I know I’ve said it before, but why do people hate Microsoft so much? I get the feeling they are thinking considerably ahead of most other people in the market. If anything I think they are some of the true market innovators. I know it sounds to many people like I’m getting into bed with the devil, but that’s the way it goes (for some reason I have yet to fathom).

When the Zune came out it was ridiculed for being late to the party (well, yes, fair point, it was) and for coming in brown (what the hell is wrong with that? (must be MS Brown….)) and last but not least, for coming with wireless. Everyone was going on about how pointless it was and why the hell you they ever need to move songs about over wireless. It was called a gimmick and a pointless feature amongst other things.

Then a short while ago out came the Surface. This is in short a big touch screen table that allows you to view photos and flick through music etc. It also contains wireless. So for example the idea is I put my windows smartphone (which I own) down on it and it connects and allows me to move my contacts, music, pictures etc around. So maybe I could put my smartphone and a friend’s down and drag a couple of contacts over. All neat stuff so far. Strikes me as another step towards intuitive computer interfaces. In fact having been using toutchscreens for almost a year on my phone and a few months on my mp3 player I have to say, they are without doubt the way forward. I often find myself poking the screen of a non-toutchscreen device and wondering why it doesn’t work.

If any of you are sad enough to watch diggnation (I get bored sometimes… it allowed) you may have seen the episode where the Surface was talked about, and the first thing Kevin Rose (Apple fanboy) did was talk about how it wasn’t needed and how it was so pointless and kept trying to poke holes in the idea and that the technology wasn’t very developed and it would never work etc. He even complained there were almost no digital cameras that had wireless… that strikes me as a chicken and egg situation… something has to come first. Well, great as he may think his comments were, I would rather fall on the side of innovation. If this sort of stuff was developed more and if more and more were supported it could become a real time saver and focal point of a lot of what I would consider consumer digital devices (so phones, cameras, mp3 players etc).

Oh, wait, what was that last one there… An mp3 player…. So like the Zune… and oh wait, it has wireless… Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all…

Oh, and while I remember… Apple look like they are going to make the iPod wireless soon… So Apple inovate do they?