Too Soon, Microsoft. Too Soon (Premium)

I recently joked with Scott Hanselman on Twitter that Microsoft implements technology too quickly, allowing followers like Apple to come in later and perfect and popularize that technology. Sadly, this is no joke.

This situation also neatly highlights how much the personal technology industry has changed over the past decade. When Microsoft and PCs ruled the industry, it was the software giant that could formalize technologies and popularize them for bringing them to the masses. Microsoft still does a great job of doing this with the enterprise and cloud computing. But in the consumer space, it is now Apple---and other firms, like Google and Amazon---that are doing so.

Any Microsoft fan who watched or is at least aware of last week's iPhone press conference probably felt a growing sense of dread as the event unfolded. Again and again, Apple took technologies from elsewhere and pulled them into its own products, especially the new iPhones, and acted as if it had invented them. This would be brazen if it weren't corporate policy. Steve Jobs, after all, actually claimed that Apple invented multi-touch when he unveiled the first iPhone 10 years ago.

So it is perhaps just a tradition now that Apple steals the best ideas. To give the firm some credit, however, it does have a good track record in the implementation department. In fact, one could easily argue---as I do---that Apple's core strength is recognizing those perfect situations in which the usefulness and capabilities of a particular technology are currently under-served by complex or limited implementations. Apple, any Captain Obvious tech blogger can tell you, does a great job of getting it right. Of making it actually work.

For those with an understanding of history, this can make for some sleepless nights. And last week's event was, I think, an apex of sorts for idea theft. That presentation was just a series of déjà vu moments.

There were the minor incidents, like Apple belatedly bringing LTE cellular capabilities to its smartwatch and 4K/UHD and HDR to its living room set-top box. And there were the more major thefts, all associated with the new iPhones. (Is it notable that Apple skipped version 9 with the iPhone X, just as Microsoft did previously with Windows 10? Probably not. But still.)

The worst of these thefts, of course, were those technologies where Microsoft, against all odds, was actually a leader. I'm talking about augmented reality (first announced in January 2015 with HoloLens), Qi wireless charging (available on Lumia handsets and as well as devices from other firms), and, perhaps the toughest blow, facial recognition.

For Microsoft followers such as myself, the facial recognition functionality in the iPhone X is like a kick to the solar plexus. It utilizes technology developed by the company that created the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox, and it duplicates---and seems to improve on---the Windows Hello sign-in functionality used by Windows 10. There ...

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