Microsoft Quote of the day

Not sure that I get it in that case...

People can talk and understand speech a lot more quickly than they can type, so I think that many people would have considerably greater productivity from using spoken e-mail than they would from typed ones. Of course, typed ones do permit far more advanced things than spoken ones in terms of archiving and the like, so I expect that the ideal solution would involve some sort of automatic transcription service. (Indeed, once this becomes available for phone calls, so that you can have a permanent record of what you've been chatting about, I think this will be a fairly killer app.) It's nothing new in that Silicon Graphics' IRIX has been all about this sort of method of communication for years. (Remember the day CSoc went to the Silicon Graphics offices? That was cool.)

Just because every desk has its own set of 5.1 speakers doesn't mean that they have to be on particularly loud. (Indeed, aren't there experiments in loudspeakers which are particularly good at directing the sound only to exactly one location? Fearsomely expensive at the moment, but the price will come down...) I suspect that there are some interesting information cues that can be given by the positioning and panning of sounds that a computer plays - for instance, a sound to the left of you might indicate that the window at the far left of the screen needs attention, ditto for the right.

I agree that these problems are something like about twenty thousandth on the list of things that MSFT needs to do with its OS, but I do think that they are on there somewhere along the line :-)