What Microsoft is Doing Right

Per my earlier post, I railed on Micrsoft for not keeping up with the times and being reactive instead of proactive. But, that said, Microsoft is doing some things right and it’s important to share that side of the story, as well.

One of these things is the image above: Photosynth. Dreamed up by Microsoft Live Labs, an arm of Microsoft whose mission it is to “advance state-of-the-art Internet technology and products,” Photosynth lets you take a group of photos and essentially “synth” (in English: paste or join) them together to create a 3-D image that allows you to sort of virtually walk through the scene.

Here’s how it works according to Microsoft:
“Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.”

So, they’re trying. Keep it up.

Secondly, they’re trying to “hip” up their image. How? Well, wonder where Jerry Seinfeld’s been since Seinfeld (besides “Bee Movie”)? It looks like he’s got a new gig: the spokesperson for Microsoft. The company is investing $300 million, according to MSNBC, in a fall ad campaign featuring the comedian.

Not sure just plugging in a seemingly “cool” person (is Seinfeld really cool anymore?) into your ads is going to solve the problem. I think it starts at home and the type of products they’re developing, but if they keep paying more attention to LiveLabs and less toward creating operating systems that don’t work, they’re on the right track at least. What do you think?