Microsoft's Great Week

Call it the wishful thinking of the guy who owns Microsoft (MSFT) stock, but the news flow from the company this week was excellent:

MSFT did something very uncharacteristic. It did not push back the release of Windows 7, which will be released on Oct. 22. (Editor’s note: Microsoft publishes MSN Money.)

Bing is excellent. I played with it for a couple of days, and it’s an “un-Microsoft-like” search engine. It is very good. Type for instance “flight from NYC to Denver“, and it will tell you that fares are predicted to rise in the next 30 days. Click on the green arrow and it will tell you everything you want to know about fares.

MSFT demonstrated Project Natal this week at the E3 tech expo. If the technology demonstrated is real, and it looks like it is because MSFT has released an SDK (Software Developer’s Kit), programmers can now start developing games and applications for Natal. Natal puts Wii’s wireless controller to shame. In fact, I think it will change the gaming industry forever, and I’d be very worried if I owned Nintendo (NTDOY.PK) stock. Natal is:

“A motion sensing device that allows you to control video games and Xbox 360 menus with your body instead of a peripheral controller. Natal gives you voice and full-body motion control over your on-screen avatar using an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software,” writes PC World.

Finally, in a previous post I wrote that “it is believed by many that creativity retired with Bill Gates.” In response, I received a lot of e-mails saying that Microsoft never had any creativity because it never had an original product. It just took products created by someone else, improved them and marketed the hell out of them.

It is very true that even the original DOS — the one that MSFT sold to IBM (IBM) — was created by someone else. But copying requires creativity, too; otherwise, why would anybody buy your product instead of competition.

Think about WordPerfect, for example. It was a dominant product at the time. Microsoft created Word, basically a replica of WordPerfect — but a much superior replica.

Comments

[Ames Tiedeman:]

I agree with you that BING is superb. This will get MSFT moving in the right direction again. I do not know why it took them this long. This should have been launched years ago. GOOG is a joke compared to the information BING provides the user. This bodes well for tech in general. GOOG will finally have some real competition. The consumer wins. The free market works despite what Washington is telling the American people.

Jun 07 10:31 AM

[Speedspirit:]

Bought MSFT this past week and will love to see the stock rise with all this favorable news. Building a better mouse trap is the American way so dont knock it. Bing is in the early stages and getting positive reviews which can only be good news for the future stock price.

Jun 07 12:30 PM

[InvestBaboo:]

With BING I tried Phx to Mia. (Phoenix to Miami). Nothing useful turned up. (True, the search worked as the author stated for NYC to Denver). Google returned information by far was useful. What Microsoft is really doing is putting a better interpreter for ecommerce type queries. Not all but most popular ones. How hard is it for Google to do this? I think about 4 weeks with 10 programmers and you will have most of these eCommerce type queries covered. Be careful here and look under the surface.

Jun 07 01:52 PM

[M0nst3rB0y:]

Ballmer can mess up anything. Remember the idiotic stock split? No chance anyone shold be nervious about Softie so long as the fat man is at the helm.

Jun 07 08:49 PM