de-boxing the computer: microsoft's next big idea [part 3]

Phil, it’s easier to think of it as a “big idea”, not as a breakthrough new idea to sell to the world, but as what Mark Earls calls a “Purpose-Idea”, something to galvanize the company around.
“A portable music player that people like” is not a big idea, in and of itself. Unless you’re the Apple iPod. Then it becomes a HUGE idea.
i.e. “How” is more interesting than “What”.

When Microsoft rock up with a new game, a fresh new hot pie of their own rather than a share of one the market baked, that is when they will have found that big idea, that skyhook to hang success on. The world isn’t a zero sum game anymore, at least not in anything where a business model depends on artificial scarcity anyway.
MS Surface is just tinkering with the computer box, same as the iPhone was just tinkering with the mobile phone, very cool tinkering that enhance the touchy feelies of how we work the boxes. Surface isn’t a big new idea, not even in terms of it’s market, buying aQuantive again, in the grand scheme of things not a big new idea either, so outwardly I don’t think they’ve cracked it just yet when it comes to being authors of the future.

I think you nailed it: TV 2.0 may appear without any actual tellybox component.
One law of marketing is that of divergence, which goes against all logical thought that things will converge. But divergence is all around us. That is why you have so many boxes around you.
Somebody needs to create a new category which soaks up all these boxes – not in a convergent device (which does lots of things poorly) but with a brand new category which does what all those other boxes does but does it singly and does it well.
That somebody could be Microsoft. Surface could be the category. Pigs might fly.
You see, isn’t “touchscreen” like videophone? Been around for decades and yet, for some reason, it’s never really become great for anything?
The explanation can be found, for example, at the channel tunnel, where queues are longer due to dirty touchscreens producing delays (thus driving customers away and providing tech support with more “stupid user” anecdotes).
Surface is good for … what? Now, what does Surface do that is the killer app? Advertising? We have billboards for that – some billboards don’t even require a power source, imagine that! All the “object recognition” is second only to Microsoft salivating over advertising revenue? Surface is already doomed.

At the same time Apple introduced the iPhone, they dropped ‘computer’ from their name – while there was a lot of hand-wringing at the time about their focus shifting from computers to consumer devices I think for them it simply was an acknowledgement of the move away from the ‘box’. When we say ‘computer’ we mostly think of the box that holds our files and gets us online; meanwhile the computers we are using more and more – cellphones, DVRs, navigation systems, media players, etc – don’t count as computers in the minds of the general public. The ‘next big thing’ is simply the diffusion of computing throughout our environment, but it’s tricky because as this happens the ‘computer’ is disappearing and I have a feeling we’ll only see what the shift clearly when looking back from the other side.