Since Microsoft is the only company left in this tech-industry depression with the money and the ambition to conduct real research and push new types of products, it pretty much gets to call the shots at events like the now-humbled, on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy COMDEX. Bill Gates kicked the conference off with one product announcement that strikes me as fascinating and one that seems ludicrous.
On the interesting side there’s Microsoft One-Note, slated for a mid-2003 release. This is a new twist on the PIM (“personal information manager”) that sounds like it might be fun and useful. (It’s tied in various ways to Microsoft’s new Tablet PC initiative, but don’t hold that against it.) PCs have never done a great job at collecting one’s notes, and note-organizing software like Ecco and Info-Select have never really seized the public imagination. Most of us still use pad and paper. If One-Note does half the things it promises — and if Microsoft doesn’t lock it down too tightly into the company’s use-all-our-products-together template — it could be important.
On the ludicrous side there’s a new Microsoft initiative called “small personal object technology” — or SPOT. Here’s one report:
The most bizarre announcement was saved for last, which Gates described as the culmination of an idea that began three years ago.
He informed the audience that Microsoft’s Smart Personal Object Technology group has been looking at embedding intelligence into small, everyday devices. Gates showed off a range of fridge magnets, key chains and wristwatches that are automatically updated with the time, current weather and the latest news. More information was promised at next January’s Consumer Electronic Show. Gates said that the company hopes to ship a smart alarm clock based on the technology next year. It always tells the right time, gives a default wake up time based on user patterns, and checks the weather, traffic and news to calculate the user’s journey time to work. |
Typically, the problem with all such “smart device” projects is that the device is too small and too poorly designed to have an intelligible interface. So that in order to program it to do what you want you have to cycle through ridiculous “modes” by punching little tiny buttons, or spend hours reading an instruction manual that has been translated, poorly, from the language spoken by the engineers who created it. I guess the coolness of Dick Tracy watches remains a powerful lure to geeks everywhere, but I will be shocked if SPOT proves anything but a great big money-hole for Microsoft.
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