Innovation in a small way – Microsoft media player

The latest version of Microsoft Media Player has a cool feature. If you minimize it, you can have it on your taskbar with all the key controls in place. Here is are two images of the media player on the task bar

1. When play is ON

2. When paused

“What’s the big deal?” you ask.

First, I think the taskbar resident mediaplayer with all controls is cool. Second, observe that the “play” and the “pause” buttons are interchangeable. For ages, there would be two buttons one for “play” and the other one for “pause”

You don’t have to be a genius to innovate. You can just look at doing things differently. Most cool innovations have a common theme – the outcome looks obvious once the new way is implemented.