Microsoft is Imagining a NUI future
You don't have to look very far to realize that technology is becoming more natural and intuitive. In a typical day, many people use touch or speech to interact with technology—on their phones, at the ATM, at the grocery store and in their cars.
Context & Ripple Effects
The blog post is Microsoft formally naming a direction its research arm has been circling for years: CNET covered image-navigation experiments with a sci-fi touch back in 2006, and New Scientist profiled Microsoft work on reading users' minds in 2007 — both early probes at replacing keyboard-and-mouse input. What changes in January 2011 is that the company elevates those experiments into an official strategic frame, citing touch at the ATM and speech in the car as evidence the shift is already mainstream.
The timing is commercial, not just academic: Windows Phone 7 shipped more than 2 million copies last quarter while Microsoft fights a sliding smartphone share, and details of the next Windows — reportedly Windows 8 — remain rumor with only Microsoft knowing its look. The NUI pitch gives the company a differentiation story exactly when its phone platform needs one.
First-order effects
- Microsoft gains an official design narrative to hang its product cycle on: Windows Phone 7's touch-first interface and whatever the still-unconfirmed next Windows becomes can now be presented as steps in one NUI arc rather than isolated releases.
- Hardware partners and developers get a directional signal for planning — build for touch and speech — while the actual specifications of the next OS stay inside Microsoft, leaving them betting on intent rather than specs.
Second-order effects
- Embedded-terminal vendors — the ATMs, grocery checkouts and car systems the post itself cites — face raised consumer expectations that their touch surfaces match what people now use on phones, pushing natural-interface components into markets that bought plain button panels before.
- If the living room is part of the NUI map, Microsoft's rumored Mediaroom IPTV push around set-top boxes becomes a candidate endpoint for the same interface language, pulling touch and speech beyond PC and phone into home entertainment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the interface stops being a per-device feature and becomes a cross-device vocabulary — one gesture and speech model spanning phone, TV and terminal — a structure in which platform owners capture the value and app makers inherit constraints.
- Microsoft's research lineage points past touch and speech toward sensing-based input altogether; the longer-term structural question is whether interface innovation consolidates inside a few platform companies with the sensor and research budgets to sustain it.
The trend: Input is migrating from mouse-and-keyboard conventions toward touch, speech and sensing across every device category, and platform vendors are positioning to own that interface layer.