Innovation Can Be Found in the Most Unlikely of Places

If you look at Sony today and then ponder where they might be in the future, I think the most upbeat statement you could make would be that Blu-Ray seems to be doing well and that the PS3 will get better with time. And if you asked what new and impressive products might be in the pipeline, well, I would have to guess the PS4 and…that is all. In looking at Nintendo, however, one should be considerably more excited about the Wii Too (or whatever they call the next one) because as good as the Wii is, it looks as if it will only get better. So who else might be making cool stuff? Intel? Great, faster chips. That is good news, but not really earth-shattering news. IBM doesn’t really do much in the way of interesting innovation geared towards consumers so we shall ignore them for the moment.

So who else can we expect good stuff from? Motorola, Nokia, and friends might surprise us. I don’t really see them making anything better than the iPhone, but that doesn’t preclude them from going in a different direction and surprising us with a unique or unexpected design. But still, it seems kind of hit and miss. For every phone that looks like it might have an innovative feature, expect two dozen more copies of the RAZR. So who else is there? Well, Phillips is working on several cool technologies like flexible displays. This kind of thing definitely has the potential to be “the next big thing” if they ever get it working correctly. And there is Samsung, a huge corporation with many different interests; they are quite capable of introducing some impressive consumer products. And yet I haven’t really heard anything about them lately that makes me excited.

So who does that leave?

Well, there is one company that I haven’t mentioned yet. They’ve been working on some really great stuff lately that you’ve probably never heard of. And if they get it working I guarantee it will dazzle the world with its speed and complexity. The company I’m referring to is, of course, Microsoft.

If you just forcibly ejected your drink onto your computer screen at that last statement, I’m sorry. If you are currently choking on some bit of food, please stop reading this article and get someone to assist you before you die. We here at Apple Matters generally don’t like our readers to expire while viewing our site. Bad karma and all that.

What’s that you say? Didn’t expect to see the words “innovative” and “Microsoft” in the same sentence? Well, you didn’t, actually. However, it was implied. But getting back to the matter at hand, what you were most likely expecting was to see was Apple’s name there. After all, didn’t they just release the iPod Touch? And those new iPod Nanos? And the iPhone for crying out loud? And didn’t Leopard just ship, uh, like 10 minutes ago? Yes, that is all true. They have been quite busy. And I expect them to get busier in the next year. I am going to be very surprised if the Mac Pro isn’t completely redesigned. Likewise, Apple TV will get upgraded and I think we can expect a smaller version of the iPhone to debut as well. Plus you can expect a few great software products thrown in the mix as well. So in that respect, yes, I think Apple is a highly innovative company that does awesome stuff and will continue to produce awesome stuff for the foreseeable future. And in spite of all that, the product I am most excited about is currently being developed at Microsoft. In fact, I’m so excited about it, I would be willing to run Windows to use these technologies.

Ever heard of SeaDragon? Or how about PhotoSynth? I can’t explain how amazing this is, you have to go watch the PhotoSynth Demo for yourself.

If you watched that demo then you can appreciate this question. Is there a product, or rumor of a product, that Apple is working on that even comes close to being that amazing? I can’t think of one. Oh, Apple does great stuff to be sure; Expose is phenomenal, Time Machine is a Godsend, and OS X 10.6 I’m sure will reach new levels of coolness. But none of that can hold a candle to the idea of cross indexing every image on the web and creating a 3 dimensional, scalable, searchable model of our world. We are talking about software orders of magnitude more awesome than anything Apple has on its drawing board.

Please, look at that video again and tell me I’m wrong.