At the D6 Conference put on by the Wall Street Journal, the Windows 7 demo Debuted with Touchscreen technology. In our posting of July 23rd last year I said this would be the battleground between Microsoft and Apople – a fully touch screen enabled machine. What iPhone and Windows 7 have done is brought two new elements into the UI interface: multitouch(two or more fingers/pointers on screen and predefined gestures. The Microsoft people admitted these elements have forced them to do an Opera (the browser to first bring gestures to the Web) – rethink how a UI should work.
But clearly this demo shows that Microsoft will be in the race to deliver touch to home and business computing. iPhone is the model – but clearly scaled up here. The demo was careful to use ordinary PC technology to demo “some” touchscreen capability with a Dell Latitude unit. Clearly given the stinker that is Vista, Microsoft had to show Windows 7 with Touchscreen Futures:
If you listen to the discussion, you will hear the iPhone and Surface machines ($10000)mentioned several times. You will see Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates hovering around this discussion of what is going to be in Windows 7 . But the key question is exactly when and with what system requirements plus price/performance. God help Redmond if they use Vista as their guidelines.
Finally, if you have been reading Keep an Open Eye, you have seen a number of other relevant articles as well. I am not crowing, just tooting my horn.
(c) JBSurveyer 2008