Microsoft Seminar: "The New Era of Work" (Surface)

Chicago

Microsoft hosted a seminar in Chicago on Wednesday titled "The New Era of Work".

Microsoft claims this is the new era of for Operating Systems.  The Internet, iPhone/iPad, and cloud has changed the nature of computer systems. 

Microsoft has long been pushing for tablet machine for some time.  And the competition is a nice thing.  The latest iPad 4 offers hardly hardware improvements other than resolution.

At the conference room, the Surface RT's were on display along with Lenovo and Toshiba machines.  All those tablet machines have no home buttons.  Swiping out to the edge does the trick.  And they come with keyboards. 

At the Surface booth, they explained to me that Surface RT has somewhat unique capability that Apple's iPad does not.  It works as a remote terminal and runs apps on the host machine just like a workstation.  That, is a wonderful idea, I thought.  There could be many application for it.  "Can you show me how it works?" I asked.  The machines are not connected, they told me.  They were not able to show me how it works as a terminal. 

The only reason why iPad or iPhone can not be loaded as a removable drive is because of security concerns.  The MP3's and eBooks are copyright protected.  If only those directories that contain the copyrighted files then they will be more accessible by the possibly criminals.  What the remote terminal does is that the files in tablets would be accessible freely.  The remote terminal apps might have security concerns. 

Instead of that wonderful feature, they showed me the Surface apps fully loaded with shop icons.  The sight of the ads of all those stores on the screen overwhelmed me.  It looked much bigger than the simple and elegant Apple Store.  "This may change the business style, and consumer life style", keynote speaker said. 

So how about Surface Pro?  The new version of Surface runs on Intel chip.  It means, it runs Windows 8.  And that means, every desktop apps should work on Surface Pro.  Would it be a killer machine?  Does that mean my desktop apps works on my tablet machine?  "You must recompile all apps for that machine," one of the participants told me.  "Surface Pro will be coming in January," the Microsoft people told me.  "The pricing is not yet announced.  It will be as big as the RT machine," they said in answering my questions. 

to be cont.