Microsoft’s vision for a “next-gen newspaper” looks like TweetDeck. The Newspaper Association of America cast a wide net this summer in seeking proposals for generating online revenue. Their request went out to many of the firms we’ve been covering closely but also several tech companies that aren’t exactly in the thick of the news industry, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. I thought there was big news in Google’s response, but most of the big-name replies amounted to a glorified catalog of existing services — in other words, lip service.
Oracle and IBM discussed content management systems that have been on the market for years. Microsoft’s response was similar, but it also included an intriguing screen shot of an unreleased product it calls the “Next-Generation Newspaper.” [UPDATE, 3:43 p.m.: Two commenters point out that Microsoft's screenshots depict an existing program called Sobees. I'm checking with Microsoft for some clarity. Tech Blog | Microsoft’s moving sense of motion. Reader - Robert Scoble's shared items. The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces - ReadWriteWeb. Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only – it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content.
But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We’re speaking of the contextual user interface. Even five years ago we lived in the boxed world of Windows-dominated UIs. Strikingly, the recent wave of UI innovation is proving exactly the opposite. Windows UI – The World Of Never-Ending Choices Looking back at the years when Windows dominated our lives one can hardly believe what we put up with. Every imaginable choice was thrown at users at once and it was up to the poor user to figure out what to do. Another philosophy of the old UI approach was that the user wants to see all information all the time.
Apple’s Revenge Steve Jobs and his team know this all too well. Out to Pasture » Blog Archive » Xbox Director on social experience. The future of virtual worlds. This week was the 7th, and final, of my Annenberg faculty lectures. It was by far the most challenging and most fun of the lectures to put together. A look into the future. My guesses as to where this all is going. While I posted some of my early thoughts on Monday, the full talk goes quite a bit further.
The trends fit together rather nicely, I think, and expose some of the false dichotomies that currently limit our thinking. This is going to happen. It's only a matter of whether Microsoft, Nokia, Google, or some startup is going to demonstrate it first. Microsoft wanting to be king of all media. J Allard of Microsoft. Photo: John Froschauer/Associated Press In November 1994, I had breakfast with Nathan Myhrvold, then the chief technology officer of Microsoft. He talked about how the soon-to-be-introduced MSN online service would best America Online. Central to his thinking was that MSN would give publishers a higher percentage of the per-minute fee for using the service. This would draw more content and thus more users to Microsoft and allow it to earn a smaller fee on a larger block of minutes. This strategy was misguided for so many reasons. That conversation jumped into my head as I talked earlier this week with J Allard, a key force behind the Xbox who is now driving the Zune music player business (and, he said several times, a few other secret product efforts).
We talked about the Zune and Microsoft’s approach to cellphones, about which I’ll post shortly. This service will at some point add more options for video and mobile phones, Mr. Here is what Mr.