Are you ready for Windows7?

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I will say that if you are impressed by the "touch features" in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7. Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales. That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista, things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech, but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks; they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline. Its going to be a whole new user interface paradigm for consumers. ” If you have an iPhone, or have used a tablet PC or other device with touch screen technology, you have an idea what Bill gates is talking about.

Imagine the possibilities? I also tend to think about the resource requirements, because they are basically talking about the ability to render your home page anywhere you want, via Live Services. I dont imagine that will be without fees. Still, not needing a mouse would be interesting. The other day I got to see a demo of a virtual keyboard, which is a projected image of a keyboard that functions like a keyboard on a computer it is linked to. It was pretty neat. A big step up from this:

From Wikipedia:

An optical virtual keyboard has been invented and patented by IBM engineers in 1992. It optically detects and analyses human hand and finger motions and interprets them as operations on a physically non-existent input device like a surface having painted keys. In that way it allows to emulate unlimited types of manually operated input devices (mouse, keyboard, etc.). All mechanical input units can be replaced by such virtual devices, optimized for the current application and for the user's physiology maintaining speed, simplicity and unambiguity of manual data input.