photo credit: Ken McGrail

Getting under the skin of this week’s Zune launch, Saul Hansell has posted a three-part interview with Microsoft’s J Allard at the NY Times Bits blog. There’s a great amount of candid conversation around all aspects of Microsoft’s growing entertainment movement.

On the perpetual rumor of a Zune phone:

The phone will be one part entertainment…. What you will see from us is more of these signature experiences. When you see the Zune, you’ll say say, I want my music experience on the phone to be like that. Hey, I want my telecommunication experience on the phone to be more like that.

On the evolution of Zune devices:

I’m a big believer in failing fast… If we skipped last year, we would have never come out with the product we did this year… We learned that because of the shortfalls in the PC client [software], the device was less useful… People hated that there was no podcasts, that they couldn’t fill their cultural cache [the Zune] with the stuff that was meaningful to them.

On the evolution of a new Microsoft entertainment platform:

Today we have Xbox live for $50 a year. We have Zune Pass at $15 a month. We don’t have a rationalized premium version yet. Fast forward a little bit, and you can image a menu like DirecTV. There is basic, there is enhanced, there is movie pack and NFL Sunday ticket.

It’s exciting to see another solid base hit for Mr. Allard. His laser focus on consumer experiences and the interaction between Microsoft and individual human beings is right up my street. There’s a gravity around personalities like J and Ray Ozzie that fill me with a lot of hope. They both seem to understand the importance of user experience, and seem to place more importance on them than traditional Microsoft thinking.

If you happened to find yourself near the Sheraton Boston Hotel tomorrow, drop in and say hi to Surface. Robert Warnick and a handful of the Surface team will be in the lobby at 39 Dalton Street from ten till three with three, “big-ass tables.” Grab a drink and take a ride on the coffee table of your dreams.

(Surface in Boston This Week - Tales from the Microsoft Surface team)

Do the current crop of personal computer designs make you yawn? Can you just never find that one machine that speaks to you and compels you to spend your hard-earned money?

If you want to do something about your sad state of affairs, look into the Next Generation PC Design Competition. Mock up a machine designed specifically for your own digital media compulsions, but don’t neglect the entry questions, such as concerns around actually building the thing and the customer experience from the moment they sit down with the box.

Your online submissions must be recieved by December 14th, and then come February 15th, the voting public will spend a month punching their radio-button ballots for which designs they really want. The five finalists will end up as special guests at WinHEC, with enough cash and cache to get your masterpiece bourne into the real world.

My father sent me the initial link to The Encyclopedia of Life on Wednesday morning, and it was one of those rare things that is so incredibly relevent I’ve been wanting to tell everyone I come across about it.

E.O. Wilson’s wish from TED2007 seems to have already sprung to live (someone please let me know if the site cropped up even before he asked for it), though right now there’s only the glorious concept video you see here, as well as a few demonstration pages.

I posted a piece about EOL on Channel 10 earlier today, and I encourage all of you to start telling people. Contribute in any way you see fit, because it’s probably the most accessible and important idea in the history of biology.

Sounds like some of us are waking up from the coma that is the last twenty years of personal computing. The files and folders metaphor took off like wildfire because it represented a total departure from the command line user interface. The introduction of a GUI allowed a larger percentage of humanity to adopt technology, which in turn made the tech community much more exciting and diverse.

Today our desktops are all interconnected, and a slew of different devices have evolved from the desktop and grown into our backpacks, our cars, and our pockets. Most of the popular uses of these machines no longer involve organizing all our files into folders. All of our memos, timesheets, photos, movies have been left in a petri dish with Email, IM, WiFi, and GPS–It’s all merged together but hasn’t quite gotten the entreprenurial rubdown it needs.

Jeremy Zawodny has talked about three problems that need solving, so he’s certainly clued in. Applications need to be built for the web and the desktop equally, the archipeligo of devices need interoperability, and someone needs to build and support an OS that accepts the networked reality of personal computing.

In more particular terms, Ross Rubin is calling it PC 3.0: the social computer. It would leverage all the bleeding edge technologies to create a more natural interaction method. He reminds us of the double decade old promise of Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video (Where did you want to go yesterday?)