Looks like an interesting concept. I'm not too surprised to see it coming from MS R&D. They are well funded and have some great ideas. The problem with a company like Microsoft is actually getting those ideas into a real shipping product unmolested. I hope Apple's rumored tablet is more or less the same form factor and functionality.
I think being a "booklet" is the only way Microsoft and Apple are going to protect a tablet device from in-use damage such as scratches and being dropped. But then again, look at the iPhone.
Microsoft has a lot of the core concepts in the Courier video already built in to One Note. It's a nice little app for doing research and saving and annotating clippings, especially if you have a tablet.
I carried around a Windows tablet PC for a project at work for several months, and it was actually a really nice workflow. I'd love to see what they added in the Windows 7 tablet version.
The biggest problems were the weight of the machine (it was two years old) and the battery life on it sucked. And, the handwriting recognition really sucked when it came to user names and passwords. It was really hard to log in to a thin client application that I had to use all the time using the tablet.
It seems like there's a lot of different applications, finger commands, pen commands, etc. If Microsoft can come with some kind of consistency across the different use cases, this could actually be a worthy piece of hardware...
My first exposure to this was at the UIST conference in 2007, I've seen it pop up at a couple of other HCI conferences since then and I've always been skeptical of this interaction paradigm ever since I first encountered it.
Every time I meet someone working on this project, I ask them several hard questions which I've never managed to get satisfactory answers to:
* How is cross screen, pen interaction handled in a graceful & generalizable manner? How do you distinguish dragging to the edge of the first screen vs dragging onto the second
* What is the persistence model between the two screens in independant mode? Do they share state or not?
* Is this designed for specific, highly targeted applications or as a platform? If it's a platform, how do you intend to replicate the interaction paradigms of desktop apps such that they can either be trivially ported or completely rewritten?
My ultimate conclusion about this project has always been that it's been optimized to get papers into HCI conferences and not towards practical use.
"In March 2004, during a consumer class-action lawsuit in Minnesota, internal documents subpoenaed from Microsoft revealed that the company had violated nondisclosure agreements seven years earlier in obtaining business plans from Go Corporation, using them to develop and announce a competing product named PenWindows, and convincing Intel to reduce its investment in Go. After Go was purchased by AT&T and Go's tablet-based computing efforts were shelved, PenWindows development was dropped.[21]"
It looks pretty interesting, however only the actual device photos looked real. The rest of the content (video/images) looked like very polished prototype mockups.
How that translates into real product remains to be seen.
Hmm, on one hand it looks pretty awesome. On the other hand, it's going to have to do a lot my Pre cannot for me to carry it around. It's got wow factor but not sure about practicality.
Even if this comes out, I see it as being a flop. It's too far fetched from the traditional computer, only the upper echelon of computer users will take the learning curve to use it.
The same company that can't consistently release a successful operating system (unless you redefine success to fit Windows Visa performance) is capable not only of delivering a revolutionary user interaction paradigm with its Surface and of creating the ultimate videogame experience with Project Natal, but also steal Apple's cake by launching a tablet before their arch-nemesis can even announce theirs.
Or would it be simpler to explain Microsoft is just again using vaporware to create confusion in markets it is not ready to enter with a product, but that they feel are strategic to the maintenance of their monopolies?
On the other hand, if they are dedicating so much of their brainpower to Surface, Natal and Courier, this could explain Vista and Windows 7.
None of their demos are particularly outlandish. Surface has been duplicated n times; Microsoft has had the best, most polished implementation, that's all. If you look at the real Natal demos, they're certainly doable for a big company like Microsoft. This tablet also isn't anything new; multi-touch PCs have been around for a while.
I'm not even particularly impressed with their interface here. It doesn't have the consistency of design that Apple's does, and it doesn't look particularly intuitive. That doesn't mean that it's vaporware, however; in fact, it probably means the opposite.
Anyway, Microsoft's operating systems are more successful than everyone else's anyway. Windows 7 looks like it will be successful even relative to other Windows releases, no matter what you think of it. The buzz is right, and people are impressed.
Work on Surface started around 2001 (as far as I remember). Jeff Han presented his work in 2006 at TED. So both were most likely developed in parallel.
If they can pull off a Milo and Kate, they are wasting their (and our) time with Windows versions while they could start selling a pocket version of HAL-9000...
As for the controllerless controller, have they set a release date yet? Until they do so, I will say it's vaporware.
And the same goes for the dual-screen tablet. I think they were aiming towards murkying up the waters of an eventually successful XO2 laptop and ended up with the perfect Newton killer.
When you announce an incredibly amazing product that clearly blows what your competition has currently shipping without even as much as a launch date plus or minus a year, it's vaporware.
The effect is twofold: it inhibits sales of the competition (who would want a Wii/360 when they could buy an Xbox 360 now and expect this mind-blowing Natal by Christmas?) and takes space on specialized media, limiting the free promotion their competitors could have gotten had Microsoft stuck with realistic products.
