I was cleaning out some drawers and I found one of my old Suunto Spot watches. I’m pretty sure I have a charger for this in another drawer so maybe I’ll have to charge it up. When you look at .NetMF you see ‘SPOT’ in the namespaces which stands for ‘Smart Personal Objects Technology’ and SPOT was first publically announced by Bill Gates at the COMDEX computer exposition event in 2002 and was a research project led by Bill Mitchell (now CEO at PicoBrew Inc so small is still his passion) and the Microsoft Research Division. To me SPOT was typical of Microsoft, very cool and advanced use of technology and innovation, but marketing that just wasn’t anywhere close to what it would take to make it a successful product, but however technical lessons noted and learned and the technology guys moved on to something else that was a cool technology challenge and the technology morphed into something else and waited for its day in the sun.
So every time you fire up .NetMF you are firing up almost 15 years of small device history at Microsoft and starting to share a secret that a number of internal research groups already know at Microsoft, that .NetMF rocks!!!
