[UPDATE]

Having seen the hands on demo video over at Gizmodo I’m less impressed. Apparently, according to Giz anyone who’s not impressed is just stupid, so I guess I’m just stupid then. But childish gadget blogging aside, while it looks nice and slick in the carefully edited and faked official demos, the hands on unit looks flakey and difficult to use. It seems that they’ve created something that’s very clever from a design point of view but the implementation hasn’t been fully thought through. Many elements look too small for fingers. In many of the screens too it’s not immediately clear that you’re supposed to scroll across, as there doesn’t seem to be any visual clues. I can’t help but think that some of the animations are much too long too. They’re nice, and animation to add visual clues is cool, but some seem to just add delays. In fairness, it’s a long way away from being released, so I guess much of this could be beta issues, but still.

I think that, ironically, the interface appeals to designers and web developers as a clever and interesting design, but I’m not sure how that will translate to consumers. The irony of course being that Apple is the one usually accused of such things. I don’t know if hard coding facebook so visually into everything is such a good idea either. The popularity of such things on the internet is often fleeting and facebook could be yesterdays news at any point. That might sound far fetched, but it wasn’t very long ago that My Space was the go to social networking site, and now that’s vanished into obscurity. Of course it’s just conjecture, but by placing it front and centre in so many aspects of the phone is a pretty big risk. You could understand if Microsoft owned facebook. Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud.

I’m not sure how well this will compete with the iPhone, but I suspect it will do well against Android at least. If nothing else it shows up just how derivitave Android is. I think that compared to the linux like unpolished and geeky nature of most android devices, Windows Phone Series 7 (are you kidding me with the name?) will look like a much more friendly product.

At the end of the day it’s good to see some healthy competition in this space. Rather than being dominated by just one or two players, there are now at least 5 main competitors (iPhone, Palm Web Os, Blackberry, Android, Symbian) vying for consumers cash. This can only be good for the long term development of all platforms in the mobile space.

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If Apple apparently gets a free pass for everything (yet everything it does is lately is attacked for not being open or fair enough and blown considerably out all proportion) and poor Microsoft is (according to some) constantly the butt of unfair attacks, then where’s the massive uproar over this? Seriously, if you believe that premise that Microsoft is so unfairly attacked for perceived injustices to consumers then there should be an equally “unfair” but massive overpowering of rage against the company.

No? Nothing? I thought so.

[UPDATE] Looks like Microsoft has fixed it . Good for them. All without cries of “The Zune is Doomed” or “Microsoft is doomed” or “Oh the humanity” and such that the PC pundits told us we should expect because anything Microsoft does gets attacked far worse that anything Apple does, right? And yes, I am holding up my sarcasm sign.

Can we please stop using this stupid argument now every time someone wants to justify blowing some minor thing Apple does out of all proportion? Please.

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One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

Now, I know lots of people have reported on this by now, but it’s worth repeating. I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Of course Apple has borrowed ideas from Windows too on occasion, although usually they are features that people have come to expect, rather than the whole look and feel.
Still though, you have to admire the gaul of the guy to say: “it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform”. Vista more stable than the mac? Really?
[UPDATE] Apparently they’re now denying it.
[Read Microsoft's new vision | Home Computing | Features by PCR ]

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Something occurred to me today as I was reading a piece about Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Sometimes it seems like Microsoft acts like the bitter older brother or sister who can’t stand its siblings having anything that it doesn’t have. When someone makes something successful, Microsoft has to have it. Then I began thinking about how this contrasts with the way Apple does things. If you look at the way both companies develop new products, or bring new technologies to the market you see a stark difference in approach.

Apple identifies technologies that are in their infancy or are relatively unexploited and finds away to give them mass market appeal. Examples: iPod, iPhone, The GUI, iTunes, Multitouch

Microsoft on the other hand identifies technologies that are established and successful, then decides that it want’s part (or all) of that success and uses its size and power to chip away at the competition until it gains market share. Examples: Xbox, Bing, MSN, Windows, Windows Mobile, Zune.

I’m speaking on general terms here of course, obviously there are exceptions.

Another interesting point is that Apple almost always seems to approach new products with the goal of making a profit from whatever that product may be, whereas Microsoft seems to approach a product line with the goal of dominating that market regardless of profitability.

The curious thing about this is that from a purely business point of view, Apple’s way of doing things should make more sense. Bring out something people want and make a profit from it. It’s business 101, and yet over the years the technology media has become blinkered into accepting Microsoft’s approach of “dominate at all costs” as being the only acceptable way for a technology company to operate. Time and time again we hear from pundits about how Apple is doomed unless it focuses on market share over profits, and yet the company has been operating very successfully for the past 10 years or so and we’re still waiting for that inevitable doom.

It’s funny how Apple is one of the few (if not only) very successful businesses that pundits continue to argue that the companies business model is entirely wrong and that it should be doing things completely differently. According to some, Apple should open up the iPhone to other handset makers, licence its operating system, let other products work with iTunes and so on. Even after all the years of iPod and iTunes success, even with the recent rise of the Mac and the dominance of the iPhone, many pundits still think Apple should be operating more like Microsoft. Yet Microsoft has become stagnated in an endless round of trying to one up others. It tried to reposition its successful xbox 360 to go after the wii market despite being a successful product in its own right. It opened a series of its own retail stores almost identical to Apple’s despite having hundreds of thousands of existing channels to sell its products. It’s desperately trying to wrestle control of the search engine market from Google even though its core business is computer operating systems.

I’m not trying to say Microsoft copies and Apple is original. It’s just that Microsoft has become obsessed with having what others have at the expense of what it used to do best: making money. Obviously they’re still a profitable company, but as they continue to make decisions based on what appears to be jealousy rather than basic business you have to wonder for how long. Perhaps it’s time technology pundits start accepting that maybe Apple’s solid business model of profitability before market share isn’t that bad after all, and maybe Microsoft could learn a thing or two by taking that approach for a change.

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Macworld has more.

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It was hard not to be impressed yesterday with some of the things microsoft showed off at their E3 press conference but their demo of their new controllerless controller was pretty mine blowing. The add on to the xbox 360 is essentially a real time motion capture system. For some bizare reason though they’ve decided to call it “project natal”, possibly one of the stupidest names for anything ever.

Still, though, the technology was very impressive. People are already calling it a wii killer although how much of this is actually real is yet to be seen. What looks good on a video demo may not translate into the real world. Some of the things demoed for sony’s motion eye looked cool but the novelty wears off extremely quickly. Then again, if this can do half of the things in the demo then it’s going to be a huge success.

Either way though it was an impressive demo. Sony’s keynote is on today and will at least feature a new psp. What other surprises are in store remains to be seen but they will be hard pressed to top microsofts demos.

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Now, if only they’d take the ads off the dashboard or NXE or whatever it’s called this week.

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