything you want to do while your friend does his own thing. Let’s say you are hanging out at my house and I put on some music you like. You want to check it out, so you lean over my Surface and pull up the artist, track title, artist’s history, really anything you want. Maybe you put your Zune down and download the song right then and there. Maybe you and I start talking about it, compiling a list of similar songs. Maybe we don’t, but we will interact with it and each other.
Similarly, the UI is so transparent that you don’t have to think about what you are doing. You won’t say, “Damn, where is the rotate tool for this picture I want to turn around for you look at”. You will instead grab the corner with a finger and rotate it, just as you would. For that reason, you can now multitask. We can all talk while rotating a physical picture, but something about interacting with a computer makes everyone that I know inaccessible, probably because interacting with a computer is so different from interacting with the world.
Some more things struck which I’ve now forgotten. Still, it was pretty damn cool to see it right there in front of me. Plus there was free breakfast.
Post a Comment