Dr. Neil's Notes

The latest example is the Mobile 'Surface' project being undertaken by Microsoft Research. Make no mistake, I think this is awesome research and it is thinking and projects like this that will lead us into future generations of computer interaction. The issue lies with the use of the Surface brand. Microsoft has a product called Microsoft Surface, it is very clear that such a new and innovative product needs to have a clear and concise purpose and place in the market.

When Microsoft themselves allow research projects such as the Mobile "Surface" and SecondLight projects to use the Surface brand it dilutes the message of what a Microsoft surface actually is as a product.

To make matters worse, Microsoft released Microsoft Surface applications in the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7. This pack contains a number of touch applications that have the Surface brand associated. This further dilutes the value proposition for Microsoft Surface as a brand.
To protect the brand Microsoft needs to ONLY use the Surface name for the Microsoft Surface product and nothing else.

Why do I care so much? Because I have invested a lot of energy in helping to promote, and teach people about Microsoft Surface, teaching Surface application development, writing a book on Microsoft Surface, and working with nsquared to build rich Surface applications.

If you have followed my activities over the last year you may have noticed that I am doing a fair bit of work with the Microsoft Translator team. I presented at Mix '09 on Exposing Web Content to a Global Audience.

For Mix '09 the nsquared technology studio in Sydney worked hard on producing getting started guides and documentation to help developers begin using the APIs.

then at TechEd in Berlin last year I worked with the Translator team to announce that the wdiget and APIs were moving from CTP to Beta.

Today the translator team announced that seven new languages have been added to the supported list, creating a grand total of 30 languages!

I will be at Mix again this year and talking about Microsoft Translator. If you are at Mix be sure to come along to find out about some new additions to the Translator and how you can build translation into your software using the same technology behind Bing Translator.

This new .NOT framework represents ground breaking abstraction technologies that removes the need for a software developer to do any work. According to feedback received from many software developers they really don't want to do any work at all, but they still want to get paid for it.

The .NOT framework allows this new bread of .NOT developers to simply sit in front of their computer and the code is generated for them. According to one developer, 'One of the fantastic things about the .NOT framework is that it generates exactly the code I would have written'. From playing around with the new .NOT framework it is clear this is the case, the code it generates is superbly scattered with memory leaks and unhandled exceptions, it is just like it was written by an overpaid .NET developer.