Last night at the D6 conference both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer sat down together for an interview. We’ve got two highlight videos from the conference below, and there were actually some interesting things brought up. What’s even more surprising is that there were some jokes being thrown around.
Before we get into that we wanted to bring some attention to the multi-touch Windows 7 interface that was demoed. Despite being rather tight-lipped on Windows 7 Microsoft decided to show off a glimpse of what’s in store for the future operating system, but it didn’t go any further than the multi-touch capabilities. My question is whether people are actually looking for multi-touch capabilities in a laptop? The Tablet PC market never really seemed to explode like Bill Gates said it would, and I don’t think that on-screen multi-touch laptops are going to do any better. Sure there will be a chunk of the population who will find it useful, but the hardware required will probably fall outside of the price range for general consumers. Take a look at this video demonstration by Microsoft and give us your opinion:
And as you can see in that video there is not a drastically new interface in Windows 7 like those pictured over at Crunchgear. In fact the credibility of their “screenshots” has already been smashed. All of them are clearly mockups (apparently not even done by Microsoft), and some even look like they date back to the Longhorn days.
If you’ve got 12-minutes to kill here are the highlights from the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs interview, and they are worth watching in my opinion. The first video covers their chat about the history of Microsoft, and the second half focuses on current/future developments.
You missed the most interesting thing about this: Ballmer said Windows 7 would come out in 2009.
It’s not really that interesting. It could mean that the first beta is generally available in 2009 or that in 2009 it’s RTM which could be general available to consumers in 2010. Until they communicate the actual schedule it really doesn’t mean much. And besides, those dates are subject to change based on, what Sinofsky says, is “what we want to achieve”.
It is interesting that they’re saying it will come out in late 2009, but we have no idea if it will get pushed back or not. We saw Vista pushed back how many times? Several, so I wouldn’t keep your hopes up for a late 2009 launch.
Hmmmm… where have I seen a touch screen interface before that lets you use two fingers to shrink and enlarge photos???
And I’m not too crazy about touching my laptop or desktop screen… is there anything more annoying than a huge fingerprint smudge on your high resolution monitor?
I think this will be more interesting in point-of-sale systems that are used by retailers, food service, etc. Think of the number of large retails and restaurant chains that could use Windows based systems in their stores. It would easily integrate with the current software stack that Microsoft already offers (SQL Server, Windows Server, BizTalk, etc). You could easily get 100,000’s of additional PCs in the business market place. Along with that new system purchases, corporations would be more likely to upgrade existing system to the latest-and-greatest version of the server software. Heck, it may even spure the growth of SharePoint services. What compliments SharePoint? MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services and) which could mean large sales of the latest version of Microsoft Office.
Just because a new feature is introduced don’t assume it’s for the home consumer.
I meant to mention that but it slipped my mind while writing the article. They’ve drilled into all of our heads the “3-years after Vista” date, and so my guess is that they are targeting a late 2009 launch for business and early 2010 launch for consumers. Just like with Vista.
Surely the only thing you could be thinking of is the Microsoft Surface, right?
That’s actually a really good point, and I hadn’t thought about anything along those lines. But I’m still wondering how multi-touch could benefit a general point of sale system.
Well of course the UI won’t be a lot different than Vista right now since it’s still at its early stages. But I think everyone are more willing to see some other improvements other than the interface, right?
I actually like Vista’s Aero interface, and so it wouldn’t really bother me if Microsoft didn’t update the interface this time around. I’m sure there will be some minor changes to it, but I think the Aero glass is here to stay for awhile.
It is like an physical exercise to gesture all these movements instead of small wrist and finger movements.
Useless.
After the Vista debacle, I’m never getting excited about a Windows OS again.
Lots of retailers and restaurants already use touch screens to increase productivity; it’s faster to touch than to use a mouse and keyboard when placing order or checking out a customer (also no keyboard or mouse is needed so neither breaks ro needs to be replaced). Also, think about the touch screen “self checkout” units in a lot of supermarkets. I’m sure Microsoft would like to be the ones providing the OS for those systems.