Windows 7 Multitouch Demonstration

Starturtle writes "Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7 at Walt Mossberg's D: All Things Digital conference. It seems like the Windows team have switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS. Multitouch is the biggest addition, and will appear system-wide, usable anywhere. The most interesting part of the touch UI is not the eye candy, it's the Task Bar, which seems to have morphed into a pie menu."

Comments

makes no sense...

[jgarra23]

Why 2 articles so close about what WON'T be in Windows 7 and now what WILL be in Windows 7... ? Maybe I'm not seeing the forest for the trees but what kind of marketing tactics are these?

For instance in the movie industry... in a highly anticipated movie, let's say a book-to-movie one, you never hear about what they've LEFT OUT until the reviews start pouring in. OTOH, we hear "all about the great scene from the book that's also in the movie"... well before the reviews in the previews or buzz...

Or with Apple announcements we hear at best rumors about what will & won't be in it...

and then we hear from Microsoft a while back (forgive me for not recalling the article) that there won't be much external buzz about the contents of Windows 7 & that development will be much more "sealed" or "internal" for lack of better words...

so why the change of heart? Why are we hearing so much about what will & won't be there? There has to be more reason to this than to just generate some sort of overall interest via marketing in this respect, and I'm wondering beyond the typical answer "...because their last OS sucked ass" mainly because that answer doesn't really answer anything... any more insightful ideas?

Re:makes no sense...

[Jason Levine]

In Microsoft's defense, there's a thin line they have to walk here. People already aren't enthused about Vista. If they hype up Windows 7 too much then they lose Vista sales to people who would rather wait for Windows 7. Plus, they run the risk of having to cut features, thus bursting the hype bubble, disappointing those people who waited through Vista for Windows 7, and losing more customers to Apple (and possibly to Linux as well). If, however, they don't hype Windows 7 enough, then people will see Vista as Microsoft's only option and will seriously look at Apple (and possibly Linux as well) for their future upgrade paths. This scares Microsoft as it is harder to convince an "Apple convert" to come back to Windows than it will be to convince XP holdouts (like myself) to upgrade to Windows 7.

Slow

[wonkavader]

I notice that this machine redraws on zooms quickly, and creates a travel route quickly. That means the box has some real horsepower.

And yet, the dragging is way behind the finger, the responses of input and menu popup is slow -- it looks like running a modern paint program on an old machine.

This is not going to make for a pleasant user experience. Why is that stuff so uncrisp?

What Kind of Fund Manager

[mpapet]

would take this stuff seriously? The problem is most will.

1. Sure microsoft delivers above-average returns and that's enough reason for hanging onto it. But stock prices have some -future prospects- built into it. I see none at Microsoft. Zero. Especially when they flush dev resources down the drain for their forthcoming knock-off iPhones that probably won't see the light of day for a decade.

Off-topic

My gut feeling is, there's a growing reality distortion field that most of the people/groups managing funds are working in. If I had to guess, I'd say their math/quant models are wrong because these are a relatively new set of economic conditions. News disguised as PR fills this gap nicely and brings some sense of equilibrium back.

Meanwhile some hack on ./ can be laughed at for calling some dev groups blood, sweat and tears, and management's gravy train broken.

Flame on!

More tech without design

[StreetStealth]

The real problem here is that Microsoft is just regurgitating what we saw from Jeff Han two years ago.

Draggable freely-resizeable photo viewer? Amazing, MS, welcome to 2006! Pinch-zoom map viewer? Again, good to see you MS engineers watched Han's TED presentation on Youtube; I liked it too!

So they can integrate a (laggy) version of the tech into the OS. Step 1, done.

Now, how about some actual design? Copying two-year-old TED videos doesn't count; let's see some insight into how this tech can be used to make managing files easier, make navigating data relationships easier, and so on. Seriously, fire half your UI "design" team and replace them with the folks who built Photosynth; maybe bring in some of the Zune embedded UI team too; they might figure out how to actually make a decent multi-touch UI for Windows 7.

Or will Ballmer be content to just have "OH LOOK PHOTO SORTING" on top of a slightly less stable and slightly more DRMed future Windows release?

If history is anything to go by...

Re:How they will break apple's multi touch patents

[travbrad]

Yeah, I agree. I think a mouse is faster and more accurate anyway. It has the "cool factor" but it's not really that practical. Plus my puny geek arms would get sore holding them up all day ;)