If I may muse a bit, I’d like to explain my support of Microsoft’s decision that produced W8 by looking at both past and future.

The past first, of course. Back in 1983 I was one of those computer people saying that 48K was plenty for a computer. I, and most of my peers, were talking about business computers because really that’s what most computers were. When the Commodore 64 came out our response was “of course it has the extra, it needs it for all those graphics. But what business really needs all those graphics?” If you want to ridicule our lack of foresight that’s much more painful, though more nuanced as well.

What I learned, and what I’ve seen since over the past 20 years, is that pretty much every advance in the desktop computer world - and most of the advances for larger systems - have been driven by people wanting more out of their play. Someone makes something that’s neat or useful or amazing for gaming, and someone else says, “Hey, I can use that for my business.”

with that in mind, I want to point to two gaming nifty things. Motion capture and independent viewing. Colloquially ‘Virtual Reality’, though not really. Not as handwaves, specific.

Motion Capture has two competing technologies, both past beta but still exploding in development: Kinect and Leap. With both a set of sensors detect what you’re doing with your hands and bodies. Leap is much more sensitive, able to see what your individual fingers are doing, but it’s got significantly greater bandwidth requirements. Kinect may win with ‘good enough’ and bigger pockets. We’ve seen this before, see betamax vs VHS. whichever wins, however, we have the ability to do touchscreen without touching the screen. Add dongles and wireless pen-pointers and a half a dozen other little devices and the whole mouse and keyboard concept may be on its way to being specialized tools for narrow groups of professionals.

Independent viewing was the hard one, but that’s about to change. There’s a device called Oculus Rift. It’s currently designed as a game device. It’s light, comfortable, and resolves a lot of problems past systems have had. (A minor one being it works with those of us who wear glasses.) The thing is, it just got bought by Facebook.

I despise facebook for a number of reasons, but I cannot deny the advantage deep pockets provide, especially to a device that had reached the end of kickstarter funds with a working product. The deep money boost solves funding for manufacturing, sales, and distribution.

Running in competition of sorts is Google Glass. Again, independent viewing information. The difference is, well, OR is for full immersion (ie sitting at the desktop fully focused on the job) while GG is for augmented reality (such as GPS while driving or doing a quick check of your email while waiting for your table a the restaurant).

The thing is it’s all here. For the next few years - maybe one, maybe ten - all this will be game oriented. Then someone’s going to put it together. Nobody needs to reach out to a vertical touchscreen that’s at arm’s length (or slightly further) since the viewscreen is virtual. Raise the hand and see the virtual hand on the screen. Left-click/right-click? How about pinch and drag, push, and pull?

And Microsoft’s Win8 and its successors already handle ‘touchscreen’.

Yes, i think they made the right move. Maybe a bit early, but maybe not as fast as some of these are coming together.