Nestled among the many indistinguishable buildings of Microsoft’s Redmond campus, a multi-disciplinary team sharing an attention to detail that borders on fanatical is designing a keyboard… again and again and again. And one more time for good measure. Their dogged and ever-evolving dedication to “human factors” shows the amount of work that goes into making any piece of hardware truly ergonomic.
Microsoft may be known primarily for its software and services, but cast your mind back a bit and you’ll find a series of hardware advances that have redefine their respective categories:
The original Natural Keyboard was the first split-key, ergonomic keyboard, the fundamentals of which have only ever been slightly improved upon.
The Intellimouse Optical not only made the first truly popular leap away from ball-based mice, but did so in such a way that its shape and buttons still make its descendants among the best all-purpose mice on the market.
Remember me?
Although the Zune is remembered more for being a colossal boondoggle than a great music player, it was very much the latter, and I still use and marvel at the usability of my Zune HD. Yes, seriously. (Microsoft, open source the software!)
More recently, the Surface series …read more
Source:: TechCrunch Gadgets
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