To disprove the myth that I write nice things only about Apple, here is news about some cool new products from Microsoft.
The first one that caught my eye is Photosynth. It takes a group of photos, typically of a single geographical location, but possibly taken at different times by different people, analyses them for similarities, and then stitches then together into a smooth-flowing, pseudo-3D panorama. Check more on it here and here. It does not run on Macs as yet. When you try to access it from a Mac, you get a message: ‘Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows’. Talk about self-deprecating humour.
Another cool product from Microsoft is Surface – its touch activated table-top computer. It is being made available to Sheraton Hotel lobbies in some US cities currently. It like a digital concierge for Sheraton guests.
It is like a giant iPhone screen (well, I had to bring in Apple somehow) with touch-friendly graphics. So instead of Mojave Experiments and trying to counter Apple with snazzy advertising, if Microsoft were to be in the news for such cool products, they would never need to be defensive.
And oh, Microsoft Surface runs on…Vista. Cancel or Allow?