Reading through the overwhelmingly positive comments about Microsoft's Bing Maps augmented reality demonstration at last week's TED conference, I did several double-takes just to make sure I wasn't missing some hidden sarcasm. I've written about Microsoft for almost eight years now, and maybe I'm forgetting something, but I can't recall such a favorable reaction to one of the company's technologies.

And then it happened again this morning.

Whether or not the reaction turns out to be justified, many tech bloggers and gadget hounds are saying extremely positive things about the company's new Windows Phone technologies. "No matter who you root for, to be anything short of impressed is stupid," writes Gizmodo's Wilson Rothman.

Add to this the relatively smooth launch of Windows 7, and the buzz over the upcoming Project Natal motion-sensitive Xbox 360 controller, and suddenly this doesn't seem like the same old Microsoft, the one described in a widely read New York Times commentary by a former company executive.

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But, of course, there's a big caveat here.

The problem is that, with the exception of the new operating system, all of the aforementioned technologies have yet to be formally released. The first of the new Windows Phones won't be be on the market until later this year. Same with Project Natal. The Flickr photo integration with Bing Maps is currently available as a technology preview, but when I followed up for more information on the other technologies from the TED demo, Microsoft declined to provide any information about the possible timing of their release.

And therein lies Microsoft's next big challenge: Following through and continuing to maintain -- and justify -- the positive sentiment as it brings these new technologies to market.

To be sure, simply being able to announce some buzzworthy consumer products is a noteworthy development for a company with a tendency to confine the cool stuff to its research labs. But before we jump to any wild conclusions, let's mark our calendars to check back in on this topic around the end of the year.

In the meantime, I'm holding out hope that Microsoft will finally release as a product one of the coolest things I've ever seen from the company -- that coffee-finding, GPS-enabled mariners compass that they showed a few years ago at a research event. OK, I'm mostly kidding, and it was never meant to be more than a prototype, but as long as Microsoft's paradigm is shifting, I figure it doesn't hurt to put in a request.