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Good to See Microsoft Is Still Innovating

June 29th, 2010

One of the key new features in Microsoft’s next OS: an App Store!

Sure is nice to see that Microsoft has stopped copying Apple.

Well, they are doing some innovating: project Natal, now known as “Kinect,” may be integrated. The feature: you get logged in automatically when you sit down, and the computer goes to sleep when you walk away. Hopefully, all that tech will be used for more than just that. Sure, such a feature would be useful in some circumstances, but most people wouldn’t care much.

It’s definitely more for an office environment. But in the end, all it really does is save you a few keystrokes a day, maybe a minute or two over the whole workday, if (a) you are in a multi-user environment, (b) you want to maintain privacy, and (c) you leave and come back to your computer several times a day. Even at that, it’s a small benefit at best. Seems like a waste of tech to me.

The “near instantaneous” startup feature sounds best–but one has to wonder what the details are. Unless they’re talking about non-volatile RAM, then it’s probably simply a matter of making “sleep” the default option instead of “shut down,” and then improving on wake-from-sleep times. Me, I don’t have any problems with waking from sleep on my Macs. It’s already nearly instantaneous on my iMac (less than a second), and only about two seconds on my MacBook Pro. I hardly even notice it.

So, all these new features sound like they wouldn’t be much use at all to me. I already have the first and the third, and don’t care about the second one. Some businesses may make use of the facial recognition, but to me it comes across as one of those cool-but-specialized features most people like to show off but then never really use, like the fingerprint scanners on laptops and such.

Presumably, Microsoft has more than this under their belt.

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  1. Troy
    June 29th, 2010 at 17:19 | #1

    Apple also needs to expand the AppStore to desktops.

    Shoulda done it years ago.

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