5 things you didn't know were invented by Microsoft

During its half-century of existence, Microsoft has brought forth a plethora of products, but the company also has a number of inventions under its belt. While some are quite popular, you probably wouldn't guess they were invented by the Redmond Giant.

The Comic Sans font

The (in)famous Comis Sans font first saw the light of day in a Microsoft office more than three decades ago. Back in 1994, Vincent Connare, a graphic designer at Microsoft, saw an early version of Microsoft Bob and thought the font it used was too serious for a piece of software aimed at introducing Windows 95 to people who had never used it.

His idea was to create a playful, light-hearted-looking font to accompany Microsoft Bob's cartoon dog assistant, Rover. His inspiration came from comic book speech bubbles and the typefaces within them, especially the one used in Watchmen .

The idea was approved, execution was flawless, but the timing was off. Vincent finished his work on Comic Sans too late for it to be included in Microsoft Bob, but Comic Sans had found its way into Microsoft 3D Movie Maker and was later shipped with the OEM versions of Windows 95.

Three decades later, Comic Sans remains one of the most polarizing fonts out there. While there's nothing objectively wrong with it—many designers would disagree—its use in serious contexts, such as formal documents and business emails, is often seen as inappropriate. Personally, I don't mind it, but I do find it a bit goofy and understand why the prevailing view is that Comic Sans shouldn't be used for serious matters.

The dual-touch screen tablet form factor

While the first commercial dual-touch screen tablet, the Acer Iconia 6120, was released in 2011 (Toshiba had released its Libretto W100 a year earlier, but that device was classified as a laptop), Microsoft had been working on its own dual-touch screen tablet, the Microsoft Courier, as early as 2009.

The project was the brainchild of J Allard, the man who co-founded the Xbox project and played a significant role in the creation of Xbox Live. His vision was of a creative-first tablet, equipped with two touch screens that would allow creative professionals to quickly and easily give form to their ideas by hand, or with the help of a stylus.

The device ran a modified version of Windows CE and was intended to complement PCs, not replace them. This didn't gel with Microsoft's leadership, especially Bill Gates, who thought the tablet wasn't a good fit for the broader Windows ecosystem.

On top of that, Microsoft had already been working on a touch-friendly version of Windows that would ultimately become Windows 8 and Windows RT (a version of Windows 8 for ARM devices). The Courier simply wasn't part of the broader plan the company had for Windows 8. Ultimately, the Courier project was canceled in mid-2010.

Two years later, the competing project—Microsoft Surface—debuted to a tepid reception. In the following years, however, the Surface line would go on to become one of Microsoft's most successful hardware products.

Microsoft took another stab at the dual-touch screen form factor with the Surface Duo. While the device was intriguing in many ways and even received a successor in the form of the Surface Duo 2, the Surface Duo family didn't capture the market's attention and ended up a failure.

A motion controller that doesn't require a physical controller

The Wii was a smashing hit for Nintendo, primarily because of its motion controls and a plethora of excellent games that used them.

Naturally, other players in the space wanted to repeat Nintendo's success, resulting in PlayStation Move from Sony, and Project Natal from Microsoft, better known as Kinect.

While Sony didn't reinvent the wheel with its Move controller, Microsoft moved the needle in the motion-control space with Kinect, the first motion controller that didn't require physical controllers. You could control games only with your hands and body; no additional hardware was needed.

So while trying to one-up the Wii, Microsoft went a bit overboard and invented an entirely new type of motion controller. While Kinect did attract more casual gamers to the Xbox 360, the decision to bundle it with the Xbox One was one of the reasons the console failed. Despite Microsoft discontinuing it almost a decade ago, Kinect is still a pretty advanced piece of hardware you can use for a number of DIY projects .

Holoportation

According to Microsoft , "Holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed, and transmitted anywhere in the world in real time." The technology uses Azure Kinect devices (a beefed-up version of Microsoft Kinect) for 3D scans.

In other words, Holoportation could serve as the foundation for a mixed reality video conferencing platform that uses real-time animated 3D models of participants rather than user-created avatars like those in VRChat .

Unfortunately, Holoportation is still in early stages, and considering the popularity— or lack thereof —of Microsoft HoloLens and other mixed reality headsets such as the Apple Vision Pro , there's a slim chance you'll be able to chat with 3D-scanned avatars of your friends anytime soon.

Modern skill-based matchmaking

Now, I would never have guessed that Microsoft, of all companies, invented modern skill-based matchmaking. But the company did, in fact, develop the first skill-based ranking system tailor-made for video games, called TrueSkill. The system ranks players based on their skill and matches them against other players of a similar skill level.

TrueSkill differs from the ELO rating system, a popular ranking technique used to calculate player skill in chess, in that it can calculate the skill of individual players much faster, and that it works well in games with more than two players, which includes most online multiplayer video games. Also, whereas the ELO system represents skill with a single number, TrueSkill uses two numbers: the average skill of an individual player and the degree of uncertainty in the player's skill.

TrueSkill was developed by Ralf Herbrich and Thore Graepel. They worked at Microsoft back in the early aughts, and both were avid gamers, with Halo 2 being their favorite multiplayer shooter at the time. The idea of creating a new ranking and matchmaking system for multiplayer video games first came about while they were playing the Halo 2 beta. They found the game's ranking system too slow at calculating the skill level of individual players, leading to highly skilled players needing to play tons of matches to move up through the ranks.

What they made was TrueSkill, a new type of ranking system that kicked off skill-based matchmaking as we know it. The first game that used TrueSkill was Halo 3 , and most Microsoft-made multiplayer games since then have either used TrueSkill or TrueSkill 2, which debuted in 2018.

Contrary to popular belief, Halo 2 didn't use TrueSkill. However, the game did feature a sort of prototype of skill-based matchmaking based on the ELO system developed by Max Hoberman, the Halo 2 multiplayer lead.

---

While it has a number of cool inventions in its portfolio, Microsoft has been struggling with hardware products since forever. A case in point is the Courier, a device that was a decade ahead of its time, but never moved past the prototype stage. Another interesting tidbit about the company is that, while Microsoft doesn't offer any smart home hardware, it got a surprising number of things right in its 1999 smart home video .