YOUR FEEDBACK
shirley wrote: As an ISV and service provider, we specialise in .NET based collaboration soluti...

SYS-CON.TV
TOP MICROSOFT .NET LINKS


Windows 7 Really Just Windows Surface?
Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse far less important than in the past

I was reading news feeds when I read a blog post that included some quotes from Bill Gates. Bill was quoted as saying that Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse far less important than in the past. We've all heard that crap before, it's typically what Bill used to say before attempting to pimp yet another failed Tablet PC project. I admit, I fell for the Tablet thing once... I had one, and I hated it. It was never powerful enough to be a real laptop and it was never portable enough to be a good enough tablet. In short, it was useless.

Literally one blog post down in my reader after seeing that quote from Bill was some information about Microsoft doing some more demos of Surface, and how they plan on showing off Surface like mad during Mix '08.

So let's put some deduction to work here. Bill Gates says that Windows 7 is going to make the keyboard and mouse far less important than they used to be. Mix is coming up and Microsoft is planning on hyping Surface as the next best thing (admittedly, it could be...Surface is quite drool-worthy). Scott Guthrie has been posting about how by the end of the year, WPF will have received some dramatic new performance enhancements, as well as some much-needed functionality that makes it more equipped to deal with Line-of-Business applications out of the box.

If you want my completely off the wall predictions totally induced by lack of sleep, caffeine, and a healthy imagination, I'm guessing that Windows 7 is going to have Surface device drivers in it, and Microsoft, in cooperation with some hardware vendors, is going to try and release "Surface PCs", devices that use Surface technology that are small enough and affordable enough to become PC/furniture/appliance fixtures in upper middle class homes.

Maybe I'm totally nuts... nuts like a FOX! Or maybe not... ;) So far I've been unable to find a reason for consumers to own yet another video output device - we're all trying to consolidate everything so that our main display is our HDTV, so I don't know if MS will be able to convince people that they need another display.. Time will tell I guess.

I still think the sweet market for Surface is in themed entertainment/dining. Restaurants, Casinos, and Arcades (assuming there is still a functioning arcade left in this post-arcade-apocalyptic world!) are positively begging for stuff like Surface ... but do home consumers really need it? 

tags:  
links: digg this  del.icio.us  technorati  reddit

About Kevin Hoffman
Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's iPhone Developer's Journal, is Technical Chair of iPhone Developer Summit. He has been programming since he was 10 and has written everything from DOS shareware to n-tier, enterprise web applications in VB, C++, Delphi, and C. Hoffman is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. He authors The .NET Addict's Blog at .NET Developer's Journal.

YOUR FEEDBACK
Windows 7 News Desk wrote: I admit, I fell for the Tablet thing once... I had one, and I hated it.
MICROSOFT .NET LATEST STORIES
The DevExpress ASP.NET Filter Editor was created to address key business issues confronting software developers. The control does not require users to know or understand SQL syntax and does not have any limitations regarding filter condition complexity. To make filtering even easier fo...
CodeGear RAD Studio 2009, Embarcadero’s flagship product for Windows and .NET platforms, combines the rapid application development capabilities of Delphi® 2009 and C++Builder® 2009 with the recently introduced .NET development capabilities of Delphi Prism™. This combination of p...
According to the Times of London, Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo's search business. The Wall Street Journal says the story is utter hokum. The British paper puts the price at $20 billion – although all of Yahoo was only worth $15.96 billion as of Friday. However, it says "sen...
The federal court hearing the disclosure-rich "Vista Capable" class-action suit claiming consumers were misled by the logo has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to submit to a three-hour deposition. Microsoft, which tried to block the discovery, maintains that everything Ballmer know...
The two-year anniversary of the Novell-Microsoft alliance that scandalized the open source community passed quietly enough earlier this month. The pair waited a couple of weeks to mark the occasion and then said that in the second year of their arrangement they added upwards of 200 new...
SUBSCRIBE TO THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL NEWSLETTERS
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEEDS & GET YOUR SYS-CON NEWS LIVE!
Click to Add our RSS Feeds to the Service of Your Choice:
Google Reader or Homepage Add to My Yahoo! Subscribe with Bloglines Subscribe in NewsGator Online
myFeedster Add to My AOL Subscribe in Rojo Add 'Hugg' to Newsburst from CNET News.com Kinja Digest View Additional SYS-CON Feeds
Publish Your Article! Please send it to editorial(at)sys-con.com!

Advertise on this site! Contact advertising(at)sys-con.com! 201 802-3021


SYS-CON FEATURED WHITEPAPERS

ADS BY GOOGLE
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE WIRES
Allin Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: ALLN), a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner technology consulti...