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March 6, 2010
 

Better than Paper and Pencil?

As beautiful as the iPad is (and as vaporously strategic as the pundits predict it to be) the functions demo'd so far are sleek but kind of pedestrian (with the exception of Brushes).  It seems to offer the same kind of child-ish experience that the OSX mail program does. Something that drives me to distraction (Apple, if you give me resize handles on embedded images, really, I won't hurt myself).

This however promises something quite different.  If it works, as fictionally demo'd, I think it could really be something that improves upon raw paper and pencil for ideation and creative thinking:

Is it real?  Apparently not - it's just a "concept car" ... but hopefully the iPad has ruffled Microsoft enough that they get serious about pushing it out of the lab, or out of the UX designers heads, whichever the case may be.  Windows Phone 7 series is a good sign...but I've seen pretty designer videos before, like the one above, that come to nothing.  And finally, Microsoft, please don't invent some new UI platform for this - that's what your Silverlight investments are for.

Comments (2)

Mar 06, 2010
Jonathan Korman said...
I have learned my lesson from two decades of heartbreak from Microsoft. The products you should fear the most are the ones which you actually like, as they will find the worst ways to break your heart.
Mar 06, 2010
Phil Cockfield said...
Yeah right! The battle scars or a weary world...MS has been kicking the dog for such a long time.

I have been waiting for 2 years for MS to screw the pooch with Silverlight, and over that period they have consistently impressed me (first getting .NET on the client, making sure it works in all major browsers...not just Windows, although they could do a better job getting it on Linux).

None-the-less, they could still screw things up. Getting it working on the iPhone is an important move to make. Having it only work on Windows Phone 7 is not gonna be good enough.

In my happy future, MS moves enough of their revenue generation from Windows (Client) licenses to revenue from Azure based services (Azure itself + a Silverlight version of Office hosted in Azure). Then the giant beast will be incentivized to keep their UI technology platforms broad and open, and get past this awfully destructive legacy of protecting their Windows (Client) business at the cost of a more diverse client-side ecosystem.

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