Wow. With all the recent talk lately about Microsoft’s lack of innovation, especially after Apple’s unveiling of the iPad, these two projects blew me away. First up is Windows Mobile 7, or maybe it’s Windows Phone 7 Series – not sure what the official name is. The Windows 7 Phone website shows some pretty decent screenshots and video demos. It appears to be inspired by the clean simplicity of the iPhone’s interface, but seems to take a fundamentally different approach. The entire experience is centered around your data, not your apps. To be honest, it’s kind of refreshing after poking around the App Store’s 100,000+ applications for an hour or so this evening. I won’t go into detail explaining how it works because the videos demonstrate it much better.
Second – I stumbled across a presentation by software architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas from a recent TED Conference. This is another instance where pictures are worth a thousand words. Watch the 8-minute video presentation and you’ll see some of the most amazing applications of mapping, user-generated content, geodata, metadata and much more. Blaise starts with an overhead map, very reminiscent of a Google map. Then he starts zooming in and changing his perspective, so you’re now looking at a 3d representation of the cityscape, with buildings being rendered as what seems like real 3d models. Then he shows some crazy stuff with flickr photo integration, some live video streaming, etc. Finally, he points his view up into the clouds and boom – the sky darkens and is full of constellations. Who knows if/when we’ll see this technology in mass markets, but this demo completely knocked me off my seat. Plus, I also enjoyed Blaise’s nonchalant, “my team and i have been playing with this” attitude.
Anyway, I’m very excited to see these two projects grow and develop. Just as I was ready to completely write off Microsoft as a company that lacks “it” and is always playing catch-up, something like these things pop up. Bravo, MS – hopefully you won’t crap out make me regret saying this.
