Once again Microsoft being pretty low-key with the fact that this is a Microsoft product just like they did with Sway. [1]
* No mention in the title bar or above the fold.
* First mention of Microsoft is in the footer.
* iOS App Store and Google Play links are before the Window Phone Store.
* Mockups include iOS looking device and Androidy Device (however the largest one might be a Windows Phone?)
[1] https://www.sway.com *Although they have now added this annoying Microsoft Toolbar dropdown-thingy which wasn't there on launch day. Interesting.
This is from FUSE labs which is a little team inside MS who do research on new experiences and such. They don't really produce 'products' like Office, OneDrive, etc. They make neat demos and if they get enough traction try to influence the bigger products to adopt them.
I love that direction. Recently stumbled upon "Microsoft Ajax Minifier" which is a prime example of the old way of naming things. What does compressing files have anything to do with async requests? At some point they were just giving the AJAX name to anything javascript related, without thinking or to not have "Java" appear in naming conventions.
> At some point they were just giving the AJAX name to anything javascript related
They shipped the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit back in ~2008, when "Ajax" was generally synonymous with "JavaScript". Google's CDN was called the "AJAX Libraries CDN" until just a few years ago. It happens.
Most of the commonly-used functionality in Ajax Control toolkit were things like the date-picker, various animated widgets, and making the deployment guy scream and pull his hair out. The actual ajax-side of it was rarely used, in my experience.
Their attempt to use "xim" as a verb right from the start (hint to the marketing staff: it only happens after mass adoption) is very Microsofty. It's, in fact, a dead giveaway.
But, indeed, the presence of other phones along with Windows devices is refreshing, as is the multiple store links.
Not sure I like it, but I have to recognise Microsoft's effort in rebuilding their brand.
No, but you could "squirt" a song from one device to another. I wish I was making that up.
Microsoft does manage to make some really useful products and services. Even the Zune you mentioned had a service similar to the now-popular Spotify where you paid monthly for access to a full catalog and you could even choose 10 tracks to (permanently) keep each month so it wasn't solely a rental/subscription service.
But their marketing can be some of the worst I've seen coming from a major tech company.
For a second I thought it would be some kind of editor vim style but Microsoft made. But no, just an other photo app. Can you still generate any revenue out of this kind of app in 2014? I feel like the market is pretty dense already, between dropbox, instagram, flickr ... plenty of apps already in the landscape, why an other?
Keyword being "direct". Publicly no doubt they have mission statements that read like they're trying to save the planet. Privately, they are tasked with exploring the margins of new paths to revenue. (NOTE: pure speculation.)
I don't feel like you are very familiar with Microsoft Research. While I'm sure Microsoft ultimately expects to benefit from their work, it's pretty far out there to suggest that their mission is discovering revenue streams or anything like that. Like, do you really believe Microsoft intends to monetize Haskell?
I did mention that I was speculating, so yes, I'm not at all familiar with Microsoft Research.
However, I've yet to work at a place where I wasn't surrounded by p* managers who weren't falling over themselves to get involved with some new idea that would lead to revenue somehow. On the business side of the house, I don't think anyone gets up in the morning if it can't be linked to revenue.
So, yeah, I'm comfortable saying that Microsoft Research is swarming with people looking for new revenue streams. Swarming.
That is wrong, how? Revenue streams (and corresponding cash flows) are the lifeblood of any business. It's a nice notion to build an organization solely to do cool things but, if you don't make money somehow you'll go out of business and will never be able to do cool things.
Well, I don't really doubt the idea that justifies the department's existence is that Microsoft Research will produce new developments that can be used in money-making products, but the research itself is not necessarily linked to revenue in any real way. For example, the Haskell programming language and the experimental Singularity OS are things that really have no chance of ever themselves making Microsoft money, but Microsoft Research drove their development nonetheless. The most obvious underlying motivation is not finding revenue streams, but pushing the state of the art in ways that Microsoft can learn from and use to improve other projects.
Same here! The name made me think I was going to see a vim 2.0 by Microsoft. I'm sure the majority of their target audience wouldn't have this kind of reaction.
Putting the snark aside for a second, if this app works as well as it's claimed to, then I actually think it's an awesome idea. I really dislike handing my phone over to other people, even to show them a photo or video, and if I'm wanting to show something to 3+ people at once there's no truly convenient way to do that anyway. I've already installed this and will definitely be trying it out at the next opportunity.
I agree with the use case, but most of the time I show someone a photo, it a fairly quick process. Comparing (1) how you share photos now to (2) how you share photos w/ Xim: (1) "wanting to share photo-> pull out phone-> unlock phone-> open photos app-> select photo-> show people your phone" is a lot faster and easier than (2) "wanting to share photo-> pull out phone-> unlock phone-> open Xim-> select images-> add or select contacts* -> send message -> wait for others to receive message-> they pull out phone (if not already)-> they unlock phone-> they open the message-> they are redirected (to app or website)-> they can see the photo"
I don't think this use case is definitive, i just meant it as an illustration of "it will take longer to share photos with Xim."
I think this MIGHT be ok if you only had to go through a laborious process the first time you used the app or viewed a Xim, but I think you have to go through that whole process (minus the adding the contact) every time you share. This app is trying to work at that intersection of cyber- and meat-space, and I think the handoffs will just take too long.
The ironic use case--this could be a great tool for remotely sharing photos. But if you're doing that, wouldn't you be using your phone to talk with the other viewers about the photos? ;-(
* Seems more likely you're trying to show more than 1 photo, as it's fairly easy to show a single photo to many people.
Similar to above, and like you were saying, it's fairly easy to show 1 or 2 people a series of photos on your phone.
Unlike many in the comments, I don't think this is a useless app. I don't particularly enjoy passing my phone around, and sometimes it's a nice way of showing everyone photos at the same time.
At first I thought this was Nokia Photobeamer v2 [1], but it appears to be a completely separate app.
This is a surprisingly simple idea which I'm surprised nobody else did first. Neat idea. +1 on you guys for making it so only one person needs the app too!
I'm guessing the app has a small built-in webserver - or perhaps relays through a 3rd party webserver - and the others join up in their browser using some kind of websocket like transport? Wonder if they direct the others to the app user's phone's internal wifi IP?
To use a local webserver, they would have to be on the same network (unlikely). To use the cloud based service, they would have to be on the internet (likely).
I know, right! I mean, there's already Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Imgur, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google+, email, MMS, LinkedIn, Myspace, and hosting one's own site. But we need more options to share blurry photos of backgrounds or mediocre desserts.
I agree with your point, but I also want to point out that the term also has sexual connotations, which (in my experience) made up the bulk of the negative comments about it.
I think this app is actually pretty cool, especially in situations where you want to show family at a table photos from your latest trip or weekend adventures.
It is such a shame that the scroll performance on this site is so horrible (performance wise), scroll up and down and you will see this behaviour first-hand.
Nicely done, I'm a bit surprised there isn't more of this. When you see several people there with their phones and only one has the content everyone wants to see, it makes a lot of sense to be able to "cast" it to everyone's screen.
I don't know if it exists already, but what I would like is a Bluetooth mixing app: say it is installed on my phone, I connect to speakers and I can play music from my phone. Buddies around can connect by Bluetooth to my phone and "play" some other track to me. Then a fader allows me to mix both tracks to the speakers.
I have to imagine that this is part of a larger plan to rope people into an MS ecosystem by getting folks to use useful utilities one at a time. I can think of another company that did this a few years back with disparate utilities: Google. Recall gmail, Picasa, Reader, Maps, etc. Standalone in the early 2000s and now if you use one, you likely use them all.
Also, a pretty unsubtle rebranding campaign: "Made with love by Microsoft Research FUSE Labs"??
> Recall gmail, Picasa, Reader, Maps, etc. Standalone in the early 2000s and now if you use one, you likely use them all.
I don't think I know anyone who uses 'them all' even from this small list. Of course, Reader doesn't even exist anymore. And I know no one who uses picasa as far as I know. People use gmail and maps, but not really as integrated components or because of their use of anything else in the google ecosystem.
I mean yes, I agree that this is a very google-ish strategy, but I also don't think it's really driven a lot of cross-app use. And when they tried to push G+ through that channel people screamed bloody murder at it.
Picasa doesn't exist any more as a standalone product - its backend is just what you use if you upload a photo to G+, or share a photo from an Android phone, these days.
I think that it's not meant to replace those. It's meant to replace the act of passing your phone around in person — say, around a dinner table — in order to show photos to the people you're with.
I imagine it's to stop people from committing the social faux-pas whereby they're handed a phone, and they start swiping through pictures in the gallery (and possibly stumbling upon pictures the phone owner did not intend to be seen).
I agree. Whoever thought this was going to end up being less troublesome than passing a phone around (which is, admittedly, awkward) hasn't thought through the scenarios. There's no way a bunch of people at "dinner with friends" are all going to pull their phones out and start up a little photo-viewing LAN party.
A lot of people don't like passing a phone around because in many cases the recipient, either out of force of habit or just snooping around, will keep scrolling through the rest of their photos.
It leaves you in control of the "show". If you have a series of pictures, for example, you pick when to move to the next photo, and can narrate as you do. You don't have to think about them flipping beyond the photos you wanted to share. They don't have to figure out how to work your phone.
It's certainly easier to pass around a phone, of course, but I can see the flaws.
This is a place where NFC would really be a step up though. Tap-to-share-screen, instead of having to find contacts and numbers and sending texts.
Yeah, would be nice if this launched a little web server on your device with a temporary url for people to connect to. I feel like this is how social networking should work too, but that's a whole nother story.
I'm not sure if I'll get much use out of this, but at least Microsoft is starting to release their software simultaneously on all three platforms. Hopefully others will follow suit.
Ah, that makes more sense. They're probably just waiting for it to get approved. The Android and Windows app approval process tends to be much faster in my experience.
“wirelessly transfer a song you want to share to your zune friends, they can play it just a little bit"
Then Steve Jobs said something like:
“if you’re on the subway and want to share a song with someone cool, why fuck around with sending a demo song, just take off 1 earbud and listen to the music together"
Marketing gimmick sometimes frustrates the hell out of me.
1. (No app required) - but the person hosting the photos need to install the app?
2. (Download on the Apple Store icon)- Yet clicking on it will give you a coming soon page. Will it kill you to put a "Coming Soon" text below the icon ?
Of course, I am still trying to wrap my head around the use case for this concept, especially when you have a dozen other ways to solve this problem. Oh wait, what was the problem again?
