It’s been almost two years since I sat down to write my last blog entry. I vividly remember writing my last controversial rant on the raging console war between the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii on my “Jerome on Tech” blog. The multi-core, parallel architectures at the heart of Sony’s Cell processor and the 360’s Power PC derived Xeon processor were glimpses into the future PC, and I couldn’t help but be mesmerized with excitement about bringing small supercomputers with high speed networking and storage to the center of the living room.

After three years at Microsoft and moving from the Microsoft Office Excel team to the Microsoft Surface team, I see another revolution happening, a revolution that will change the face of the modern PC forever, and I can’t help but begin to rant again! :-)

I was really, really passionate about data visualization when I first joined Microsoft in 2005. Working on Excel 12 and Excel Server was a dream come true. One afternoon in the winter of 2006, I started watching a video of Jeff Han’s

multi-touch prototype demonstration at TED, and a light bulb switched on over my head. The perfect way to interact with large data sources was touch, and instantly I knew Excel had to be redesigned around multi-touch. Pivot Tables had to be completely rethought so that you could simply slice views of your data through gestures and natural manipulations with your fingers. It seemed so obvious that touch, a sense that we develop as infants, is the ultimate method for interacting with computers. I began to feverishly sketch ideas and wish for a killer platform that would show the world the power of multi-touch, and in 2007, that wish was granted with the introduction of the Apple iPhone and the Microsoft Surface. Being that my days working for Apple at Virginia Tech were long gone, I knew I had to be a part of Microsoft’s multi-touch story. After many sleepless nights thinking about leaving Excel and several rough internal interviews, I joined the Microsoft Surface team, ready to learn everything I could from another group of amazing minds at Microsoft while helping put the finishing polish and hoist version 1.0 of the Surface platform and application suite out of the door and into the hands of customers.

This back story I hope sets the stage that conveys to you how much excitement is building within me for this year, excitement that has awoken me from my blogging slumber to yell across the digital mountain on high to everyone across the Internet that this year, this 2009, will mark the beginning of the next major revolution in personal computing, multi-touch and NUI (natural user interface). Multi-touch technology will usher in the third human computer interface revolution, just like the keyboard that characterized the command line interfaces (CLI) of the 80s and the mouse that ignited the graphical user interface (GUI) of the 90s. Multi-touch will provide the foundational technology necessary to completely redefine user interfaces, creating what is being coined as natural user interfaces (NUI). Why doesn’t every window, every tool bar, and every user interface element have physics? Why does every application today look like a more colorful version of every application I ran back in elementary school on the Apple II?  Why do we still have a keyboard and mouse? How could we improve the experience of using a keyboard if all of the keys were defined with software, able to animate, highlight, and resize to react to what’s happening within an application or more importantly, reacting to the context of the user’s actions? Where they shortsighted or brilliant to envision every computer on Star Trek the Next Generation with a touch screen interface?

Windows 7 will usher multi-touch into the core of the operating system. We on the Microsoft Surface team will keep ferociously building our multi-touch platform and applications (I wish I could talk about what I’m working on!). Apple will continue to drive multi-touch throughout their platforms, and this blog will provide you with a dedicated, front row seat to the impending software design revolution. I’m a Microsoft blogger born from the generation that “grew up” reading Scoble, Dare Obasanjo, and Paul Thurrott, so I will provide a blunt, raw, personal view of my insight into the spread of multi-touch, NUI interfaces across our industry. So sit back, throw some popcorn into the oven, and enjoy the ride because 2009 will be about a lot more than just the cloud. :-)