Microsoft has a mixed record with new technology. Its Zune music player has not yet become a major challenger to Apple Inc.'s iPod, but its Xbox 360 game console has enjoyed early success in the battle of next-generation game machines.
For years Gates has championed touch-screen technology such as the tablet PC with little success, but the Surface is a totally different shape and allows for multiple users at once.
In a demonstration, Microsoft placed a digital camera with a wireless chip on the tabletop. The Surface recognized the camera and sent its pictures to the display, allowing people around the table to sift through them, grabbing and turning pictures or making them bigger or smaller by spreading or narrowing their fingers.
Microsoft showed in another demonstration how Deutsche Telekom cell phone operator T-Mobile USA, one of its launch partners, could deploy the computer in its stores.
A customer can grab a phone off the shelf, place it on the tabletop where it will recognize the device and pop up the handset's specifications and information to the screen. For a side-by-side comparison with another phone, the customer can put down a second handset next to the first phone.
"It's drop-dead simple and people really like it, because it mimics what they do in the real world," said Pete Thompson, general manager of Microsoft's surface computing business.
Microsoft said at launch it will deploy a virtual concierge for Harrah's Entertainment Inc.'s casinos in Las Vegas and place the surface computers in the lobbies of Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide Inc.'s Sheraton hotels.
It also signed a distribution and development agreement with slot-machine maker International Game Technology.
I think this computer could be amazing to have, i think it was a great idea! 
