The Microsoft Surface the table top iPhone?

It is funny to think that years ago if you had a Mac you were considered a chump. Microsoft reigned supreme in the PC dominated world. Now, Microsoft is seeing a decline in their financial earnings and aren't making news headlines with many innovations. The revamping of Macintosh's company and the creation of iPods and iPhones has certainly catapulted the company into the technological media spotlight. But two years ago, billions of years ago in technology terms, Microsoft sounded like they were really on to something. It seemed like they had created a product that might revolutionize the way we dine and shop. In 2007, Microsoft Surface previewed its innovation.

When a friend of mine chose Microsoft Surface as the topic of her Com 114 speech, I was enthralled. What a cool invention! Microsoft Surface was a table top computer with multi-touchpoints. You could lay your credit card on the table at a restaurant and pay your bill. Or for the stingy who hate to split a bill in half, you could lay everyone's credit card on the table. If you had the cheesecake and the steak dinner, tiny pictures would come up from your digitilized bill and you could drag those pictures to your card, allowing your friends to deduct what food was their own. You could lay a digital camera on the Surface and watch as it spit out all of the pictures on your memory card. You could share pictures with friends or send them off to relatives with a message on the back. The Surface could allow bar and restaurant patrons to play games or put their glass of wine on the table and have the Surface say what dish would compliment it. There seemed to be a million things you could do with the Surface. In the beginning only retail stores, restaurants, and hotels bought the $10,000 Surface to use. Then, the hype about this new product seemed to fade away. Who wants a $10,000 interactive table when they could buy a computer for less than half that?

Then Macintosh's iPhone took off like wildfire. People were willing to be a still expensive, but more reasonable, $600 for basically the phone version of the Surface. Of course, there are pros to the Surface and some capabilities it has that iPhone hasn't developed yet (I mean will we ever be able to rest a wine glass on an iPhone to hear what dish would go best with it?). But, there are too many cons when weighed against the iPhone. It might be comforting for Microsoft to know that Macintosh was in their same shoes years ago and now look at them! We'll see what Microsoft innovators come up with next to combat the Macintosh empire.