Just read this post on Mashable saying that Google confirms they’ll have an operating system for computers out for late 2010. This is a huge move. A new OS isn’t to be taken lightly, and yet, today I was having the conversation with Rob Hatch that neither of us really use native apps that often. We live in the browser.

This doesn’t hit for another year, so let’s not all go crazy. And yet, think about this.

MSFT has decades of experience. Apple does, too. Linux isn’t a big slouch.

Would you go full-Google?

Photo credit MikeBaird

What do you know about a brand? What do you know about a company? If I told you that these folks were all social media types from within a big west coast company, and that they were all excited by the trends in personal media making, and in the implications to both the consumer and the enterprise, and if I told you they took me on a tour of their headquarters that ended with a trip to their cool store, where would you guess they work?

What if I said that some of them were working on web-based applications for office productivity, and others were working on the future of podcasting? Something coming to mind? Do you have an idea?

Microsoft. Right!

I was fortunate enough to tour Microsoft’s campuses, including their research facilities (where I saw more patents and cool ideas sitting around than I could imagine in one space), as well as their media production studios (which were just downright incredible and filled with geek goodness), and then I toured the museum and finally the store. I met all kinds of really great folks from the Office Live team, from architecture, from podcasting, and all kinds of other parts of Microsoft. They were passionate, excited, engaged in trying to make great things happen and make products and services that people wanted to use.

So imagine me, a guy who’s had nothing but Macs in his house since 1984, but who has his engineering background in NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 boxes and products, and what I’m thinking about. I met an entire “Social Media Minds” group, and came away thinking that Microsoft really has some neat ideas for the future. ( I wrote about some of this back a year ago.)

As I grow older, while others are putting boxes around their perspectives, and pegging people into certain categories while not others, I’m seeing that there is no box. And I’m pretty damned excited for what that kind of thinking opens up.

Thanks for the tour, Microsoft. I’m grateful for your contributions to the space. Keep opening things up. Keep sharing. Keep trying new things.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

What’s your take?

You can buy it here (or find it somewhere else):

Device Mesh and Context

If/when our technology can understand that we’re using our BlackBerry now, and oh wait, we’re at the laptop, and hey, I’d rather get IMs from this person, but drop this other person’s stuff in email, that’s when things start to get cool. When I can get podcasts onto my iPod or whatever (if we’re talking about Ray Ozzie, let’s say a Zune) without thinking much about it, and/or without having to tether to my laptop, life will get a lot cooler. Going a little further into this notion, when I can shift media between multiple devices and shift preferences and bring my identity and context between multiple devices (maybe even if it’s my own personal cookie), then that’s going to really be cool for what we’re talking about with social media and impact. Are you with me?

Location and Fire Eagle

After reading about six blog posts, I still can’t tell you much about what it really is going to do, but here’s what I want it to do. I want us all to have the ability to opt in and out of defining our physical proximity, and then I want that platform to be open such that smarter people than me can write apps that will facilitate real space experiences that might mirror our extended, augmented online experience.

There are two ways to use this (well, there are millions, but let’s talk about two) that would be immediately fun and useful. When I’m at an event, I want to loudly promote that I’m there, so that people who matter to me will connect with me there. I think Fire Eagle facilitates this. Second, when I’m at a place, like a restaurant, or an airport, or a park, I want there to be “invisible tagging” that tells me lots of locative data and contextual overlay (yes, I admit that I am a big William Gibson SPOOK COUNTRY fan in this regards).

Mash The Two Together

Take device context (moving the “me” in my things from one device to another) and mix it with location context (tell certain apps about where I am and give me value from this), and I feel like I’m finally getting augmented reality. Smatter some 2d barcodes, some visual overlay stuff like Paul Ottelini from Intel was showing off at CES this past January, and we’re getting towards something insanely usable.

The business applications of device context mashed with location context are numerous. Commerce implications are the obvious ones, but go beyond that and you can see educational value, communications innovation, journalism toolsets, and plenty more.

And if you throw in autonomous applications like traffic sensors, and sensor networks sharing info with Fire Eagle, and porting what’s useful to my devices based on the context I’ve configured, then it gets crazy.

Last Thought

Microsoft has built some products that sync home to portable to the car. Yahoo has some complementary products and technologies, as well as more web DNA than MSFT (don’t fight me on this, softies). For this reason, among the others that others have cited, I really hope there’s a potential win here with the potential Microsoft / Yahoo merger.

What do you think? Does this make any sense to you? Do you see any of it? What does a world where your devices know it’s you and know your preferences, and where your location can be opted-in for all kinds of other functions feel like to you? Scary? Big Brother? Or an opportunity? I’d love your ideas.

Photo credit, Annie Mole

But the thing is this: Ray is super cool. His stuff with Groove Networks (which got watered into being Office Groove- and no, I don’t know what I’m talking about because I haven’t used the MSFT version) is killer collaboration stuff. Ray’s mind is set up for this kind of thinking. He’s one of us. He’s participatory.

And to that end, I think that with Microsoft picking up Yahoo, there might be some interesting collaboration points.

Who’s going to argue about what Yahoo has going for it? I think you could say Groups (which I think are some of the best 1.0 technology out there), and you could say that Finance is pretty good. What else? (No! You may NOT count upcoming, del.icio.us, Flickr, and more).

So yeah.

Photo credit, Jeff Sandquist