Is it really any surprise that Microsoft wants to create a Flickr competitor? Is there anything that has been remotely successful in the past 5 years in the Internet/tech realm that Microsoft hasn’t tried their hand at?

Is it too much to ask for Microsoft to use all those billions of dollars they have for R&D to come up with something new? Maybe it’ll suck, but just try it. I know it isn’t technically new, but Microsoft was trying to be the first to market with a viable large-scale Multi-touch system – their ‘Surface Computer’. This was cool and I had absolutely no qualms about saying so.

The first of these systems were supposed to roll out to hotels and casinos right around now, but guess what happened? Delays. Now we can only hope to see them by Spring of 2008. When Apple was worried they were going to miss the iPhone launch they pulled all the resources they could to the detriment of things like OS X “Leopard” (which was delayed 6 months) – can Microsoft not do this with Surface Computing?

I’m sure I don’t know a lot of the intricacies about how Microsoft works and so people will want to jump on me for saying something like that, but to me it comes down to this: why is Microsoft so worried about launching fill-in-the-blank competitor after fill-in-the-blank competitor – the majority of which are crap when compared with the original – when they have something that seems to be very cool just about ready to deploy? Why not focus on that? Or why not focus on more new areas like that? I don’t need or want another Flickr competitor.

Meanwhile from Flickr I’m still waiting on that ‘Places‘ launch and when on Earth are they going to get around to launching a video portion of the site?