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Watching a demo at Microsoft today.

The features demonstrated were similar to Apple’s OS of four years prior (from rapid wakeup, to the dock (task bar), to screen and widget management, to the use of translucency on frames), but somehow that made me feel comfortable, like a leitmotif in the diffusion of design. Imagine how shocking it would be to see something new, even an artistic departure.

The one visual feature that looked like it departed from the OS X look-and-feel was tiled windows (filling the screen instead of overlapping), a feature that came and went in Windows 1.0 and now it’s back.

Then we saw a premier of the Windows 7 TV ad spot. It shows a young girl using a PC to make an animation of how easy Windows 7 is to use… and she ends with a zinger of an Apple-ad allusion: “I’m a PC, and this is getting good.”

I did get a copy of Windows 7 to play with; will need to find a PC at work.

The most interesting demo and discussion for me was around Bing. Imagine that. Badda Bing, badda boom! It is like a coral reef of specialized post-processing and data integration in the canonical verticals. Barney Pell called it “the professionalization of search, like with data mining and databases before, from one-size-fits-all, to specialization around common tasks.”

Ballmer was full of vigor and pithy quips, as usual (I had a prior conversation with the Microsoft team on what is on and off the record, and in striking that balance, I left out the gratuitously funny comments, as they may be a bit embarrassing out of context… but they sure made the day fun):

“In Search, we are like The Little Engine that Could. Anyone with single digit market share has to take that perspective.

We are absolutely committed to get to scale in the search business.

The next 5 years of search will bring more innovation than the past five years. Especially in the user interface. Think of how dull a search page is. Visualization and Natural Language processing are the two big future areas.

In retail today, there is Best Buy and Apple. And that makes Best Buy more pro-Apple than they otherwise might be. On Oct 22, we will open a couple stores.

In phones, PCs and TVs, I don’t think the hardware and software will come from one vendor. There’s a natural layering. In low volume products, like music players or game boxes, they can be integrated. But for high volume products, one vendor can’t do it all.

It’s very unlikely that we would do a phone. The BIOS has not yet been defined. The abstraction between hardware and software is not done yet.”

Muglia showed a snazzy demo of Excel 2010 linked to SQL Server with 100 million lines of data. He claims it is a main memory database, and what we saw were sorts and simple queries with sub-second responses on a “normal $1000 PC”

He also opines: