
This is the Microsoft I want to see: A Glimpse Ahead - fuzzmeister
http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/28/this-is-the-microsoft-i-want-to-see/
======
kenshi
Microsoft (along with lots of other companies) have put together lots of great
concept videos in the past. I've seen amazing concept videos from MS, Sony and
Orange (UK mobile operator company) over the last 10 years.

Making a concept video or having a group of talented people with a good vision
doesn't mean the corporation is actually going to deliver on that vision. You
can bet every big company has a load of talented people with great ideas and
talent inside it. But the machinery and politics of the big company pretty
much dictate the really groundbreaking ideas aren't going to make it out of
the R&D lab.

~~~
joe_the_user
It is not clear to me what concepts in this video are. There's lots of touch-
screen-y stuff and shared screens.

But given that tablet technology has not proved its usefulness where it is
available, I'm not sure if making more common would make it more useful.

Sure, it's nice to see a video of programs responding to a gesture according
to what the person apparently wants. No one has yet created an environment
where that happens (the iPhone GUI is a perhaps closest).

------
lunchbox
This video consists of snippets from previous "Microsoft future vision"
videos. Full videos here:
[http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/b112da1c-c918-4...](http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/b112da1c-c918-41ee-
bb45-d6a553496168)

The healthcare video is the one that seems to get the most attention. (When I
first saw it, everyone around me was "ooh"ing and "aah"ing.) I actually found
the video to be a pretty banal vision of the future of healthcare. You don't
fix healthcare by adding a bunch of touch screens everywhere. What _would_
have impressed me is if any of the following had been featured:

\- AI decision support helps the doctor correctly diagnose a patient's disease
(think 20q.net, but for medicine)

\- Software that helps nurses in the ER triage patients and queues them to be
seen based on a mathematical model to minimize costs and morbidity

\- Enterprise resource management that ensures all resources are delivered
around the hospital like clockwork

\- Telepresence software that lets a surgeon in China watch and maybe even
guide the surgery

\- An app that gives patients specific recommendations based on their genotype
and lets them communicate with others who have similar genes (see
<http://www.patientslikeme.com/>)

These things would not have made great eye candy, but they are _far_ more
important to the future of healthcare.

------
sunkencity
By the time anything of this comes down to the consumer it will suck
tremendously. It's incredibly difficult for big companies to innovate. They'd
be better off just buying smaller interesting companies to aquire interesting
technologies rather than trying to implement it themselves. Like Next buying
that french? company to get Objective-C.

~~~
kailashbadu
And How did you conclusively know that it will suck when it comes to
consumers? some occult prescience or just devil’s advocacy. Pray enlighten us!

~~~
Andys
Because with this video Microsoft isn't showing that they are solving any
real, actual problems in people's lives.

To me, the suckage is that its all just gimmicks: the marketing department
tricking people into buying things they don't really need.

~~~
Retric
Videos like that are a clear sign of a company that can't innovate. Creating a
video like that suggests Microsoft's "creative" people are not really part of
the design processes and the company has no idea what to do with them. And
those "Creative" people don't understand what makes useful advances vs. art.

None of those "products" would be that hard to prototype today, but the
interfaces are just not that useful. Take that screen shot capture in the
meeting. Now outlook or some location aware system could keep track of where
people are and link to the meeting notes, but no they want to guess where
you're eyes are and figure out where the screen is ect. It's different, but
not useful.

------
swaroop
Reminds me of the Longhorn promise (WinFS, etc), and we ended up with Vista
(it's a decent OS, but as an end-user, it just hogs more memory, I don't see
any other benefits).

I hope they make this happen though.

------
jodrellblank
That's such a predictable future it makes me suspicious.

Newspapers? Devices that need a stylus to use the screen? No keyboards?
Nothing wearable, no summary dashboards?

It looks a lot like a read-only, use-only, no-hacking, Trusted DRM Limited
swirly interface kind of future to me.

~~~
thwarted
I thought this looked like a future as envisioned in the 90s. There sure is a
lot of "copy files around", moving them between devices, taking snap shots of
them, for a future of always-on, always-accessible remote storage.

------
ctingom
Really interesting video. Most of the products looked like they were well
designed but just like all of the stuff coming out of Detroit, why bother
making concept products if you don't intend to actually build them?

~~~
axod
PR? Try to convince people you're innovating and still relevant?

------
metatronscube
If this is a glimpse of our technological future I don't think it will be
coming courtesy of Microsoft. All they need to do for me is concentrate on
actually delivering an operating system that I can use for a change. They need
to stop the dreaming and show us some of the things that they are working on
now. I mean they have one main product, and its been a botched mess since XP.

If any company is going to deliver these kinds of solutions I think its going
to be Google and Apple.

------
anewaccountname
There are two ways to enable everything to talk in a slick manner like this:
brutal monopoly, or open standards. As evidenced by this video the "new"
Microsoft has all sorts of cool ideas, but I'm willing to bet they see the
enabler the same way as the "old" microsoft. Brutal monopoly.

------
antiform
I don't understand why there's so much hate for Microsoft. There's much more
to Microsoft than just Windows, Office, and Live Search. For one, I'm
impressed by some of the stuff coming out of Microsoft Research that was shown
at Techfest 2009, their internal research conference, in the last couple of
days: [[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/events/techfest2009/vide...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/events/techfest2009/videos.aspx)]

------
vgolf
The main difficulty with this kind of vision is that people need to build a
system to support it. It is not like a single company can make the devices,
the software, the infastructure, the economic environment, the incentives,
etc. So one must develop and establish rules and interoperability protocols.
And this takes a lot of time.

Expressing the vision and trying to build parts of it (e.g. microsoft surface)
does not hurt, though.

~~~
shiranaihito
> It is not like a single company can make the devices, the software, the
> infastructure, the economic environment, the incentives, etc.

Apple?

~~~
unalone
It's worth noting that Apple never makes concept videos, mainly because their
creative minds actually make real products.

~~~
shiranaihito
I've seen this mentioned too. It seems they do concentrate on just shipping
stuff.

"Here's this phone we made.."

------
jmtame
im looking for the blue screen of death in one of these concepts

------
TweedHeads
It is not about vision, it's about mantra.

Theirs is to fuck up everybody for their only benefit and that doesn't fit
with my view of a cooperative world for the benefit of all.

Call me romantic or idiot, not both.

