Microsoft presents Montage

First of all I’m impressed how microsoft comes back from the ashes of crappy advertising and reinvents itself in that manner. Most of their recent ads are actually AMAZING pieces of work. It’s good to see that the “boring old PC” is getting the creative treatment. Well corporation-wise at least.

But the main thing I’d like to mention here is that they’re introducing a cloud based “magazine editor” that allows users to create their own magazines from the content from the web. This is an amazing idea and in fact I think it will be another thing that revolutionizes journalism in the e-world. Sure most of the things will be crappy, clip-art things from people with no imagination, but imagine those tools in the hands of someone wanting to do something really creative who doesn’t have programming knowledge. Yeah, that’s right! It can be huge. We just have to wait and see.

Apple + News Corp. = The Daily?

Apple is pushing forward the magazine revolution by cooperating with news corp. and they want to create a tablet-only newspaper. This is revolutionary and exciting for a couple of reasons. One – right now the tablet papers are “versions” of a regular paper. This one will be completely 1’s and 0’s so less trees will die in the process. Good.

There seems to be a lot of discussion about it recently, but mostly content-wise or about their future plans – i.e. more electronic only but high quality content publications. And yet everyone seems to be missing one point – since we already kinda know how a tablet magazine should look and work in terms of visuals and interface, is it the time for an “apple style revolution” again? Will they invent a tablet newspaper interface of their own, or will they simply base it on the best ones out there (Flipboard). ?

We’ll probably see sometime mid-december. And if the interface will be new it might be a start for A LOT of change coming soon to the tablet publishing industry. Well unless it’s actually any good…