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I’ll bet that there are days at the Microsoft cam­pus when some groups are work­ing on a super-secret project that they just wish they could tell the world about it. In fact, keep­ing their secret must drive them crazy. Espe­cially when some other com­pany comes out with a sim­i­lar project to the one they were work­ing on, or shows off some fea­ture in one of their demos that seri­ously steals some of their thun­der. Time to mar­ket is part of the game, and when you lose the race, it hurts. That’s prob­a­bly how the group who were work­ing on the project called ‘Sur­face’ felt some months ago when Steve Jobs made his spec­tac­u­lar iPhone demo, par­tic­u­larly when he showed that product’s new User Inter­face called Multi-touch. Multi-touch, at least the way that Apple defined it, means that a device can tell when you have one or two fin­gers touch­ing a touch screen, and behaves dif­fer­ently depend­ing on how those fin­gers inter­act. For the iPhone, this means that you can tap and dou­ble tap for some behav­iors, tap and fling to move a screen or scroll a page, or touch with two fin­gers and move them toward or away from each other in order to zoom in or out on an image. It’s that last one that Microsoft’s new prod­uct has, and I’ll bet they were gnash­ing their teeth and gri­mac­ing with each ooh and ah from the crowd as they reacted to Jobs’ demo at Mac­World last January.*

But I’m get­ting ahead of myself here. Sur­face, besides all of that multi-touch stuff, is a strangely exotic and futur­is­tic prod­uct. Most folks would call it ‘bleed­ing edge’. It’s frankly not some­thing I expect from Microsoft. When I think of Microsoft, I think of Win­dows™. Win­dows is not bleed­ing edge. It’s market-tested, well worn, doesn’t take chances, and is def­i­nitely not exotic and futur­is­tic. It runs on hard­ware that is get­ting cheaper by the day, and most of the time that hard­ware is, well, ugly (with a few excep­tions from Sony and maybe one or two others).

Sur­face is none of that. It’s a 30 inch acrylic dis­play with touch­screen built into a rather austere-looking cof­fee table that’s 22 inches high, 21 inches deep and 42 inches wide. There’s no key­board and no mouse, although it does have Wi-Fi, Blue­tooth and wired Eth­er­net con­nec­tiv­ity. The main way that you inter­act with it is by touch­ing the screen. Actu­ally, Sur­face is designed to work not only with more than one fin­ger touch­ing at once, but with more than one per­son inter­act­ing with it at once. Oh, and yes, in case you for­get, it’s a com­puter run­ning Microsoft’s own Vista OS (Win­dows is still in there some­where!) and will prob­a­bly cost some­where between $3,000 and $5,000. (Update: I just found out that these num­bers are $5,000 to $10,000. No big sur­prise there.) What remains is the ques­tion of what you actu­ally do with a $10,000 cof­fee table touch­screen com­puter with Inter­net and wire­less connectivity.

Here are some exam­ples of what Microsoft has in mind: (click on these thumb­nails to see a larger image).

In the Fact Sheet on their web site, Microsoft says that they will ship Sur­face (and yes, this is a ship­ping prod­uct) “… to part­ners with a port­fo­lio of basic appli­ca­tions, includ­ing pho­tos, music, vir­tual concierge and games, that can be cus­tomized to pro­vide their cus­tomers with unique expe­ri­ences.” The web site for show­ing off Vista has sev­eral video demos, rang­ing from happy-smiling-people (a term I learned from my days at Fidelity that refers to those mod­els you see in busi­ness ads who always seem to be hav­ing a bet­ter day than you are) arrang­ing dig­i­tal pho­tographs, plan­ning a trip, play­ing cards, and inter­act­ing with their cell phones as they place them on the glass table-top dis­play. One of the demos that seems just a lit­tle unre­al­is­tic has a lit­tle girl using Sur­face to paint a cute pic­ture. I’m sorry, but even though the top 1% of the very wealthy in the US are get­ting wealth­ier, it’s hard to imag­ine any­one but the Gates fam­i­lies and a few oth­ers that can afford a 10K elec­tronic paint toy for their kid, much less place it in the liv­ing room. What did look the most inter­est­ing, how­ever, were the instances where some­one was inter­act­ing with one or more cell phones, allow­ing peo­ple to down­load trip infor­ma­tion into them by drag­ging the infor­ma­tion into a box that stood for the phone on the screen or mov­ing music tracks from one cell phone/audio player (iPhone? Zune?) to another. The one that made me think ‘Hmm, I don’t think they’ve thought through the social dynam­ics of this one…’ was an exam­ple where a group of din­ers in a restau­rant split the bill and dragged their por­tions to their cell phones. It might be nice to be able to split a bill with per­fect math account­ing for each dish ordered, but some­how hav­ing that appear on the screen felt a bit…awkward? I sup­pose it’s no worse than the wait­ress split­ting up the bill, but can you imag­ine the tug-of-war that might ensue when one or more din­ers tries to pay for the other?

The fact is, this is a prod­uct that is prob­a­bly going to be seen in casi­nos and some upscale restau­rants and hotels first. The liv­ing room will have to wait. I have to say that I like that Microsoft is think­ing out­side the box (or rather, the desk­top or lap­top), and some of the appli­ca­tions do look fun. Will this catch on? I’m not sure. For a long time, peo­ple were hot on touch­screen kiosks for some of this activ­ity, and they never really took off, and I can’t really see Sur­face work­ing as a real restau­rant table:

Oh, I spilled my Curry sauce all over the com­puter screen…
Don’t worry sir, I’ll just wipe it up, oh, whoops, sorry to order that round of cham­pagne…
Oh, how cute, lit­tle Dylan is play­ing Black­jack between courses…Oh, don’t stab at the table with your fork, sweetheart…

Damn that messy phys­i­cal world, full of food, klutzes and kids get­ting in the way of our cool soft­ware technology!

I used and designed inter­faces for a touch­screen years ago, and I was struck then by the inti­macy of the inter­ac­tions. Rather than move a cur­sor via a phys­i­cal proxy (the mouse, track­ball or track­pad), you can touch a part of the screen, and some­times that piece of the screen would change, just like in the phys­i­cal world. The exam­ples that Microsoft showed had this hap­pen­ing most of the time. You touch some­thing, it either rip­ples, moves or high­lights. The Sur­face UI is meant to be more than sim­ply a new dis­play, form fac­tor and method of input, it’s a dif­fer­ent style of inter­ac­tiv­ity that looks like the iPhone writ large (and for two or more peo­ple). I’ll bet it just kills the Sur­face team to hear that.

*It’s worth men­tion­ing that Jeff Han demoed a sur­face inter­face at TED in 2006, and much of what he demon­strated is reflected in Microsoft’s new prod­uct. Han’s demo also got oohs and ahs, but it has only been seen by a rel­a­tive few, where the hype for the iPhone def­i­nitely went far­ther into the main­stream media.