If you haven’t seen it on digg already, Microsoft has announced “Microsoft Surface” today. If anyone remembers, Gates demoed this technology during the CES keynote. Check out the video at gizmodo demonstrating its features such as picture management and enlargement, the cool water screensaver, and interaction with wireless digital cameras. It looks impressive, but I don’t see myself using this for anything practical.
I saw this article on digg just now and I think it’s a brilliant move by Gates. Let me just say that Bill Gates is not an idiot. He knows that there is no such thing as perfect software (perhaps with the exception of QMail?). He also knows that software testing is also a long and expensive process that is not always complete. Put those pieces together and you can turn the initial users into software testers! To further elaborate, I think he’s trying to mock people into finding all of the bugs they can find and submit them to Microsoft to prove him wrong. Of course they will prove him wrong, but Microsoft will then fix those bugs accordingly and then be able to push their software on businesses because it will truly have no more bugs!
We remember the Windows RPC buffer overflow exploit, right? Well to refresh our memories, it existed up to Windows XP SP1 and allowed remote access to any vulnerable machine. That was a big embarrassment to Microsoft right there. If you encourage people to find as many bugs as possible when the user base is low, it’s not much as an embarrassment and a much smaller fire to extinguish if a major bug is found.
Of course this is all speculation/opinion, but wouldn’t that make for a great strategy?