HP’s McKinney dismisses Microsoft’s Surface tech

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Microsoft has taken a wrong turn bringing its Surface table to market, at least according to the outspoken Phil McKinney, chief technology officer for HP.

McKinney was speaking to journalists in Los Angeles, California.

“I’ll try not to sound too condescending,” said McKinney, responding to a question from IT PRO regarding his opinion of Surface, which was recently officially launched in the UK.

“HP released a touch sensitive table in 2004 called Misto, but we decided not to bring it to market. The problem we faced was how do you sell it? We had this dichotomy in that people buy furniture expecting it to last for 20 years, but technology doesn’t last that long.”

Microsoft, however, is aiming its Surface table at commercial customers rather than consumers. McKinney said this made little difference. “We found that it was the same issue for companies – they didn’t want to buy something that would end up just being a piece of glass.”

However, McKinney did not touch upon the fact that Microsoft’s Surface has one key advantage over Misto in that it is fully multi-touch, which from IT PRO’s own hands-on experience does make it a compelling prospect.

He did temper his thoughts a little though, conceding that Surface is, "a great piece of tech".

HP currently sells its range of TouchSmart PC’s and has now released a second version aimed at business users.

“Touch is not the magic answer.” McKinney added, stating that it was best suited for, “short, burst interactions.” He also admitted to the problem of the lack of feedback when touching a screen compared to a keypad, comparing prolonged use of a touch display as like, “tapping on granite”.

As such he said that most Touchsmarts in the home would be placed somewhere the whole family could interact with it and used for tasks such as quickly checking the weather or the sports scores. However, he said that HP found that some artists were using the Touchsmart as an easel and working on them for many hours a day.

McKinney also peered into his crystal ball to make some productions for how we interact with computers in the future. “We’re doing a lot or research around gestures. However, gestures are still a hard thing for a computer to understand.”

To solve this McKinney said that HP was looking for a way of combining language with gestures to improve accuracy finally predicting that, “we’re four to five years away from cognitive devices”.

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