“I’m superenthused about what it [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways.” — Bill Gates in an April 2008 meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank [!]
Great post with lots of detail, I can remember watching that very D conference interview & reading the Ina Fried article/non-article.
Question, you mention several technologies and how they also showed on iPhone (multi touch from Surface table, the mapping app) as if to indicate Microsoft thought of them first or that one influenced the other. Surely this is more happenstance vs actual influence in any way? It’s always easy in the fullness of time to see the parallels but I can’t recall any commentary at the time talking about the similarities (and I loved Windows 7 & used all the Betas).
Thank you! It wasn't my intent to make it seem like we were first since obviously we were not. Touch interfaces have a long history, but primarily as a substitute for buttons. Most trace the origin of multi-touch to various research labs (Toronto, CMU, Bell). The thing I did mean to imply was that we would be seen as beating Apple in bringing multi-touch to "computers" and I say that with explicit irony given that the prevailing view at the time was that phones were not computers, excepting for the previous sections where I talk about the role OS X played (as per Jobs). In the next full chapter I will discuss how the reception and rollout Windows 7 touch informed the direction for Windows 8.
Great post with lots of detail, I can remember watching that very D conference interview & reading the Ina Fried article/non-article.
Question, you mention several technologies and how they also showed on iPhone (multi touch from Surface table, the mapping app) as if to indicate Microsoft thought of them first or that one influenced the other. Surely this is more happenstance vs actual influence in any way? It’s always easy in the fullness of time to see the parallels but I can’t recall any commentary at the time talking about the similarities (and I loved Windows 7 & used all the Betas).
Thank you! It wasn't my intent to make it seem like we were first since obviously we were not. Touch interfaces have a long history, but primarily as a substitute for buttons. Most trace the origin of multi-touch to various research labs (Toronto, CMU, Bell). The thing I did mean to imply was that we would be seen as beating Apple in bringing multi-touch to "computers" and I say that with explicit irony given that the prevailing view at the time was that phones were not computers, excepting for the previous sections where I talk about the role OS X played (as per Jobs). In the next full chapter I will discuss how the reception and rollout Windows 7 touch informed the direction for Windows 8.