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Why Microsoft Surface Took So Long To Deploy
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 03, 2008 01:08 PM
from the delay-delay-delay dept.
from the delay-delay-delay dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly a year after all the fanfare unveiling a new touchscreen tabletop interface, Microsoft's Surface computer will finally appear in select AT&T stores later this month. Popular Mechanics tech editor Glenn Derene, who first introduced us to Surface in May, seems to have done a complete 180 in this rant, blasting Microsoft for being more obsessed with Surface's novelty as a magnet for image-conscious partners while messing up a rare hardware device — and, surprisingly, the simple software he was told came with it. From Microsoft's official excuse in the article: 'It's actually been a good thing for us,' Pete Thompson, Microsoft's general manager for Surface, told me. 'We were anticipating that the initial deployments were going to be showcase pilots using our own software applications on units to drive traffic. What our partners have decided is that they want to skip that stage and go to an integrated experience where they build their own applications. That's pulled the timeline until this spring.'"
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Submission: Why Microsoft Surface Took So Long to Deploy by Anonymous Coward
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civ4 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:civ4 (Score:5, Interesting)
A lowly developer that wants build a hobby project where anyone with a surface can play chess virtually against someone? Tough. Exorbitant license fees or no surface for you!
I remember in eighth grade trying to fathom how I would come up with $240 for a student license of Visual Studio! I can't imagine what these costs are going to be. And that's the sad thing, really, the neat stuff would all come from the hobbyists who still have an imagination that's not twisted towards profits.
Think what kind of senior project a graphical artist could make with one of these things! I'd go to an art show where you get to interact with the art any day.
To reiterate, I doubt your civilization 4 dreams will come true unless its creators decide the demand is big enough for them to drop megabucks developing another interface to the engine hoping that fans will splurge for the 'surface.'
Parent
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Re:civ4 (Score:4, Informative)
several researchers have been doing this for years. MSFT is just the first big name to commericialize it. other companies have been selling the same thing for years.
Also MSFT's table is useless in brightly lit rooms. It needs a darkened room in order to be seen clearly.
Parent
Re:civ4 (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure MSoft will also try to make a killing on the software, but there is still a pretty significant hardware cost here.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
To reiterate, I doubt your civilization 4 dreams will come true unless its creators decide the demand is big enough for them to drop megabucks developing another interface to the engine hoping that fans will splurge for the 'surface.'
Well, the video game industry is something like a $14 billion/year industry these days and developers have dropped megabucks into systems in the past that showed far less promise for gaming applications than the surface.
I do think the GP is being a little bit shortsighted though. The true potential of the Surface for gaming is not ports of old PC games, just like all those PS2 ports on the Wii are not utilizing the system's full potential either.
When I think of gaming on the Surface, I imagine something t
Re:oblig (Score:5, Informative)
The product above is Mitsubishi's DiamondTouch screen. The folks who make it have released a Linux-compatible SDK. [merl.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Myst or Carcassone would be wicked cool too.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But no, we can't lock them up. Why use the big-empty case where our stock of PS3 stuff was for securing something. Heavens no.
But back on topic... yes. This is entirely possible. Surface can read small barcodes (both 1D and 2D) so just stick a barcode on the back of each card and there you go. Done and done.
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Dude! (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY [youtube.com]
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Simple (Score:2)
Not entirely dissing Surface (Score:5, Interesting)
He's not really criticizing MS, but more like chiding them gently. I'm a little underwhelmed by Surface. If you've ever had a coffee table that you can't put your legs under, you know how awkward they are to sit at. Plus, this price seems awfully exaggerated.
I like ROSIE's surface much more, although the direct screen (instead of projection) makes the resolution an issue, but hopefully that'll get addressed as hardware goes up.
Really, if you took a touchscreen laid flat, added a bunch of multi-touch capability and some touch tags for wireless pseudo-plugs, why couldn't this be built by anyone?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Walking through a mall you see a digital sign, walk up to it touch it and it gives you more information. This is all available now, but things like surface get it exposed to levels that make decisions.
I work for a marketing company and as soon as surface was released our customers were asking for them. So I'd guess the interest is there. It's not specifically surface they want,
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Craplets (Score:5, Insightful)
You can tell Apple's _customers_ are it's actual customers.** Microsoft's partners and developers are it's customers, and it shows.
Look at Windows Mobile: you get a reasonable platform that's perverted by hardware "partners" and their singular inability to write crash-resistant software, and then further mangled by the carriers, who seem addicted to penny-pinching revenue-ware.
Yes, it's "open" to developers, but as a manager of a fleet, the first thing I'd like to do is strip the device down to Microsoft's core platform, without the craplets the vendors see fit to add to it.
With Apple, you get a locked-down device. AT&T can't rebrand it (if they had their way, it'd be the "AT&T A7530", and it'd have six different ways for AT&T to sell me overpriced ringtones or web forms), nor can the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer load it with battery management software that misspells the word "Battery".
** you see this with free software as well, but the customer base isn't quite the same demographic as Apple's.
Re:Craplets (Score:5, Insightful)
And vendor lock-in can definitely benefit the simplicity argument I just made. If your goal is simplicity, the fewer cooks at the pot the better.
Poo-pooing the idea without careful consideration is ill-advised.
Parent
Or the... (Score:5, Insightful)
He might also mean the:
Macbook Air, which forgoes a DVD drive to give you a much lighter and thinner notebook, better for traveling.
Or the Apple TV, which foregoes a tuner but makes it easier to get media directly to your TV over the internet with easy iTunes integration.
Or the iPhone, which makes smart phones that are much easier to use for most people.
Or OS X itself, which is basically UNIX with a simplified window manager which is easier to use than most traditional X windows managers (and that for most people does make up for the loss of flexibility).
In fact all Apple really does is look at how consumers are using something, and simply that thing in ways that most people can actually use it, and advanced users can tolerate it because in spite of simplicity it's doing programatically sophisticated things under the hood. You may disagree with Apple's choices of where to simplify but historically Apple has shown they make very intelligent choices, based on what people actually buy over time.
The same arguments apply for much of the software they write as well.
Parent
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Rob
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And for the other guy who said that it gener
What is true... (Score:3, Informative)
Your repetition of something that simply isn't true doesn't make it true, either.
or that most of its products are hardly superlative.
Products are not successful when they are merely superlative. That gets you a little way, but you do not see the kind of share Apple has with iPods and music, without a hefty dose of solid usability behind it. You don't see the huge range of customer types that use the iPo
You can thank Apple for the fall of DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
They are also the sole reason Amazon sells any big-label commercial MP3's at all.
Only by grabbing control of the DRM reigns away from the studios was Apple able to force labels into realizing DRM free music was good for them (it was the only way to illustrate to the studios that lock-in was a problem for studios as much as consumers).
Pray that Apple succeeds in the video market if you ever want to see DRM free video as a commercial product. This is less
Hmm.. theme ideas... (Score:5, Funny)
Testing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Great, now when I come home I gotta check my computer to make sure the cats didn't put kitty porn on it...
*HIDE*
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Re:Testing... (Score:5, Funny)
while(!asleep()) {
eat();
breakSomething();
}
Parent
Expensive? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Development (Score:3, Funny)
So, the delay was getting an SDK out the door? Holy cow, MS pumps out half a dozen SDKs a month, it took a whole year to create an SDK for a table? I'm guessing they didn't build this thing from scratch, either - it's probably
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A novel kiosk (Score:5, Interesting)
It may simply not be suitable for long-term use so they picked an application where people would interact with it and leave the store before they got tired of craning their necks and holding their arms up in the air.
Re:A novel kiosk (Score:5, Interesting)
There are all kinds of cool niche markets for this thing. Microsoft's creativity stifling bureaucracy is in full effect in marketing this thing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The original demo showed it recognising (some) cell phones placed on the table and so forth, but those were real live cell phones out of someone's pocket. Every cell phone I have seen at a store, AT&T or otherwise, is either behind glass or a tethered "dead" model. It simply won't be as easy as the customer helping themselves to cell phones and placi
Apple Lisa II, by MSFT (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like an Apple Lisa (pre-Macintosh, even more expensive, unreliable and pompous than a Mac) or the NeXT cube: great ideas, the first to bring them to market, but still not fit into a market niche. Market niche is what Microsoft does really well.
They will trot this out to try to gain the cool points, then find out a way to apply the technology to a tablet computer that also can prop itself up like a mini-table.
Roughly Drafted got it right (Score:5, Interesting)
I still think Roughly Drafted had it right in a post [roughlydrafted.com] last year.
Surface took longer, was more expensive, and is uglier than the iPhone. The iPhone uses real touch sensitivity, while Surface uses cameras and a projection screen. Surface had interesting tricks like identifying objects, but it did that through essentially 8 dot bar codes.
So here we are, a year later. Surface has been no where to be seen. It is now coming to 4 AT&T stores in large cities, where it will do next to nothing.
You can compare phones. Neat. A normal kiosk could do that (as the article points out). The more interesting abilities of Surface (like collaboration and such) won't come out in that. You can only compare two phones at once? There are only 8 or the (what, 20+) phones AT&T sells that will work with it? And how long before people steal some of the special phones (with the magic bar codes or whatever) thus rendering it a big expensive table? Or will those phones be tied up with leashes also?
It's a semi-interesting technology, that isn't going anywhere because of the management. Is anyone surprised? This is how basically every tech demo ends up. We never see it, or it gets managed to death.
They should have just started selling them to the (business) public at a high price with an SDK and just let people figure it out.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The iPhone uses real touch sensitivity, while Surface uses cameras and a projection screen.
What kind of fanboy nonsense is this? Is there some kind of platonic ideal of touch sensing technology? In what conceivable way is touch sensing by capacitance more "real" than touch sensing by infrared image processing? If it senses touch, it's "real" touch sensitivity, no?
Re: (Score:2)
Apple had the easier job. They already had a bunch of fan bois lined up to buy the phone as soon as they hit the shelves, and they introduced it into a culture obsessed with the newest, shiniest gadget. On the other hand, Microsoft now needs to convince people that they actually want this piece of crap that they created.
Rome was not built in a day (Score:4, Interesting)
How badly do we need multitouch for e-mail, web browsing or posting on slashdot?
Build your own... (Score:3, Informative)
There are lots of research labs working with low-cost multi-touch-sensitive tables. At this point, one can practically build such a table for a few hundred dollars (plus a computer).
I literally spent today demonstrating my lab's table. An early prototype is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doK66IYG0Ug [youtube.com], and instructions for building one are at http://open-ftir.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. Unfortunately the pictures and video from today's open house are not up yet, but they should be shortly (search for "Equis lab").
There are also lots of free libraries for handling the input. Mine (EquisFTIR) happens to be Windows-only and aimed at Microsoft XNA developers. There are lots of portable ones, often built on Intel's OpenCV library: check out http://nuigroup.com/ [nuigroup.com] for more information.
Couple the table with some object-recognition libraries, and you could probably build yourself a Surface-equivalent with a few hundred dollars and nothing but FOSS.
Re:April Fools is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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