Microsoft: Grasping touch in enterprise productivity

[Brink]

The future could see touch gestures move beyond use in games and casual consumption, to more applicability in business productivity tasks such as executing commands on data sets by finger-drawing symbols.

Pinch, drag and zoom are now commonplace gestures, and could be the precedent to using the concept of touch for enterprise and productivity-related tasks. For instance, using one's finger to "circle" some data on a tablet that will automatically display the information into a detailed pie chart, without needing statistics know-how.

This is the possible future for touch-enabled technology, transcending games and consumer-centric applicability to being useful for businesses as well, said Hon Hsiao-Wuen, managing director of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). MSRA is one of Microsoft's 13 research and development (R&D) facilities around the world, and the second largest with about 220 staff.

Hon, who is based in Beijing where MSRA is located, spoke with ZDNet in an interview Friday here where he was visiting to speak with industry partners.

Read more at source:
Microsoft: Grasping touch in enterprise productivity | ZDNet

 

[Layback Bear]

I understand R and D for the future. Has or is the business world asking for such a Enterprise type Operating System? One doesn't have to know how to make a financial statement to bring one up and display it. One doesn't have to make a pie chart or a graft to show it on a screen. Showing those things on a screen can be done with little effort and knowledge today. Some one in the company has to be able to create such things for others to see on a touch screen. I just can't see how the charts or grafts can be created by poking a bunch of squares on a computer. With 220 people working on this R and D who know what might come out of it.
Thanks for the information.

 

[jimbo45]

I understand R and D for the future. Has or is the business world asking for such a Enterprise type Operating System? One doesn't have to know how to make a financial statement to bring one up and display it. One doesn't have to make a pie chart or a graft to show it on a screen. Showing those things on a screen can be done with little effort and knowledge today. Some one in the company has to be able to create such things for others to see on a touch screen. I just can't see how the charts or grafts can be created by poking a bunch of squares on a computer. With 220 people working on this R and D who know what might come out of it.
Thanks for the information.

Hi there.

Haven't you ever done quite complex "What IF" analysis or in manufacturing / engineering design often quite complex algorithms need to be created when manufacturing a product -- for example if you can make a product that requires various percentages say X% of material A, Y% of material B and Z% of material C you have to work out supply chains, costs, longevity of the product etc before optimising the values of X, Y, and Z. (Usually called "Linear Analysis / Log Linear Analysis" to our less mathematically challenged folks on the Forum).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-linear_analysis

Try and derive graphs on a spread sheet manually using this forumula :

has an approximate chi-square distribution when the sample size is large:

If you think that's complex - there are a load more complex functions in Financial areas too -- a lot of successful market traders use some horrendously complex statistics in what they call "Technical Analysis" and these people often need the results to be dynamically displayed in real times during market trading hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis

A decent future "Touch" application could allow you as Brink said simply to circle around a few numbers and the optimal result could be shown graphically.

It can be done currently but it sometimes involves manually entering a load of numbers and complex formulae / macros in a spread sheet and usually also a fair bit of trial and error.

Back in the days of Office XP there was an addon built into EXCEL I think called solver.xls which had the rudiments of this --seems to have vanished from later releases of EXCEL or it might be called something different. EXCEL 97 (remember that far back) had also a whole load of complex financial functions in it (in the business version).

All this stuff would be hugely simplified via a simple touch type drag 'n drop mechanism.

Creating Blueprints, architectural design, civil engineering drawings, CAD etc would be brilliant for decent touch applications.

While the above are mainly from engineering (that's my background) I'm sure touch applications are also equally applicable for other areas too.

Also whether we like it or not Touch in W7 is not very well handled which is why I think in spite of my earlier misgivings of the usefulness of W8 in the workplace it (or the next version of Windows) will appear on SOME (not all) computers in the workplace and certainly on touch enabled tablets as these begin to move away from "top management" down to "us lowly pions".

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Layback Bear]

Thanks for your reply jimbo. I'm trying to understand how the things that one drags and drops to compile something were created. If someone drags onion from location (A) and drops in location (B) does not make them a onion grower. It make the a transporter of onions. Someone has to grow the onions.

As you can see I'm not at the high level of knowledge as some.

I'm trying to understand how a person with the proper knowledge can create a program or application or what ever using a touch screen and little squares. Until someone creates such things their is nothing to drag and drop.
Thanks for trying to help me understand such things. I will go now. Thanks again.

 

[jimbo45]

Thanks for your reply jimbo. I'm trying to understand how the things that one drags and drops to compile something were created. If someone drags onion from location (A) and drops in location (B) does not make them a onion grower. It make the a transporter of onions. Someone has to grow the onions.

As you can see I'm not at the high level of knowledge as some.

I'm trying to understand how a person with the proper knowledge can create a program or application or what ever using a touch screen and little squares. Until someone creates such things their is nothing to drag and drop.
Thanks for trying to help me understand such things. I will go now. Thanks again.

Hi there
just before you go -- a computer program is simply an ALGORITHM. The analyst should basically write out in simple English (or your native language) the processes you go through to solve the problem for example read data from device A, multiply all numbers by 3, add them up, divide by 17.5 and then display the answer.

Now the input device can of course be a Touch screen. For the sake of argument since we are on W7 where touch screens aren't the norm we can sort of simulate the process by using the Snipping tool, capturing an area and then say drawing a circle around the part of the screen we are interested in. We then tell the program to read the snipped file we've just saved to say the clipboard, decode it and do the arithmetic as follows:
The computer program is devised to read the area captured by the snipping tool and isolate the area surrounded by your circle. The image is normally a JPEG or PNG file the format of whose contents are known -- these are OPEN well defined formats. The program could then scan for the relevant string of numbers and then the job's done -- just feed those numbers into the numbers in the program, do the arithmetic and display the answer.

In practice it will be more complex (much more complex) but hopefully you can see the sort of processes involved - and it's not weird science fiction either.

Cheers
jimbo