Bill Gates Talks Windows Future, Touch Interfaces

Nerval's Lobster writes "In a YouTube interview released by Microsoft, co-founder Bill Gates offered a few hints of where Microsoft plans on taking Windows in coming years. 'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,' he said, referring to how Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 share a kernel, file system, graphics support, and other elements. At least in theory, that will allow developers to port apps from the desktop/tablet OS to the smartphone OS with relatively little work. The two operating systems already share the same design aesthetic, with Start screens composed of colorful tiles linked to applications. Gates also praised natural user interfaces — which include touch and voice — while taking a subtle dig at Apple's iPad and other tablets on the market. 'People want to consume their mail, reading, video anywhere, and they want it to be awfully simple,' he said. 'But you want to incorporate touch without giving up the kind of mouse, keyboard capability that's just so natural in most settings.'"

Comments

Re:Like Apple?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

MS has been doing mobile devices since the late 1990's trying to make a unified OS.

Yes and those Windows CE PDAs and WinPhones kinda sucked. Microsoft tried to do too much with the limited power of the embedded processors of that time. The low resolution screens made the window UI practically useless, but Microsoft refused to abandon it on the phones. Palm was a better PDA and Handsprings Phone/PDA had a much better user experience than the slow clunky Microsoft CE devices.

Microsoft was myopic with their "Windows Everywhere" ambitions. They still seem stuck in that mode. It just took 20 years for the hardware to finally be powerful enough to support Microsoft's goals.

apple got lucky with the price of mobile components dropping to reasonable levels and the fact that samsung and others started to make touch screens

You make your own luck and Apple put a lot of planning and risk entering the mobile device market. If you browse through their patent portfolio you'd see that they been working on the iPad for years before it was finally released to the public. The iPad had to take a back seat to the development of the iPhone. Apple had to engineer the battery life, display performance, and took a gigantic leap of faith when they decided how they will enter the wireless market (No other computer company has pulled it off). There was a "controversy" over Apple abandoning the traditional Window UI for an exclusively full screen application design. The lessons learned over the demise of the Apple Newton was behind all this attention to detail. Remember Apple was still a niched company and this was a HUGE risk for Steve Jobs.

Sure today the media falls over themselves to praise Apple and follow their every move. I think is to make up for them discounting the significance of Apple's release of the original iPhone, played up how Apple was risking too much by taking on entrenched phone manufactures and the large peanut gallery of pundits that announced the death of Apple.

Their poor forecast embarrassed them so now I think they preemptively are positive toward Apple (and Google, Microsoft, others) because they learned it looks better to praise a new technology/product/upstart and allow it to fail on its own and write articles investigating the reasons than it is to be skeptical and then eat crow when the company succeeds.

When everyone think about the good old days, they forgot about all the crap they went through to get to where they are today.