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May 30, 2007
Microsoft's Playtable is a Nice Ad for iPhone
That's so sweet of Bill Gates. His company announced the Playtable, a pool-table-like multi-touch gesture interface, last night before his tete-a-tete with Apple's Steve Jobs tonight at D.Why so sweet? Because the main thing the oversized and unavailable, low-light reliant and generally cumbersome Playtable makes you do is realize how darn cool it will be to have a palm-sized gesture interface like iPhone's in another month.
Microsoft is, in other words, now making ads for Apple, which is awfully nice of Bill.
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Huh?
Sorry, but I disagree. The multipoint gesturing for photo rotation, resizing, etc. requires a form factor bigger than your palm.
I am looking forward to the iPhone but not for its multitouch interface. I've had half a dozen touch-screen cellphones and I've always ditched them for tactile button phones in the end, because there are just too many times I want to dial by touch, and putting your phone up to your face generates some unwanted stuff too.
I know its fun to make these two products part of the same news narrative, but they are quite distinct in intended application. Time will tell whether this, or its successors, is worthwhile either in commercial spaces or in residences but I applaud MSFT for innovating here.
Your post makes little sense to me.
These are completely different products targeted at different markets. Sure, they both run on electricity but the similarity ends there.
I think your anti-MS distortion field is taking effect here . . .
Paul, great point...I was thinking the same thing when I saw this announcement. What a perfect symbol of Microsoft's ineptness when it comes to innovation! Who in the world is going to use this table thing? Does anyone really think that product has any chance of commercial success on any kind of scale? Ridiculous.
This points up again why MSFT trades within such a narrow range: it is not now nor has it ever been a company that has distinguised itself through innovation.
Its products are the essence of me-too. Where it has had to compete (e.g., Zune) its products have been market failures. This will wither away into irrelevancy. It will, no doubt, be also a market failure.
MSFT is an example of a a bloated monopolist incapable of innovation and becoming rapidly less important. Soon our young children will ask what Microsoft once was and we can reply that we cannot remember.
Moi? Anti-Microsoft? I don't hate Microsoft, I don't know what I'd do without 'em.
More seriously, I just haven't liked the stock in ages, except as a periodic contrarian play when it's been beaten down.
Sure, praise AAPL for their pointless AppleTV (in all its failurity) and its attempt to capture the 10s of millions of households in the burgeoning home entertainment convergence market space, but skewer MSFT for attempting to address/create a market that most humans don't know exists (the highly sought-after yet elusive "hotel lobby" demographic!). Shame on you.
You're clearly anti-MSFT. What is it with Apple heads and their inability to just state the f**king obvious. Shit after posting that AppleTV piece I'm sure Jobs had to have a cigarette.
Oh, that old saw. Microsoft has never innovate. Yada-yada.
Sorry, but who invented the very underpinnings of AJAX, that Web 2.0 darling? (Answer: Did you know that XMLHttpRequest, which is the foundation of AJAX, was invented by Microsoft's Outlook group? Not Java, not Sun, not Apple, not Mozilla. It made its first appearance in Outlook Web Access and later IE.)
Who invented and delivered the #1 online Internet gaming service for consoles, which includes matchmaking, online voice chat, tournament play, video downloads, etc.? Microsoft. Before you criticize the company too much, have you ever actually used XBox Live? It's pretty impressive, and far, far ahead of its time. Who delivered the first truly open way to interconnect databases (ODBC)? I'm sure it sounds mundane, but before that, you had a zillion different drivers to try to figure out in order to make a database work with a client. (can you say Oracle SQL*Net? It sucks!) And do you know who put a satellite map of the world on the Internet first? It wasn't Google. It was Microsoft.
There's lots of valid reasons to criticize Microsoft -- e.g., Bob was horrible, Vista took way too long to deliver, it has capitalized on a natural monopoly, and yes, many of the products the firm delivers are simply copies of whats in the marketplace and don't show tremendous innovation. But it's untrue that the company doesn't innovate at all; in fact, it does, and it's an easy hack to simply brush it off and say it doesn't.
I for one am thrilled with this new development.
I can now keep my desk as cluttered with digital documents as I currently keep it cluttered with paper documents. I've been fearing for a long time that going paperless would cramp my organizational style...
funny, and so, so true...