Friday morning I woke up to a delightful scene: I had learned that Microsoft seems to be back to innovating. They have just rolled out their beta release of Microsoft HealthVault. For those who haven’t heard, this is a database platform that stores all of your health information. It is a platform because it is being built up as a way for patients, doctors, and all of their specialists can all use the same database to store this data. In addition, they will even have devices, such as glucose monitors that can interface with HealthVault to upload data. Pretty cool if you ask me!
Oh and about privacy…the user has complete control of what gets shared with outsiders.
Enough about the service (which I think I may sign up for soon), but I think that the more important issue here is that Microsoft seems to be in the creative stages again and just not enslaved to the Windows operating system. I feel like Microsoft has fallen behind the curve recently. For example, up until they had released Windows ME, it just seemed like they had one mission: to get people computers that were (relatively) easy to use and could be useful. Windows 9x became a huge standard and still is for some. But if one was to look at that era, they would see Microsoft’s bold new designs in mice, keyboards, joysticks, and gamepads. Maybe certain products didn’t sell too well, but they were important to the era. Or perhaps my favorite: the Microsoft Home line of software. First let me say that I still occasionally use my copy of Explorapedia: The World of Animals because it is a perfect example of this. Oh, and the glorious Magic School Bus games!!! There are just too many other examples to list, but Microsoft had committed itself to this, and it spawned ripoffs and overall, the industry grew exponentially.
Then Windows ME was ready to be released and the developers realized that the 9x kernel must die. I remember hearing years ago that the original slogan for ME was supposed to be “it just works” but 2000 Professional became a priority, and the 9x kernel was, well, old. So then Neptune was in progress…but it was then made into Whistler, and we ended up with XP…a corporate OS with very little consumer effects. Sure hindsight is 20/20, but the huge issue here was that XP should have been a platform for the future, in my opinion. It was, but there was too much legacy code. They became chained to the OS (although the Xbox turned out to be an amazing device…BECAUSE it was not chained down to Windows).
Let’s fast forward to 2004. Microsoft has huge goals for Longhorn (I am working on finding all of the original concept videos to post them online) including three main pillars of: WinFS, Avalon, and Indigo. (More about these in a later post) It was then that it was realized that these goals were huge, especially for having to deal with such a large volume of legacy code (for backward compatibility). Longhorn had to be reset and then the pillars were knocked away. WinFS, a dream since 1994, is still sitting around somewhere in Redmond.
Now on to July 27, 2005. Time for Microsoft to release Beta 1. It was three hours late (who was counting?) and immediately, one could see that this wasn’t really a complete beta. And it wasn’t feature complete for quite some time…
Back to the present: now we have Vista out the door, and the highly-anticipated Vista SP1 is already in beta. Now Windows is under the direction of Steven Sinofsky. Let’s see what happens. Of course the ideal situation would be a new platform with emulation for older programs…after all, why did Microsoft buy Connectix? I doubt it was for the rights to Virtual!
Anyway, with the Windows guys toiling away in the labs, it seems that Microsoft seems to be getting ready for a bunch of new concepts. IPTV on the 360 and Media Center finally seem to be taking off, Microsoft Surface (a supposed long-time vision of BillG’s) is very close to being ready, the Zune (thanks to J Allard) is looking to be a more serious contender…and at the same time is actually going to bring most new features to the original Zune (Apple take note!), web services are looking better than ever, and HealthVault is public.
It seems that while Microsoft pioneered, or at least finally delivered, a home PC in the mid-90s, they were caught off-guard by Apple and it’s digital media revolution. But now Microsoft seems to have some insight into this web-based future…and this could pay off.
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