I'm not sure what to make of Robert Scoble's post today entitled "Microsoft researchers make me cry". He lays out a few times in the history of tech since the 1970s that have made him cry - we can assume in a good way, though I'm not sure there is a 'good way' to cry over tech - the Apple II, Microsoft Excel, Pagemaker, Photoshop, Netscape running the World Wide Web, among others. This is of course to preface that what he saw yesterday from two Microsoft researchers.

Scoble, ever the tease, won't be allowed to talk about this *thing* until February 27th, but he does dish out a few clues in his long post:

• The two researchers behind it are Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay.
• It has no business model (a new Twitter?) and probably couldn't have been made by a startup because VCs would see no value in it.
• If he described it now we'd probably think it was lame without seeing a video of it in action.
• It borrows from techniques the Google Maps team is using?
• It is or utilizes some kind of software that will change the world his sons live in.

Anyone with any ideas?

While Dave Winer says in a comment on Scoble's post that he got "the image of William Hurt in Broadcast News when I read about the tear running down your cheek." I got a very different image - one of Wormtongue (Brad Dourif) in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with a tear running down his cheek as he first sees Saruman's massive army of Urk-hai and knows they could possibly destroy the world.

So is this the Microsoft Doomsday Device?

We'll know more at a press conference on February 27th - I hope this can live up to such a huge amount of hype, but I'm naturally skeptical.


[UPDATE]: After seeing the blogosphere's reaction, Scoble wrote a follow-up post seeming to dial-back expectations a bit. Probably a good move, very few things live up to their hype and if this is something that is actually cool from Microsoft it'd be a shame to have it be dragged through the mud simply because it was hailed as the savior of human-kind before it even launched.