Microsoft Surface

I had the opportunity to play around with Microsoft Surface yesterday. There has been a lot of fun poked at the Softies for this product. Maybe it is because of their Zune launch and their repeated failures at bringing a tablet PC to the market. One of the funnier parodies:

After seeing it in person, I think it is one of the cooler devices I have ever seen. I feel as if it was probably like seeing a television for the first time. Just seeing the demonstration applications gave me a sense of all the possibilities. Altogether, it was a pretty amazing experience and I can see Surface starting to make an appearance in hotels, bars, and other public areas.

I have one hesitation. Why couldn’t it have been Sun or Novell or Google some other open-source friendly company to develop this? I imagine that it will be shipped with some onerous and locked-down SDK. I’m guessing it will be very, very hard to develop for that platform.