One of the reasons I started this blog was to provide some rants or raves on specific products that I use.   This post is on Kinect and a few other Microsoft products that I've used recently.   I, like many, am a heavy user of Microsoft's products for professional and personal  use, but not always a happy camper.   Here's to acknowledging some that stand out.

I'm not a gamer.   My youth was wasted on the low-tech world of physical pinball machines and the early versions of Pong and Androids (no, not Google's).   My first introduction to the new world of home console games started with my young son and Nintendo 64 Super Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong a few decades ago.   I was inept at learning the handheld game controllers with multiple buttons and didn't have the ambition to spend hours honing my skills.   As the games have evolved dramatically, so has the skill and speed required on the controllers, so I've been left in the dust and on the sidelines.  

The introduction of the Nintendo Wii and its motion-controlled capabilities were exactly the direction the game companies needed to go to expand their market opportunity beyond the core young male user demographic.   While it was innovative, it still wasn't enough to entice me to buy a game console.    

A few weeks ago, I went to dinner at a friend's house, and after dinner we proceeded to the family room to try out the new Kinect.   Here we were, 7 adults and 2 kids ranging in age from 5 to 65 and everyone participated in a few rounds of bowling.   With only a little coaching to get the basic hand gestures, everyone had equal opportunity to play and score.   It was a pretty amazing combination of hardware and software integration, and the amount of excitement and fun was equal to real-world bowling but in the comfort of a home.  

The potential implications of this system beyond gaming are huge.    It's already pretty amazing to see the number of grown adults I know who go to work on Monday with sore muscles due to playing the game all weekend and competing in some athetic event.    Couch potatoes, beware.   Could this foster some national movement towards physical fitness?    How about teaching dancing or other physical activity from your living room.   Or imagine the shopping possibilities.   The game replaces its avatars with a likeness of you as you "try on" different outfits, a modern hairstyle, and new glasses.

So did I buy one?   Well, no.   I'm not ready to drop $300-$400 on this yet, but maybe for Christmas....

Anyway, hats off the Xbox team.   This is truly a Blue Ocean move.  

Internet Explorer 9

I'll be honest.  I defected from IE a few generations ago to Firefox and have never looked back.   The increasing performance drag and instability were too much for me to put up with, and I use IE only when I have to at this point and mostly to Microsoft sites.  

Given the kudos it's received regarding performance and that it is a completely rewritten product, I decided to try IE9 out last week.    My limited testing indicated that it is indeed far snappier in loading pages than the older version, and even faster than my current Firefox 3.6.    I also tried the new Firefox 4.0 RC release, since it was rumored to also have performance improvements.    Well, Firefox is also snappier, but it feels just a hair slower than the new IE9.   

I'm not sure it's enough to make me want to come back, at least not immediately.  However, one excuse - performance - has been taken off the table for me and this is the the right move for Microsoft.  

Nice work, IE team.   

Exchange Online

I'm a fan of Exchange and have used it in every company I've worked for many years.   After I started my consulting business, I was relegated back to POP3 email services for both my personal and business email as a small business.   For just getting email to my desktop, POP3 usually works fine, though I started having a terrible time controlling spam.  

A more painful transition was losing wireless sync capabilities to my smartphone.   I was constantly forgetting to manually sync my contacts, and especially my calendar, before heading off to a meeting and sometimes would not even have the meeting location with me.   Since I currently use an iPhone, I tried Apple's MobileMe.  It worked at syncing my calendar but was not so good at getting my contacts, and it costs $99/year.   There had to be a better way.  

I had the opportunity to do some work with the Microsoft Online Services team last year.  This is Microsoft's hosted version of their primary server apps, including Exchange, Sharepoint, Live Meeting, and Office Communicator.    The complete suite goes by the unfortunate name of BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), but you can also purchase each individually.   I liked the service while I was there and decided to grab it for my my personal and business accounts.   I'm just using Exchange Online for $5/month and it gives me push email, calendar and contacts plus shared calendars to other folks on my accounts.    The service will be expanding to be called Office365 this year and will also include versions of Office.  

I've been using the service now for about 5 months, and am pretty happy with it, including the spam filtering.  The service is still on Exchange 2007 and I'm looking for a few of the new features available on Exchange 2010 coming later this year (I think).   I may even upgrade to add some of the other services.  

Thank you, Online Services team, for giving me enterprise capabilities in my tiny little business.