David J. Kurlander, Ph.D.

Ph.D. awarded July 1993. Dissertation: Graphical Editing by Example.  Research topics included user interfaces, constraint-based techniques, graphical editing, and computer graphics.  Received M.S. Degree in Computer Science in January 1987, and M.Phil. in Computer Science in May 1990, followed by the Ph.D.  Advisor: Professor Steven Feiner.

Graduated cum laude, receiving a B.A. degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science.

General Manager.   Created and led the New Consumer Products Team and the Microsoft Surface Computing Group.  The New Consumer Products Team incubated a wide range of consumer technologies for the company.  Responsibilities included hiring the team, ideating new concepts, prototyping them, reviewing the most promising with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and other executives, and getting the most promising proposals approved.  One of these projects, Microsoft Surface, was recently announced, and has received a huge amount of media attention and positive press (see the quotes appearing later in this resume).  As General Manager of that effort, I created a cross-divisional team to develop the initial prototype, excited Bill Gates and other senior management about the prospects, built a product team and managed the initial product development.  Microsoft Surface is essentially a computer with a large horizontal display, coupled with a novel sensing technology (using computer vision) that can detect multiple simultaneous touches and differentiate between objects that are placed upon it.  It enables a large number of compelling scenarios that mix the physical world with the virtual.  This project consisted of three major components: hardware development, systems software, and applications development (plus a developer’s kit).  Personally filed 9 patents, and the team filed over 35.  Managed a group of approximately 75 people (62 full-timers) and a budget of 19 million.  Reached a very senior role at Microsoft (“Partner status”), and consistently received very strong reviews.

Product Unit Manager.  Proposed and built Microsoft’s Adaptive User Interface group – focused on building technology to customize user interfaces and information presentation for multiple devices.  Shipped the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit in January 2002.  The toolkit, which is part of the .NET Developer Platform, allows web applications to be authored for over 80 mobile devices, such as Pocket PC, Palm/Handspring, WAP phones, iMode phones, and RIM pagers.  It has since been updated to support over 260 devices.  Among the cutting-edge technology shipped in the toolkit is a set of runtime controls that automatically adapts its output for diverse form factors and browser markup languages, a design-time environment that integrates with Visual Studio .NET for drag-and-drop mobile web development, and a rich mobile device identification mechanism.  The technology was integrated into Visual Studio .NET, .NET Framework, and Windows .NET Server, and later was added to ASP.NET.   At Microsoft the technology is being used to build its new mobile web applications (including MSN Mobile’s Hotmail, which has already been deployed).   Externally the toolkit is being used by customers like SAS Airlines, Continental, Dollar-Rent-A-Car, the West Group, and others.   Led a group of 48, including 35 full-time staff, and managed a budget of 8.5 million dollars.  Filed 3 patents (with other team members) on the technology.

Project Lead.  Planned, organized, and supervised the development of Microsoft’s chat technologies within Microsoft’s Internet Division.  This included Microsoft Comic Chat (later called Microsoft Chat) – a project that I initiated earlier in Microsoft Research as an experiment to address many of the limitations in previous graphical chat representations.   The product shipped with Windows ’98, Windows NT 5, MSN 2.5, and Internet Explorer 3, 4, and 5..  It was localized to 24 different languages, shipped millions of copies, and four versions.  Received two patents for this work.  Also managed the development of other communications technologies, including the Microsoft Chat control, the Microsoft Java Chat applet, Microsoft VChat (3D Virtual Chat), and a prototype technology for allowing chat on any Web page.

Researcher.  Pursued research on intelligent interfaces, animation, illustration synthesis, information retrieval, and social interfaces.   Conceived and implemented a new visual representation for representing conversational histories, which later shipped as a successful Microsoft product (Microsoft Comic Chat and Microsoft Chat).  Collaborated on a project to build an agent-based interface for home electronic systems.   Loaned out to a product team to help design a multimodal interface for a new Microsoft systems architecture.  Published extensively, and helped organize several important conferences.

Summer Research Intern. Collaborated with members of Xerox PARC’s Imaging Group on projects relating to 2D illustration editing. Designed and implemented a graphical search and replace utility that facilitates coherent changes to illustrator documents. Received a patent for this work, and authored a SIGGRAPH paper on it.  Also worked on and curve types and curve editing features to illustration tools.

Summer Member of Technical Staff. Worked as a member of the Computer Graphics Division. Designed and coded a ray tracer which renders objects composed of quadric surface and polygon primitives. The system supports hierarchical scene descriptions with constructive solid geometry operations, texture-mapping and the definition of custom shaders.  Images produced have received awards and been widely published.

Systems Programmer. Provided UNIX software support for university computing facilities. Projects included coding device drivers, a system accounting program, and a terminal multiplexer.

Computer Programmer. Enhanced the data center’s primary graphics package to include a number of new capabilities. Wrote a data-dictionary driven database builder for a Department of Defense Multics system. Modified Software Cost Estimating System to run on Pentagon computers. Received secret security clearance.

Computer Programmer.  Developed pattern-based medical differential diagnosis routines. Co-authored two research papers on the diagnostic programs.

1989 – 1991.  Awarded IBM T. J. Watson doctoral research grant that fully funded my doctoral research during this period.

1987 – 1989.  Elected to the position of student representative to the faculty of the Computer Science Department, Columbia University.

1987.  Second Annual RasterTech International Computer Graphics Contest award for a computer-generated image, built with my own rendering system, which was subsequently exhibited in Boston’s Computer Museum.

1985 – 1989.  Fully supported research fellow in Computer Science at Columbia University.

1981.  National Merit Scholarship Finalist.

Gene Ball, Dan Ling, David Kurlander, John Miller, David Pugh, Tim Skelly, Andy Stankosky, David Thiel, Maarten Van Dantzich, and Trace Wax.  Lifelike Computer Characters: The Persona Project at Microsoft Research.  Software Agents. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (ed.).  AAAI/MIT Press. Menlo Park, CA. 1997.

David Kurlander. Chimera: Example-Based Graphical Editing.  Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Allen Cypher (ed.). MIT Press. 1993. pp. 271-290.

David Kurlander and Steven Feiner. History of Editable Graphical Histories.  Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Allen Cypher (ed.). MIT Press. 1993. pp. 405-413.

David Kurlander and Steven Feiner. A Visual Language for Browsing, Undoing, and Redoing Graphical Interface Commands. Visual Languages and Visual Programming.  S.K. Chang (ed.). Plenum Press, New York, NY. pp. 257-275, 1990.

David Kurlander and Steven Feiner. Editable Graphical Histories.  Visual Programming Environments: Applications and Issues. E.P. Glinert (ed.). IEEE Press, Los Alamitos, CA. pp. 416-423. 1990. Reprinted from 1988 IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages. pp. 127-134. October 1988. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

David Kurlander.  Thoughts on User Interface Research Processes and Agendas.  ACM Computing Surveys 28, 4 (December 1996).

David Kurlander and Steven Feiner. Inferring Constraints from Multiple Snapshots. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 12, 4 (October 1993). pp. 277-304.

Lawrence Wolff and David Kurlander. Ray Tracing with Polarization Parameters. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 10, 6 (November 1990). pp. 44-55.

David Kurlander, Tim Skelly, and David Salesin.  Comic Chat.  Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’96.  pp. 225-236. August 1996.  New Orleans, LA.

David Kurlander and Daniel T. Ling.  Planning-Based Control of Interface Animation.  Proceedings of CHI ‘95.  May 1995.  pp. 472-479.  Denver, CO. 

David Kurlander. Reducing Repetition in Graphical Editing. Proceedings of HCI International ‘93. August 1993. Orlando, FL.

David Kurlander and Steven Feiner. History-Based Macro by Example System. UIST ‘92 Proceedings. pp. 99-106. November 1992. Monterey, CA. Reprinted in Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Allen Cypher (ed). MIT Press. 1993. pp. 323-337.

David Kurlander and Steven Feiner. Interactive Constraint-Based Search and Replace.  CHI ’92 Proceedings. pp. 609-618. May 1992. Monterey, CA.

David Kurlander and Eric Bier. Graphical Search and Replace. Computer Graphics, 22, 4 (August 1988). Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ‘88. pp. 113-120. August 1988. Atlanta, Georgia.

Paul Fisher and David Kurlander. Pattern-Based Medical Diagnosis on a Microcomputer. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care. pp. 1420-1428. November 1980. Washington, D.C.

Paul Fisher and David Kurlander. Microcomputers in Medical Diagnosis.  Proceedings of the Annual Technical Symposium of the Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 75-79. October 1980. Nashville, Tennessee.

Richard Draves, David Kurlander, and Steven Levi.  Working with Microsoft Research: Both Sides of the Fence; Researchers Join the Product Groups.  Microsoft Interface.  June 1999.

David Kurlander. Persona: An Architecture for Animated Agent Interfaces. Imagina '98. March 1998. Monte Carlo, Monaco.

David Kurlander. Comic Chat: From Research to Product.  Interaction ’98.  March 1998.  Tokyo, Japan.

Karrie Jacobs. Digital Gods. I.D. Magazine: The International Design Magazine 43, 5 (September-October 1996). 84-87. (Includes a full page interview with David Kurlander).

David Kurlander. Graphical Editing by Example. Doctoral Dissertation, Computer Science Department, Columbia University. July 1993.

David Kurlander. Graphical Editing by Example: A Demonstration. SIGGRAPH Video Review, issue 89. 1993. Extended abstract in INTERCHI ‘93 Proceedings, p. 529. Also: Video available online.

David Kurlander and Steven Feiner. Editable Graphical Histories: The Video. SIGGRAPH Video Review, issue 63. 1991. Extended abstract in CHI ‘91 Proceedings, pp. 451-452. Also: Video available online.

David Kurlander. Graphical Editor Macros by Example. Columbia University Computer Science Technical Report CUCS 759-90. May 1990.

Eric Bier and David Kurlander. The MatchTool: An Introduction to Graphical Search and Replace.  SIGGRAPH Video Review, issue 48. 1989.

David Kurlander. Editor Extensibility: Domains and Mechanisms. Columbia University Computer Science Technical Report CUCS 516-89. May 1989.

Steven Bathiche, David Kurlander, Andy Wilson, Christina Chen, and Joel Dehlin.  Interaction Between Objects and a Virtual Environment Display, Part 2.  U.S. Patent 7,907,128 B2. Awarded March 15, 2011.

Steven Bathiche, David Kurlander, Joel Dehlin, Dawson Yee, Donald Gillett, Christina Chen.  Using Clear-Coded, See-Through Objects to Manipulate Virtual Objects.  U.S. Patent 7,576,725. Awarded August 18, 2009.

Robert Brigham, David Kurlander, Nigel Keam, Andrew Wilson. Using a Light Pointer for Input on an Interactive Display Surface. U.S. Patent 7,499,027. Awarded March 3, 2009.

David Kurlander and Joel Dehlin.  Invoking Applications with Virtual Objects on an Interactive Display.  U.S. Patent 7,467,380.  Awarded December 16, 2008.

David Kurlander, Yuan Kong, and David W. Williams.  Aggregation of Multi-Modal Devices.  U.S. Patent 7,467,353. Awarded December 16, 2008.

Shanku Niyogi, Greg Schechter, Regis Brid, David Kurlander, and Daniel Lehenbauer. Inserting Device Specific Content.  U.S. Patent 7,428,725.  Awarded September 23, 2008.

Steven Bathiche, David Kurlander, Andy Wilson, Christina Chen, and Joel Dehlin.  Interaction Between Objects and a Virtual Environment Display, Part 1.  U.S. Patent 7,394,459. Awarded July 1, 2008.

Shanku Niyogi, Greg Schechter, Regis Brid, David Kurlander, and Kris Nye.  Method and Systems for Interacting with Devices Having Different Capabilities.  U.S. Patent 7,380,250.  Awarded May 27, 2008.

David Kurlander.  Method and System for Generating User-Interface Output Sequences.  U.S. Patent 7,012,607. Awarded March 14, 2006.

Zicheng Liu, David Kurlander, David Williams, Michael Sinclair, Zhengyou Zhang.  Infrastructure for Multi-Modal Multilingual Communications Devices.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed November 2005.

David Kurlander, David W. Williams, Yuan Kong, Zhengyou Zhang.  Multi-Modal Devices Capable of Automated Actions.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed October 2005.

Zicheng Liu, Silviu-Petru Cucerzan, Zhengyou Zhang, David Kurlander, and Alejandro Acero.  Shopping Assistant.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed October 2005.

David Kurlander et al.  Multimodal Authentication.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed June 2005.

David Kurlander et al.  Health Monitor.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed June 2005.

David Kurlander et al.  Multimodal Note Taking, Annotation, and Gaming.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed June 2005.

David Kurlander et al.  Seamless Integration of Portable Computing Devices and Desktop Computers.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed June 2005.

David Kurlander et al.  Record and Playback Of Server Conversations From a Device.  U.S. Patent Proposal. Filed June 2005.

Silviu-Petru Cucerzan, David Kurlander, Michael Sinclair, Yuan Kong, Zhengyou Zhang, David Williams.  Location Aware Multi-Modal Multi-Lingual Device.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed June 2005.

Greg Schechter, David Kurlander, Shanku Niyogi, and Regis Brid.  Method and Apparatus for Applying an Adaptive Layout Process to a Layout Template.  U.S. Patent 6,772,144.  Awarded August 3, 2004.

David Kurlander, Christina Chen, and Joel Dehlin.  Restricting the Display of Information with a Physical Object.  U.S. Patent Proposal.  Filed June 2004.

David Kurlander.  Method and System for Generating Comic Panels, Part 2.  U.S. Patent 6,232,966 B1. Awarded May 15, 2001.

David Kurlander.  Method and System for Generating Comic Panels, Part 1.  U.S. Patent 6,069,622.  Awarded May 30, 2000.

Eric Bier and David Kurlander.  Interactive Graphical Search and Replace Utility for Computer Resident Synthetic Graphic Image Editors. U.S. Patent 5,133,052. Awarded July 21, 1992.

Trials and Tribulations Bringing Research to Product.  25th Anniversary of the Department of Computer Science, Columbia University.  New York, NY.  October 2004.

Designing a Toolkit for Creating Mobile Web Applications.  Human-Centered Computing Seminar.  U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department.  November 2001.

Bringing .NET to Mobile Devices.  Visual Studio.NET Conference.  General Session.  Copenhagen, Denmark.  March 2001.

Targeting Mobile Devices with Active Server Pages+.  Microsoft Professional Developers Conference.  Orlando, FL.  July 2000.

Comic Chat: Research and Product Retrospective.  New York Academy of Sciences.  January 1999.

Comic Chat: Research and Productization War Stories.

The Persona Project.  Imagina ’98.  March 1998.  Monte Carlo, Monaco.

Comic Chat: From Research to Product.  Keynote Talk.  Interaction ’98.  March 1998.  Tokyo, Japan. 

Comic Chat.

Computer Game Developer’s Conference.  San Jose, CA.  April 1997.
MIT Media Lab Distinguished Lecture Series.  Cambridge, MA.  November 1996.

Planning-Based Control of Interface Animation.  University of Washington.  Seattle, WA.  April 1996.

Graphical Editing by Example.

University of Washington. Seattle, WA.  November 1992. 
Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA.  April 1992. 
M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science. Cambridge, MA.  April 1992.
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Palo Alto, CA. April 1992.
DEC Systems Research Center. Palo Alto, CA.  April 1992.
Brown University. Providence, RI. April 1992.
University of Maryland. College Park, MD.  April 1992.
University of Arizona. Tucson, AZ.  April 1992.
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Hawthorn, NY.  March 1992
Sun Microsystems. Mountain View, CA.  March 1992.
Workshop on Programming by Example. Apple Computer.  Cupertino, CA.  March 1992.

Managing Information With and Within Graphical Histories.  CHI ‘91 Workshop on Size and Complexity Problems in Information Worlds. New Orleans, CA.  May 1991.

Graphical Macros by Demonstration.  IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Hawthorn, NY.  October 1991.

Editable Graphical Histories and Porting the NeWS Window System to HP Workstations.  HP Computer Graphics Symposium ‘89. Fort Collins, CO.  June 1989.

Graphical Search and Replace.  NICOGRAPH American Tour. New York, NY.  April 1989.

Ray-Tracing with Polarization.  HP Computer Graphics Symposium ‘88. Fort Collins, CO.  June 1988.

Lawrence Birnbaum, Eric Horvitz, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, Joe Marks, Steve Roth.  Compelling Intelligent User Interfaces – How Much AI?  Intelligent User Interfaces ’97.  pp. 173-175.

David Kurlander, Jean-Francois Puget, Jeff Heisserman. Commercial Applications of Constraint Programming. Principles and Practices of Constraint Programming ’94.  pp. 350-360.

Ephraim P. Glinert, Meera Blattner, Shi-Kuo Chang, David Kurlander. Visual Languages and Programming in the Year 2004.  IEEE Visual Languages ’94.  pp. 162-166.

Papers Committee Member and Session Chair.  SIGGRAPH ’01.  August 2001.

Conference Chair.  UIST ’96: The Ninth Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.  Seattle.  November 1996.

Committee Member.  Human Computer Interaction Working Group of the ACM Workshop on Strategic Directions in Computing Research.  Cambridge, MA.  June 1996.

Program Committee Member. UIST ’95: The Eighth Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.  Pittsburgh, PA.  November 1995.

Papers Committee Member.  CP ’95: The First International Conference on Constraint Programming.  Cassis, France.  September ’95. 

Program Committee Member. UIST ‘94: The Seventh Annual Symposium on   User Interface Software and Technology. Los Angeles. November 1994.

Papers Committee Member.  CHI ‘94: 1994 ACM Conference on Human in Computing Systems. Boston. May 1994.

Program Committee Member.  UIST ‘93: The Sixth Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Atlanta. November 1993.

Papers Committee Member.  VCHCI ‘93: Vienna Conference on Human Computer Interaction. Vienna. 1993.

Coeditor.  Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Allen Cypher (ed.). MIT Press. 1993.

Papers Committee Member. INTERCHI ‘93: International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Amsterdam. May 1993.

Fall 1987.  Instructor. W1003, Introduction to Computer Programming (for computer science majors). Had sole teaching responsibility for the course.

Spring 1986.  Teaching Assistant. W4160, Computer Graphics. Wrote course software and guest lectured.

Fall 1985.  Teaching Assistant. W4118, Operating Systems.

Spring 1984.  Teaching Fellow. CS175, Computer Graphics. Co-designed and implemented the rendering system that continued to be used by the graphics course for nearly a decade.

Fall 1983.  Teaching Fellow. AS10, Introduction to Computer Science. Taught a weekly section of the course.

Two Years ago, researcher David Kurlander developed a program that transforms the typed comments of people ’chatting’ with one another across the Internet into an interactive, real-time comic strip.  When the Internet product group got wind of Kurlander’s research, they grabbed it – and him.  For the past 18 months he’s been working in the product group, enjoying what he calls “a sabbatical” from research.  And his work?  It’s now called Microsoft Chat 2.0 and is available from www.microsoft.com.  “We didn’t want a situation like Xerox [PARC] where the research was decoupled from product design,” says Gates.  “[We want] people who are supersmart but also have a desire to see their work in use.
-  Mr. Gates Builds His Brain Trust.  Fortune, December 8, 1997

As Myhrvold [Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO] says, ‘If someone has a new idea, we can take that idea and put it in the hands of 100 million people.’  One example is Comic Chat – an idea born out of the graduate dissertation of David Kurlander of the User Interface Group. Kurlander proposed that the history of an Internet chat session could be portrayed in a comic strip, making it easy for newcomers to the session to see what had gone on before their arrival. The idea went from concept to product in just 9 months and is now a regular feature of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.  Indeed, Kurlander was so committed to Comic Chat that he had himself transferred to a product group to see it through.
-  Microsoft Researches Its Future. Science Magazine, February 27, 1998

David Kurlander, an expert in user interfaces, created a World Wide Web program that turns people's typed-in comments into an instant comic strip. People choose their characters, and the program automatically determines their gestures, location and their arrangement in the landscape -- with bizarre and funny results.  Besides high salaries and stock options, Microsoft has a powerful carrot to dangle in front of such creative people – the chance to have an impact on millions of PC users.
-  Microsoft to Unveil Chip Project Aimed at Displaying 3-D on PCs.  Wall Street Journal, August 6, 1996

STOP THE PRESSES: Microsoft has a sense of humor.  Comic Chat is a delight.
-  Review in PC World, January 1997

Comic Chat is one of the Top 10 Multimedia Communications Tools.
-  PCWorld.com, November 17, 1999

Microsoft Comic Chat.  This one’s hysterical…. This visual chat is by far the easiest to learn….. Barrels of fun – this one’s best if the rooms aren’t too crowded, and even with only three people in the room, the conversations are a laugh a minute.
- Yahoo! Wild Web Rides.  J. Tarin Towers with Forward by Jerry Yang and David Filo.  IDG Books Worldwide. 1996

Visual Studio .NET, along with the Mobile Internet Toolkit, was an easy choice to make.  It allowed us to deliver customized pages for myriad devices quickly and cost effectively, plus we have the flexibility to build in exciting new features that will help SAS serve customers even better in the future.
-  Peter Müller, Deputy Director, Scandinavian IT Group (which built SAS Airline’s Mobile Web site)

The Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit and Visual Studio .NET enabled us to create a mobile site that can be accessed by a wide range of mobile devices in less than 30 days.  All we had to do was build the pages once, call our existing XML Web service to access the mainframe, and we're good-to-go.
-  Don Horner, Senior Programmer/Analyst, Advanced Technology Group, Dollar-Rent-A-Car

.NET allows us to reach out to different devices, based on one code-base, and that for us is very important.  It saves us a lot of time from having to develop for each individual, specific device.
- Derrick Blanco, Sr. Applications Developer, Continental Airlines

PDAs and smart phones are becoming increasingly capable and more affordable, and they provide an excellent platform for business Web applications.  We are still left with a wide variety of different platforms, though. We've got different screen sizes; HTML, cHTML, and WAP markup languages (and different versions of those); color and noncolor; and so on. Fortunately, software companies are producing products that allow developers to build their application once and let the product take care of optimizing the output for a particular device. We think that the most exciting of all these products is the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit…. "Adaptability, customizability, extensibility" is a mantra often repeated by the Mobile Internet Toolkit team at Microsoft, and this phrase describes the toolkit's capabilities pretty well. Applications adapt to the different capabilities of mobile clients, you can easily customize your applications to take advantage of the unique capabilities of any particular device, and the product is extensible, so you can easily create new controls or add support for new handheld devices that become available.  Developing early mobile applications was frustrating and challenging. With the Mobile Internet Toolkit, we can spend a fraction of the time it once took to produce an application and then immediately access it from a wide variety of browsers, including those that support HTML, cHTML, and WML. Now how cool is that?
-  Building .NET Applications for Mobile Devices.  Andy Wigley, Peter Roxburgh.  Microsoft Press. 2002

DJ, you have a heck of a lot to feel proud about in shipping MMIT v1.  You and your team have stuck to the core vision for several years, and you delivered a product that is truly changing the world.  Consistently, I get very, very positive feedback from customers about your work.  MMIT has brought the new platform to mobile devices in a very effective manner, and people are very surprised at how complete and reliable the solution really is.
-  David Treadwell, General Manager, and later Vice President of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division (writing in David Kurlander’s performance review)

We see this as a multibillion-dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror.
- Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corporation

“All you have to do is reach out and touch the Surface,” Gates told me with barely concealed pride. “And it responds to what you do.”  In an industry whose bold pronouncements about the future have taught me the benefits of skepticism, Surface took my breath away. If the Surface project rollout goes as planned in November, it could alter the way everyday Americans control the technology that currently overwhelms many of us.
- Paul Hochman, Gear and Technology Editor, NBC’s Today Show

People have been asking if Microsoft is still an innovator. I think this silences critics.
- Michael Gartenberg, Vice President, JupiterResearch

This is game-changing and will cause companies like Apple and Google to go back on their heels. I try not to gush too much. I think this is a really big deal.
- Roger Kay, President of Endpoint Technologies Associates (in USA Today)

We all sat around the table and watched the demonstration, and my jaw dropped.  Our biggest concern is that it's going to create standing-room-only in our lobby, and people are going to be lining up to try it. But that's a nice problem to have.
- Hoyt Harper II, Vice President for Brand Management, Sheraton

It doesn't just have a touch-sensitive screen on its surface; it's designed to be used by several people at once, with multiple fingers or even both hands. It can also identify objects that are placed upon it and interact with them. Nobody who'd seen Minority Report could overlook the similarities to Tom Cruise's crime-busting computer, an interface that let him manipulate data with a wave of his hand…. The overall effect is enchanting—not something I'm used to saying about any technology product, let alone one from Microsoft.
- Harry McCracken, Slate Magazine, June 4, 2007

We used to say a computer on every desktop, but now we say every desktop will be a computer.  It's simple, it's convenient, and it's fun to do.  Now this is drop-dead simple. You don't have to know computing to be able to use this product.
- Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation

I think you are one of the most exceptional leaders in the company around incubation of new ideas.  I can’t point to another person, who, without the direct backing of someone like BillG, has really taken a new idea from concept to possible product as quickly and as effectively as you have.
-  Lisa Brummel, Vice President of the Home and Retail Division, Microsoft. (writing in David Kurlander’s performance review)