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Microsoft’s Surface Garage: A Cross-Department Dev Team, With Pizza And Beer
- waterside81 15y agoMSFT really let an opportunity slip here. I know a developer team here in Toronto that got access to Surface's SDK and was overwhelmed by the demand of customers who wanted Surface apps built. One in particular was a large telco here in Canada, Rogers, that wanted to put one in each retail store. When you wanted to know about a particular phone, you would put the phone onto the Surface screen and then the screen would present all sorts of specs & pricing plans. When you were happy with your selection, the customer service rep would put their badge down (which contained some authentication info) onto the Surface and that would complete the transaction. I'm not sure if the costs of these have dropped over the years enough to make it more affordable for 3rd parties to have at it, but it seems like a wasted opportunity that it was never really pursued in the first place. And by all accounts, the API was pretty easy to use, too.