Splice Now

If you’re interested in the history of the personal computer revolution you owe it to yourself to check out the Steve and Bill show from the D5 conference two weeks ago. Gates and Jobs were on stage for a 90-minute interview moderated by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal. You can listen to it or watch it from the iTunes store, see a highlight reel here, or check out a transcript. I listened to the audio yesterday, and though it doesn’t reveal anything radically new, it offers a unique perspective on the way these two leaders think and provides a few tantalizing hints about the future.

Gates referred at least three times to what he calls the “natural interface,” presumably a more general description of multi-touch. He clearly thinks it’s the wave of the future, and given that it’s the basis of the iPhone, so does Jobs.

Here’s a relevant quote:

I think natural user interface is particularly applicable here because the keyboard, you know, we’re sort of warped in that we grew up using the keyboard and so it’s extremely natural to us, but things like–and that’s partly why when we showed the Surface computer, I showed it privately to a bunch of CEOs a couple weeks ago, I was kind of stunned by how blown away they were. But their ease of navigation is just not the same. And when they saw that, the idea that they could organize their photo album, it meant more to them than it did to me.

Bill even talked briefly about editing a movie, a surefire sign that what we do is now totally mainstream.

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This entry was posted on June 11, 2007 at 6:20 am and is filed under User Interface. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.