Bill Gates, who seems to be following the tradition of Tony Blair in doing the sort of ‘long goodbye’ which makes us wonder why he’s still here, like he’s holding out for a standing ovation and encore or something – has irritated me again by doing another presentation of technology we’ve all seen before but that Microsoft is reinventing, just rather less impressively, and touting it as their innovation. It all links back to Microsoft Surface which has always been a total rip off of the work of people like Jeff Han, just with more lag and a clunkier interface. It just makes my blood boil to watch them crow over a juddery, sluggish version of something I gleefully played with 2 years ago at Siggraph, when it wasn’t even new then. Compare the following:
Personally, I know which one I think is innovative, and which is derivative, and also which one I’d rather use. But, no doubt a ton of people will hold out and buy the Microsoft version just because it’s made by Microsoft. Bah.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Wow! It’s VERY clumsy, the first one MAKES the difference. It looks smooth and responsive. Bill Gates looks like he’s trying not to crash the app
May 15th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
It is really odd, all of Microsoft’s attempts look so amateurish compared to Jeff Han’s. The speed of the response and lack of precision and accuracy are sad. You can really see this in any demo that shows the drawing and menu usage.
The general difference is Microsoft isn’t going for the gold here, just mediocrity. It seems like they are going for an OK but cheap implementation that gets them into the market in a big way. After all, a setup that sells for just a couple thousand dollars, even if its half-assed will sell more than the nice $100,000 version (Apple v. Microsoft anyone?).
May 16th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Really? I thought it was parallel evolution rather then copy-cat, after all the idea of multitouch interfaces has been presented in sci-fi movies for years.
I think the difference is probably integration. It could be smoke and mirrors, but it looks like it’s using something like the deep zoom stuff http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ or http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/bigweekend/2008/zoom/ – silverlight browser & web based tech.
When he says different “pipes” of information, that makes me think it’s pulling stuff from webservices, perhaps something like sharepoint probably. It also seems to be going in to office type documents, and even editing them.
It will be interesting to see how they both develop, competition is good for everyone. On the reverse of your last argument, I’m sure lots of people will choose the other because it’s not MS.
Have you ever seen this? Probably something like it already in the open source world for all I know, but it does seem pretty coo. Really worth a look if you are in to photography and image manipulation:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
May 16th, 2008 at 8:41 am
@Paul: if you want to call several years afterwards parallel, ok
What annoys me is the amount of publicity Bill gets over Surface’s ‘innovation’ when it’s so obviously inferior to Han’s work. The speed, responsiveness of the Han version are just on a completely different plane – I remember playing with Han’s tech in 2006 (when it was already 1-2 years old) and being totally blown away, then seeing MS’s Surface a year later chugging along with slow, overly deliberate gestures and laggy response and getting all the news coverage. Grr.
Given that the only interactive thing Bill did with the demo is draw a circle and flip through pages (very, very slowly with a horrible lag), I think the demo was mostly smoke and mirrors, whilst Han’s could clearly run entire apps like Google Earth and fully interactive web browsing a couple of years ago.
Personally, I love the idea of just having one big LCD that’s my display, mouse and keyboard in one, but the thought of the defacto solution being Surface is downheartening. I hate to see better implementations by small companies get suppressed by the inferior versions from large companies just because of publicity budgets and brand loyalty.
Photosynth is a lot like PicLens or Pogo – 3D browsing is very much in vogue right now it seems. I blame Apple’s Coverflow
May 16th, 2008 at 10:21 am
7 years – wow. I guess we don’t know when the MS boffins started on all this, but 7 years seems like a long time to sit on something.
Lets see if MS can make this commerically viable and tasty to businesses. I’m suprised tech like this hasn’t been already been backed by VCs etc if it has been around for so long already. Perhaps MS’s entry will be enough to stimulate interest in competiting and existing products?
I’m not sure why MS shouldn’t implement something like this. Or Apple, Sony or whoever else for that matter. Each would have their own unique spin on this stuff.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:20 am
‘Several’, not ‘seven’
I’m not sure exactly when it started, Han’s work was at Siggraph from at least 2005 which suggests it’s been going for a while.
Han’s tech has most recently been used by CNN for their US election coverage (their ‘Magic Wall’), although from the YouTube vids they’re not using it to the full by any stretch. I hear several military & intelligence depts in the US are using it internally too. Maybe the lower public proliferation is cost related, or just because his company is several orders of magnitude smaller and doesn’t get the air time MS does.
I’m not saying MS shouldn’t do this at all, I’m saying it’s annoying Surface et al gets more attention than Han’s stuff when it’s clearly not as good. And Bill Gates just gets on my tits
May 16th, 2008 at 11:46 am
argh, if you’re going to rip something off, do it properly! They have a full design ready to rip off and they STILL manage to make it the kludgiest thing since windows 3.1
I mean they’ve utterly missed the point in that video of why Jeff Hans version is so good. How hard is it to copy someone else?
I’m with Steve Jobs on this one, Microsoft just have no class
May 16th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Bill’s surface computer must be running Vista, must be running Vista, must be running Vista, ……