The Future According to Microsoft

March 1, 2009 · Comments

I’m a big fan of future visions from technology companies. This stuff from Microsoft seems reasonable. It’s mostly an extrapolation from Surface forward. I found it at Download Squad.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

What’s your take?

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  • looks positive! very sci-fi,,,,
  • It looks like a real live version of tech used in "Minority Report" and "Ironman". Pretty cool

    @bookerx3
  • On the one hand, this is an exciting and inspiring vision. On the other hand, I can't help but wonder why Microsoft is spending their time on this type of thinking when they have just wasted years trying to create an operating system that utilizes today's hardware/software capabilities.

    I have no doubt the future will resemble something like this video, but will it be companies like Microsoft that deliver it to us? History tells us "no!"
  • Interesting how the evolution of technology is shaping our lives. The flexible newspaper clip is an example of how the print industry must evolve. For that matter every business must adapt to technology faster than ever before. It's exciting for techies and geeks. It means new jobs, new careers. Yet at the same time, a loss of jobs. Case in point the daily papers that are failing rapidly.

    Enough rambling...Good find thanks for sharing :-)
  • I think they are missing the larger picture...sure there will be lots of cool gadgets but we are moving away from consumerism into an era of global engagement...the picture of the future IMO will be very different...
  • Microsoft always has had great vision for the future, but is always held back by it's legacy support. This vision of the future will never happen unless they make the leap and abandon there need to support older machines, businesses who refuse to upgrade, and users who are too afraid of anything new.
  • Tim Andren
    Makes me chuckle to look at static web interfaces on monitors when we know this is right around the corner. The holographic stuff will change our spatial relationships.
  • John Leschinski mentioned above what amounts to a failure to recognize and or embrace a paradigm shift.
    Though in the past many people and companies may have ignored the need for a shift or wasted time with legacy, many others will embrace the need for such shifts and drag the rest of them along. As things increasingly develop and speed up, everyone will need to change or get left behind.
    At any rate, the changes look intriguing. Whether M$ brings them market or not someone will and I can't wait to experience them.
  • I like this a lot - I had a play with the surface a few months back - very very cool. Its a way off before its hits the consumer world, but convergence is on the way. At what point is there a revolt against technology.... (I hope not soon) I love all this...
  • I saw this at a private MSFT event. It's incredible. The newspaper portion alone should be a prioritized product development, especially urgent with the current state of print journalism.

    Imagine how quickly MSFT could gain back their market-leadership position from google if they created a portable paper-like version of the Surface that incorporated standardized dynamic ad units into the display of content.
  • I don't think Microsoft can pull this off.... After decades of being a MS customer I recently went all Apple. Can Microsoft build anything that works?
  • Susan: yes. Xbox 360.
  • All a possibility, but only on a much better network and serious data portability advancements. Government regulations could also be a problem.
  • Nice video but is it possible - no on knows....
    I remember in 1990 (back to the future movies) they said we'd be driving hover cars by the year 2000... its almost 10 years since that day and no hover-cars. However, some cool things have come out and changed the way we communicate - lets use community networking as an example or just even the power of the recent Xbox.....

    b
  • This is an awesome video, the microsoft one. the unlimited amount of connectivity enthralls me and also terrifies me at the same time. I love how the card flipped out and was a business card, a PDA, a TV, really anything you wanted it to be. It would connect with whomever you wanted it to connect.

    It reminded me of that scene in Big where they were designing all the toys and making up the rules as they went along. This gave me a similar vibe.

    Here's to the future :)
  • I like futuristic stuff and it is interesting, the more things go "digital" the more they seek to emulate and interact with our "analog" vision of what things are supposed to be. For example, newspaper are supposed to be big sheets of paper, read at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee. Even the digital one, though it wipes clean and repaginates, does that.

    My take on all this future stuff, however, is to look at future films of the past -- even as recent as the 1980s. Nobody got the 16:9 television. Even when screens were larger, wall-sized, the 4:3 format still reigned.
  • This looks great and is interesting, but is it really anything more than an evolution of current smartphone technology? I am reminded of the current iphone advert which shows a user easily downloading and then using an app. And at the bottom of the screen is the inevitable small print - sequence speeded up and steps removed.

    Lets concentrate on really good mobile connections (I still can't get a phone to work for more than three minutes at a time on the Manchester to London rail line never mind the internet) before worrying about super cool hardware.

    10meg mobile broadband with 99% coverage first please!
  • interesting. so I assume all these great new concepts will crash frequently and throw errors consistently. I also noticed some RFID chip technology being present in that video.
  • If you like that sort of thing you should really check out the world builder video which I discovered through the Long Now blog: http://blog.longnow.org/2009/03/06/city-builder/

    It's pure awesomeness in interface design :-)
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