Short Nerd Chief

What is Scoble talking about here?

It’s not often that I see software that really changes my world. It’s even rarer that I see software that I know will change the world my sons live in. I can count those times pretty easily. The first time I saw an Apple II in 1977. When Richard Cameron showed me Apple’s Hypercard. Microsoft’s Excel. Aldus’ Pagemaker. And something called Photoshop, all in his West Valley Community College classroom. Later when I saw Marc Andreessen’s Netscape running the WWW. ICQ and Netmeeting which laid the ground for Skype.

Like I said, these things don’t happen often.

Yesterday was one of those days. Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay, researchers at Microsoft, fired up their machines and showed me something that I can’t tell you about until February 27th. I’m sure you’ll read about his work in the New York Times or TechCrunch, among other places. It’s too inspiring to stay a secret for long.

While watching the demo I realized the way I look at the world was about to change. While listening to Wong I noticed a tear running down my face. It’s been a long while since Microsoft did something that had an emotional impact on me like that.

Kevin Schofield says you shouldn’t get ahead of yourself:

But I want to be clear: we don’t have some huge product announcement planned for the end of the month. Microsoft Research doesn’t do product announcements. And we certainly don’t roll out “______ killers” (fill in the blank with whatever product or company you choose) just in case you were hoping for something like that. Coincidentally, at the end of the month there IS a big product announcement from Microsoft for three products that ALL happen to have technology from MSR in them. But Microsoft’s product teams do those announcements, not MSR. We did have a big announcement two weeks ago about the new lab that we’re starting in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (and thanks to everyone who sent their good wishes!) And we will be showing a whole bunch of new cool things to some reporters, bloggers and visitors at our annual MSR Techfest event in March.

All that said, the research project we are showing at the end of the month is exceedingly cool and we hope it will have an impact. Will it make you cry? Well, your mileage may vary. But in any case you’re just going to have to wait and see.

Anyway, what do you think it is? MSR says it’s not a product per se. Scoble follows up by calling it a service, not a product. An inspiring service, which would make it a change for MS, which makes a lot of nice products, but whose services are less than inspiring (Skydrive, Hotmail, Spaces, all the Live stuff).  Scoble lives and breathes social networking, so it probably has lots of social features, but then again he chokes up a little bit about iPhones and photography, so who knows? Maybe it’s a web service that runs on the iPhone, lets you take photos like Thomas Hawk and microblog them to your 6,000 closest friends. I’m more interested in what makes Scoble cry. Probably puppies, unicorns and rainbows.