How Microsoft will kill the PC and change the world
When the PC computer hit the scene, few people saw it as an advertising tool. But Surface, Microsoft’s PC-killer, is built for brands. See what it can do.
It’s not often that you get a chance to glimpse the future. But at a recent Warner Bros. press junket, Microsoft showed Hollywood the Surface, a table-top computing platform that makes “The Matrix” look, well… real.
For all the talk of interactivity, virtual worlds and Web 2.0, little has changed in terms of how we interface with the information age since the PC and mouse came on the scene in the 1980s.
But the touch-screen-operated Surface may soon spark the next wave in the digital revolution, killing the PC and the mouse, and replacing them with a computer that is an organic extension of our physical world.
So what is it?
It’s hard to make a coffee table look sexy, and harder still if you’re Microsoft, which regularly plays the ubiquitous girl-next-door to Apple’s iconic sex symbol. But in Surface, Microsoft finally combined robust computing power with eye-popping aesthetics that can inspire its own legions of brand evangelists. What sets Surface apart is a sleek chassis that delivers a new order of functionality, bridging the divide between the physical and the virtual.
September 11, 2007
Rumor has it that Microsoft will announce its exit from the OS business within two years.
September 11, 2007
The CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has said publicly that this could possibly become a multi-billion dollar industry, with applications ranging from tabletops, to interactive mirrors. It is possible that this will eventually be built into the doors of refrigerators, or embedded into walls, pervading many aspects of everyday life.