I predicted Microsoft Surface in September 2005

It was 29th September 2005, I posted on my old blog "AJAX is a one trick poney" (yes, it should be pony). Inside my rant you'll find the following snippet

"..Content is king, and always will be but how does one access the content, thats the key deciding principal. Its now about User Experience and less about complexity. We tried our hand at "functional" large systems that had poor usability, it fails and the reason is people just dont want to keep flogging that dead horse. They need perception upgrades, they need a virtual medium in which they can access software through a rapid response...we want the Minority Report style UI, where we place gloves on and simply sort through UI as we need it... yet the scarey part right now is, you could get very close to emulating that with FLASH 8 .... Through Video and motion detection you can play games like "Ping Pong"... Imagine the ability to move data around through hand movements... now..how does AJAX play a role again? .."

[ Continue Reading via old blog ]

Fast forward and what is it I see in my beloved Microsoft employer, our new and greatest toy, Microsoft Surface.

At present it's current demo is about how people can split the bill for dinner, mobile phones spewing out contact details within and so on. I look at this and wonder where it could go to next, provided it's affordable to the average consumer. One internal staffer joked today that it now gives him the finishing pieces he needs for his fridge, as combine RFID products with this and life gets interesting.

Given that it uses some serious brain powered pattern recognition thingy to identify objects that are placed on it, who's to say it doesn't go to the next level with life science? In that could Hollywood actually be real now? where I place my palm on the desktop surface and it creates a diet based on my cholesterol level using WPF (sorry, I blacked out there from the excitement rushing to my head).

Life Science should get behind this, as imagine researches combing their way through gene pools looking for something that stands out that shouldn't and so on.

Data Mining, just like in minority report, allow consumers to pick their way through web pages, images, videos - new media - the works looking for that topic or visual bubble gum for the brain somewhere out there in the interweb.

What powers this thing? WPF?, Flash?, Silverlight? you know what, who cares other then the developers as once this becomes accessible to people around the world, old Apollo /  Google's Gears may need to pickup the slack a little more is all I'm saying.

This is the overall meaning folks about "Channel Delivery" when it comes to Microsoft, to think that all this power under the XAML hood is only reserved to Internet Explorer and Windows Vista Desktops is well, misinformed?. Combine the Nintendo WII, Microsoft Surface, XBOX 360 and all other devices that aren't PC and you'll start to see an emerging pattern - humans are being put into contact with digital code through "hands on user experience".

That in lies the lesson for today from the chaotic mind of Scott, Microsoft is really serious about this User Experience thingy that everyone keeps talking about.

Ok, I didn't predict Microsoft Surface itself, but the hands one experience thing and read the comments, people were against it! (hah! who's laughing now punks!) hehe.