It feels weird to write this, but I actually caught myself feeling a bit excited about a Microsoft product, to the point of wishing this had been news about a year or so back: Game creation tool Kodu comes to the PC as beta. (H/t @arstechnica for tweeting the link) Not excited enough, though, to plug myself into the Redmond Borg cube via Windows Live, not even as a throwaway account.
But that, IMO, is largely the mistake Microsoft's been making for the last, oh, ten or fifteen years: The power of that fractious box on or under the desk to make wonder and magic and even fun. Pimping Word to make it rival PageMaker was fun--there was a triumphant brand of magic in an achievement so small as a brochure that looked as polished as professional printers could make it. (That it was the kind of magic that made you look like a genius to your Marketing boss was even better.) The last "magic" I remember making with a Microsoft product was using PowerPoint 97 to create an animated birthday card for the twin 5 year-olds of my Australian pen-pals. The magic has long since been replaced by the frustrations of fighting software that thinks it knows better than I...that's assuming I can figure out where the current version is hiding the menu option I need.
Yes, yes, yes: Banging out arcane text incantation with semi-colons and curly-braces and weird-looking indentation is fun. But--even for me--it's not the only kind. And, frankly, I think that if this doesn't change, it'll eventually kill computing as we know it. Seriously, when was the last time your TV was fun? And that's exactly what the PC has become as Microsoft and their wanna-bes have tried to monetize everything that isn't nailed down or red hot. And when you monetize things, you can safely bet on hooking wallets through two mechanisms: Productivity (boring!) and entertainment (mindless!). In that light, Microsoft's bread-and-butter applications (Office, Exchange, and a host of high-end business applications like SharePoint on the "productivity" side) and Internet Explorer, MSNBC, XBox, Silverlight and, lately, Bing on the "entertainment" side.
But it takes a certain courage to give people the run of the 'fridge when you're used to spoon-feeding them. Maybe not the run of the whole pantry, mind you--but it's nevertheless a fairly startling move from a company that large.
Let's put the magic back into the computing experience. Because even at the risk of pop-cultural pop-psychology (and maybe generational self-congratulation besides), I don't consider the timing of the internet revolution a coincidence. That was largely fostered by people who grew up with or came of age with their hands on a keyboard, when TV sets served as computer screens, and not the other way around.
