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Why Microsoft Surface Took So Long To Deploy
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly a year after all the fanfare unveiling a new touchscreen tabletop interface, Microsoft's Surface computer will finally appear in select AT&T stores later this month. Popular Mechanics tech editor Glenn Derene, who first introduced us to Surface in May, seems to have done a complete 180 in this rant, blasting Microsoft for being more obsessed with Surface's novelty as a magnet for image-conscious partners while messing up a rare hardware device — and, surprisingly, the simple software he was told came with it. From Microsoft's official excuse in the article: 'It's actually been a good thing for us,' Pete Thompson, Microsoft's general manager for Surface, told me. 'We were anticipating that the initial deployments were going to be showcase pilots using our own software applications on units to drive traffic. What our partners have decided is that they want to skip that stage and go to an integrated experience where they build their own applications. That's pulled the timeline until this spring.'"
be cool to play civ4 on one of these yokes
It's a big ass table!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Hate to use management terminology, but they're not "agile" enough to pull off that sort of application. Putting aside their ability to do it, even if they did make it work the resulting product would be too expensive for anything other than a gimmick market.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
He's not really criticizing MS, but more like chiding them gently. I'm a little underwhelmed by Surface. If you've ever had a coffee table that you can't put your legs under, you know how awkward they are to sit at. Plus, this price seems awfully exaggerated.
I like ROSIE's surface much more, although the direct screen (instead of projection) makes the resolution an issue, but hopefully that'll get addressed as hardware goes up.
Really, if you took a touchscreen laid flat, added a bunch of multi-touch capability and some touch tags for wireless pseudo-plugs, why couldn't this be built by anyone?
This is why Apple's tight control of their whole ecosystem is a good thing: you don't generally see them putting their "partner's" need to shove content at customers above the user experience.
You can tell Apple's _customers_ are it's actual customers.** Microsoft's partners and developers are it's customers, and it shows.
Look at Windows Mobile: you get a reasonable platform that's perverted by hardware "partners" and their singular inability to write crash-resistant software, and then further mangled by the carriers, who seem addicted to penny-pinching revenue-ware.
Yes, it's "open" to developers, but as a manager of a fleet, the first thing I'd like to do is strip the device down to Microsoft's core platform, without the craplets the vendors see fit to add to it.
With Apple, you get a locked-down device. AT&T can't rebrand it (if they had their way, it'd be the "AT&T A7530", and it'd have six different ways for AT&T to sell me overpriced ringtones or web forms), nor can the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer load it with battery management software that misspells the word "Battery".
** you see this with free software as well, but the customer base isn't quite the same demographic as Apple's.
--srj/mmv
Good thing for Microsoft, then, that the market for $10k tables is so big among rich, gay men in San Francisco.
I like basketball!!1!
How long before someone slaps that LCARS from Star Trek desktop theme onto one of these?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
...I wonder if they tested this with anyone who owns cats. Mine jump up on the coffee table all the time. Does anyone know if this thing will pick up pets?
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
"What our partners have decided is that they want to skip that stage and go to an integrated experience where they build their own applications."
.NET and DirectX mixed with ActiveSync and their Bluetooth stack - I can't wait for the first bluescreens being posted on flickr...
So, the delay was getting an SDK out the door? Holy cow, MS pumps out half a dozen SDKs a month, it took a whole year to create an SDK for a table? I'm guessing they didn't build this thing from scratch, either - it's probably
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The screen is projected. Multi-touch is enabled through processing images from multiple infrared cameras under the surface. This technique allows for as many touch points as processor power will allow.
TFA shows it being used as a sales tool in a cell phone store. While it has a cool GUI, it's usage is that of a sales kiosk. If that's the best use they can think of for this technology something is very wrong.
It may simply not be suitable for long-term use so they picked an application where people would interact with it and leave the store before they got tired of craning their necks and holding their arms up in the air.
Really expensive machines without practical function are almost always proof of concept. The MS guys know this isn't ready for prime time, and they want more time to test it so they don't end up giving away free units to replace fried ones, like with the Xbox 360.
It's like an Apple Lisa (pre-Macintosh, even more expensive, unreliable and pompous than a Mac) or the NeXT cube: great ideas, the first to bring them to market, but still not fit into a market niche. Market niche is what Microsoft does really well.
They will trot this out to try to gain the cool points, then find out a way to apply the technology to a tablet computer that also can prop itself up like a mini-table.
technical writing / development
I still think Roughly Drafted had it right in a post last year.
Surface took longer, was more expensive, and is uglier than the iPhone. The iPhone uses real touch sensitivity, while Surface uses cameras and a projection screen. Surface had interesting tricks like identifying objects, but it did that through essentially 8 dot bar codes.
So here we are, a year later. Surface has been no where to be seen. It is now coming to 4 AT&T stores in large cities, where it will do next to nothing.
You can compare phones. Neat. A normal kiosk could do that (as the article points out). The more interesting abilities of Surface (like collaboration and such) won't come out in that. You can only compare two phones at once? There are only 8 or the (what, 20+) phones AT&T sells that will work with it? And how long before people steal some of the special phones (with the magic bar codes or whatever) thus rendering it a big expensive table? Or will those phones be tied up with leashes also?
It's a semi-interesting technology, that isn't going anywhere because of the management. Is anyone surprised? This is how basically every tech demo ends up. We never see it, or it gets managed to death.
They should have just started selling them to the (business) public at a high price with an SDK and just let people figure it out.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's not unusual for a truly innovative technology to take 10 years to develop. Original IBM PC, first Internet connections, the first web site or the first AJAX app were all not very useful for anything practical. While Surface demo looks cool, it's not easy to develop affordable hardware or software that does more than shows little lighted ripples around objects put on the top. Besides obvious games, most software will be probably rather high and and specialized, like CAD design or astronomical modeling tools. It will therefore take a while to develop.
How badly do we need multitouch for e-mail, web browsing or posting on slashdot?
I thought rich gay men were exclusively drawn to Apple products.
This runs Linux, though it is not technically a MikeRoweSoft Surface product.
The product above is Mitsubishi's DiamondTouch screen. The folks who make it have released a Linux-compatible SDK.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
They way they have these set up, it looks to me as annoying as table-top arcade consoles from the 80's. Yuck!
I do think it could be nice as a drafting table, however.
"We've made a table."
.Net and do all of these cool graphical tricks that we have spent the last year tinkering with. Actually, it kind of reminds me of wall thingy in Minority Report and functions kind of like the iPhone's multitouch."
...
"A table?"
"Yeah, it does all of these neat things. It can recognize objects, respond to Bluetooth devices, run
"Thats it? Look, if you can make people pay a subscription fee to use software they have written for it or to use any software outside of the OS we might talk. It just sounds like it could be too... Ugh, functional. People putting them in their kitchen, to read recipes, sitting in the game room stealing face time from the 360. Think outside the box. How else can we create a market conquering product?"
"Wait, Bluetooth! Can you make some dongles that we can sell at $50 a pop?. Maybe a $150 RCA cable and a $200 AV dock?"
"Um, Bluetooth is wireless and it already has a screen."
"Damnit, what good are you? Wait, I've got it! Whoring the iPhone to AT&T worked for Apple! Make a sexy or hip or whatever demo, just remember the bullet points, we have brand recognition in those. My god, I still have it. I'm a f$%^&*@ genius!"
They push more DRM out the door than any other company
They are also the sole reason Amazon sells any big-label commercial MP3's at all.
Only by grabbing control of the DRM reigns away from the studios was Apple able to force labels into realizing DRM free music was good for them (it was the only way to illustrate to the studios that lock-in was a problem for studios as much as consumers).
Pray that Apple succeeds in the video market if you ever want to see DRM free video as a commercial product. This is less likely though as the video companies saw the path music took, and they are even less willing to forgo DRM even though the benefits they would reap would be even higher.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
By which you mean just the iPod, right? Because with everything else, you're just paying more for less, and the simplicity doesn't make up for it.
He might also mean the:
Macbook Air, which forgoes a DVD drive to give you a much lighter and thinner notebook, better for traveling.
Or the Apple TV, which foregoes a tuner but makes it easier to get media directly to your TV over the internet with easy iTunes integration.
Or the iPhone, which makes smart phones that are much easier to use for most people.
Or OS X itself, which is basically UNIX with a simplified window manager which is easier to use than most traditional X windows managers (and that for most people does make up for the loss of flexibility).
In fact all Apple really does is look at how consumers are using something, and simply that thing in ways that most people can actually use it, and advanced users can tolerate it because in spite of simplicity it's doing programatically sophisticated things under the hood. You may disagree with Apple's choices of where to simplify but historically Apple has shown they make very intelligent choices, based on what people actually buy over time.
The same arguments apply for much of the software they write as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are lots of research labs working with low-cost multi-touch-sensitive tables. At this point, one can practically build such a table for a few hundred dollars (plus a computer).
I literally spent today demonstrating my lab's table. An early prototype is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doK66IYG0Ug, and instructions for building one are at http://open-ftir.sourceforge.net/. Unfortunately the pictures and video from today's open house are not up yet, but they should be shortly (search for "Equis lab").
There are also lots of free libraries for handling the input. Mine (EquisFTIR) happens to be Windows-only and aimed at Microsoft XNA developers. There are lots of portable ones, often built on Intel's OpenCV library: check out http://nuigroup.com/ for more information.
Couple the table with some object-recognition libraries, and you could probably build yourself a Surface-equivalent with a few hundred dollars and nothing but FOSS.
But that doesn't mean that it's not true that Apple is a company that is successful mostly due to image,
Your repetition of something that simply isn't true doesn't make it true, either.
or that most of its products are hardly superlative.
Products are not successful when they are merely superlative. That gets you a little way, but you do not see the kind of share Apple has with iPods and music, without a hefty dose of solid usability behind it. You don't see the huge range of customer types that use the iPod in something that is mere fashion statement. Laptops are following the same path, albeit more slowly.
There is no evidence, and indeed it goes against common sense, that what you say is so. Superficial things are just that - superficial. Apple's success has exceeded the merely superficial.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley