mathoda.com

Saturday was a big day for Microsoft and Yahoo, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer offering about $33 a share for Yahoo, and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang stating that the Yahoo board had concluded that undervalued Yahoo by about $4 a share. Microsoft decided to walk away.

A few hours earlier, about 1,700 miles away, Sue Decker, Chief Financial Officer of Yahoo, and Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, who are both on the board of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, happened to be meeting in front of 30,000 people attending Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. Given the momentous meeting between Ballmer and Yang that was to happen later in the day, I kind of wondered what they said to each other. Now I’ve found out:

Sue Decker: Should I kiss you hello? Or will people think we’re getting married?
Bill Gates: Don’t!
[stands up swiftly and shakes her hand]

According to Sue Decker, at the time she spoke to Bill Gates she thought Steve Ballmer would accept Yahoo’s higher asking price, and was surprised they didn’t. Here’s Sue Decker stating all of this and describing in insightful detail Yahoo’s past, present and future:

(http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1975)

Steve Hodges of Microsoft Research’s Cambridge office attached some infrared sensors to a jury rigged laptop to demonstrated a multi-touch laptop. It’s a pretty hacked system, but this is the future (as I’ve stated before).

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulwA3n8AYM0

When I first saw multi-touch screens being developed in universities, I knew it would be pretty revolutionary. They later showed up in movies like Minority Report, devices like the Apple iPhone (my iPhone post), and presentations such as the one shown here: http://www.mathoda.com/archives/112.

Microsoft has now thrown it’s hat into the ring with Surface, a multi-touch table computer:

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Pretty neat, although they are targeting high end resorts and other such places as the first customers for their $10,000 computer.

I suggested desktop multi-touch would happen in an earlier post, stating:

Despite this recent history, I believe software that runs on your local computer without needing an internet connection is going to make a come back. Two things will cause this change.

The first is that multi-touch interfaces will come to desktop machines, allowing for new types of desktop applications. You only have to look at the Nintendo Wii to see that when the human interface to a machine changes, new forms of software can meet previously unmet or unknown desires.

http://www.mathoda.com/archives/123

As cool as multi-touch desktop computers are, I’m waiting for the first laptop/tablet computer with multi-touch capabilities.

Steve Jobs of Apple indicated that their multi-touch efforts were first directed to such a device, but they decided to redirect towards the phone market due to its size and the obvious integration advantages with the iPod.

I’m sure Apple and Microsoft and a few dozen startups are hard at work developing a multi-touch laptop… who will get the prize?

Update July 20, 2007: Microsoft research demo’ed a rudimentary multi-touch laptop.  See my blog post: http://www.mathoda.com/archives/167