Microsoft’s vision of the mobile future is astounding

I agree with Mr. Gruber on this:

"This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today."

I knew people who worked on these sorts of thought-leadership concept videos, and even some working advanced prototypes, at Microsoft back in the mid-2000s. I did work to get a team spun up to actually bring some of it to market.

I haven't watched this video (life is to short), but I can say, based on what I know, I doubt they'll do any of this stuff until Apple (or someone else) does it first. The best they'll do is bring out some timid, watered-down version and price it too high, miss-market it, or both.

When I was there, almost everyone was too risk adverse to actually try something that could fail, which means they were too risk adverse to try something that could succeed spectacularly. Anyone actually willing to take that sort of chance, and smart enough to make a decent go of it was smart enough to figure out that they'd have a better chance of succeeding AND profit more from success if they left the company.

Why Apple Doesn't do Concept Products:

http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

Blackberry has its own vision as well.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TghiHXK6HIQ#!

As always, the devil is in the details. Everything looks so smooth and fluid, but achieving that is definitely not easy and probably impossible.

nowhere near astounding, and i doubt this kind of interfaces could be usable at all