Monday, April 30, 2012
The Future According to Microsoft 'It will really happen'
Why Microsoft's vision of the future will really happen
Two videos from Microsoft show the future of technology. Here's why I think they're dead-on
By Mike Elgan
Computerworld - Microsoft released a video in 2008 and another one this week that together predict the sleek, wireless, connected gadgets we'll all enjoy by the year 2019.
the videos fascinate in the way that science fiction does. But what's even more interesting is that this vision will almost certainly come true.
Microsoft's videos depict their vision of the future. Use the "Next" button to advance between the two videos.
When you see them, you may be surprised by my conclusion. Will technology really move that fast?
Just remember how quickly things moved in the past 10 years.
Ten years ago, there was no such thing as a multitouch consumer device -- no iPhone, Android phone or anything even remotely like it. The original iPod was brand new, and there was no iTunes store for buying music. There was no Xbox, no YouTube, no Flickr, no Reddit. Google was just a search engine. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Calendar, Voice, Talk, Reader and many other Google services didn't exist.
Facebook? Ha! Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school, and even MySpace was still years away.
In fact, virtually every aspect of today's consumer electronics scene was nonexistent or even beyond imagining 10 years ago. Almost everything Applesells right now -- the iPad, iPhone, Siri, Apple TV, iMac, MacBook Air and other products, would have seemed like science fiction in 2001.
When most people imagine the future of technology, they envision better versions of what they've already got. But changing technology will sweep away almost all the products and services we use today.
Microsoft's videos brilliantly capture what is likely to replace them.
Where did these videos come from?
Office Labs is one of Microsoft's in-house think tanks. The initiative comes up with working concepts, some of which can be downloaded and experimented with (you need to be running Microsoft Office). Some of them are created by employees in their own time (similar to Google's 20% time projects).
Many of the Office Labs concepts would require technologies and computing power that aren't available yet. So the researchers create special-effects-laden videos and demos to communicate ideas. Microsoft also maintains an "Envisioning Lab" where close business partners can see and discuss the prototypes on display.
What to look for in the videos
In Microsoft's vision of the future, connected computers and displays are built into everyday objects.
A woman's eyeglasses whisper real-time translations of a foreign language in her ear. A coffee cup shows the drink's temperature and has a display that indicates how high the liquid is inside. An electronic newspaper is as thin and flexible as actual paper, but it functions like a wireless connected multitouch text-and-video e-reader.
"Monitors" in the video are often depicted as clear smart glass. Call 'em "Microsoft Windows." What the heck.
A businessman uses a clear-glass display that is straight-up Minority Report, controlled with both touchscreen and "wave your hands in the air like you just don't care" gestures. Both display and touch-input devices look like regular clear glass until they come to life with gestures. In some scenes, touch gestures become in-air gestures, as they extend beyond the screen.
On-screen buttons, dials and other controls appear as needed for the task at hand, then vanish when no longer required.
A clear-glass stylus is also used in one scene, suggesting a role for a pen.
Keyboards are depicted, both the onscreen and physical variety. But there's a lot less typing in this future, as Siri-like voice assistance and dictation replaces most typing.
See-through glass displays, of course, are perfect for augmented reality. A mobile version is held up to a green plant, which is visible through the clear glass. But then the device recognizes the species, and throws information about it on the screen.
The window of a taxi turns into an augmented reality screen, pointing out to the passenger the building where her meeting is to take place the next day.
Other displays aren't clear, but appealingly opaque. In many cases, surfaces that used to hold analog information tools themselves replace the tools. For example, instead of a whiteboard mounted on a wall -- a standard feature in today's conference rooms -- the wall of the future is the whiteboard -- computerized and connected, of course. Instead of a tablet on a table, the table is the tablet.
In one scene, two businesspeople each place a smart object on a smart table -- a keychain fob and a flat phone or smartcard of some kind. From these devices, out spills their data, which can be manipulated on the table. The same thing happens at home, where a girl's homework spills out onto the kitchen table, and cookbook instructions spill out onto the kitchen counter.
Data and documents can apparently be transferred from anything to anything else. One business-related example involves a drag-and-drop gesture from a desktop to a mobile device. In another scene, that same mobile device becomes a virtual keyboard for a desktop computer the user happens to be sitting at.
Another example shows a man "capturing" with a kind of take-a-picture gesture using a clear-glass remote control then moving data from a wall-mounted device and dumping it out onto his e-newspaper.
Videoconferencing has been perfected. What looks like a glass window into another classroom is actually a live, big-screen video chat connecting schools in India and Australia. In one scene, two children interact with each other, each speaking a different language instantly translated with cartoon-like speech bubbles.
Intelligent agents pay attention to what's going on. The kids fingerpaint a dog onscreen, and the computer recognizes the image and animates it accordingly.
One very cool and versatile device shown in the video is a smartphone, a card-like gadget so thin that a woman uses it as a book marker. The card functions as a boarding pass, an airport map, a calendar, an augmented reality window, a 3D holographic display and more.
The phone splits into two halves about the size of playing cards, with one "card" displaying live video and the other held up to the ear for videoconferencing on the go. It even projects some kind of laser beam arrow on the ground, telling Mr. Future Businessman where to go.
Everything is connected to everything. Intelligent agents make decisions about when to inform the user about relevant data.
Why these are great predictions
Everything in this video is being worked on, refined and developed. If you follow current trends for compute power, display technology, networking speeds, device miniaturization, flexible displays, touchscreens, gesture technologies and others, you get this Microsoft future.
And Microsoft itself is working on much of this. The intelligent displays are really just advanced versions of what's possible now with a Microsoft Surface table. The in-air gestures are advanced versions of what Kinect for Xbox 360users are already doing.
Industrywide, displays are getting bigger while devices are getting thinner and lighter. Companies have already developed versions of clear displays, augmented reality systems and all the rest.
The past four years have ushered in thin multitouch tablets supporting gestures and intelligent agent voice technology.
Although breathtaking to look at and consider, everything in Microsoft's videos are fairly conservative predictions based on existing products or technology actively being developed.
Why Microsoft won't build it
There tends to be little connection between companies that envision the future clearly and those who build it.
AT&T envisioned the future in 1993, for a special edition of Newsweekmagazine that came with a CD-ROM containing a series of videos.
This montage of AT&T ads came from a 1993 Newsweek CD-ROM, when Newsweek thought that one day, magazines would be sent to you in CD-ROM form, sponsored with ads.
Those videos suggested that in the future, people would read books online, get directions on screens in their cars, send a fax from the beach, pay road tolls wirelessly, buy tickets from ATM-like machines, make international video calls, open doors by voice command, use electronic medical records, attend meetings remotely with video and PowerPoint from a laptop, watch video-on-demand downloadable movies and take college classes online.
I remember those ads. They seemed pretty far-fetched to most people who saw them. Yet they were an accurate prediction of many of the technologies we now take for granted. AT&T's predictions all came true, except for the one where they say, "And AT&T will bring it to you."
If Microsoft is to lead the revolution, it would have to become a different kind of company. Microsoft has always had great R&D, but it has long struggled to get real products to the market in time to make a difference. Right now, Microsoft tends to be about three years behind industry leaders when it comes to cool new consumer technologies.
Microsoft could lead us into this amazing new future. But it probably won't.
Microsoft's breathtaking vision of the future will probably happen. But Apple, Google and other companies will probably bring it to you.
Mike Elgan writes about technology and tech culture. Contact and learn more about Mike at Elgan.com, or subscribe to his free e-mail newsletter, Mike's List.
The Future of Big(gering) Data
Big Data’s future? Take a hint from Google Maps (Part 5)
Big data wasn’t always “Big Data.”
“I was in the Big Data space before the term was coined. We’d say ‘yeah, there’s a lot of data,’” recalls Bassel Ojjeh, chief executive officer of nPario, a two-year old Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm that sifts through big media corporations’ troves of data to deliver insights about their customers.
Today, a whole ecosystem of new businesses is springing up to engage with this new reality – companies that store data; companies that mine data for insight; and, companies that aggregate data to make it manageable.
It brings promise to both big companies that are sitting on storehouses of data and small businesses nimble enough to manipulate them.
But it’s an ecosystem that’s still emerging, and its exact shape has yet to make itself clear.
Looking ahead, here are three things to watch for in this space:
Getting the data will be half the battle
One of the biggest challenges of working with Big Data is assembling it and preparing it for analysis. Part of this problem is technological, but another is old-fashioned organizational wrangling.
“The biggest challenge with big data is organizational,” says Eric Monteiro, a partner at McKinsey & Co. in Toronto.
Corporations that accumulate data storehouses are also, by their nature, inclined to keep it in silos. Corporate divisions are also inclined to keep to themselves and guard their turf; some have their own analytics divisions.
While cross-referencing corporate data with feeds available on the open Web – from Google, for instance – might come naturally to folks in IT, it doesn’t always mesh with the proprietary big-business mindset.
“There’s a wealth of data that they’re just organizationally not prepared to look at,” Mr. Monteiro says.
And then there’s logistics: Different systems store data in different formats, even within the same company. Assembling, standardizing, and cleaning data of irregularities – all without scrubbing it of the information that makes it valuable – is going to be a central challenge of this space.
It will be seamless
The nature of Big Data is taking inhuman amounts of data and distilling it into information that human brains can use. It follows that one fixation in the Big Data space is making the process as seamless as possible for end users.
Startups are aiming to make the process of transferring and sorting through data as simple as prosaic Web apps like filing your taxes online.
“We don’t want to be providing technology for the sake of technology,” Mr. Bassel says. “We want to focus on applications – hide the technology and provide apps for business users.”
For instance, nPario focuses on parsing customer data to paint a detailed picture of what a company’s audience wants, and how best to reach out to individuals.
The company focuses on big business, but Mr. Bassel says that, once easy-to-use services are in place, Big Data techniques can be just as useful for small businesses.
“The winning organization is going to be the organization that leverages data,” he says, even if that organization has 1,000 clients instead of 1 million. “It’s less about volume, and more about having a CEO who says we’re going to be data-driven.”
Insights come where multiple data streams meet
To get a sense of this field’s potential for end users, consider one of the earliest mainstream Big Data products: Google Maps. It’s the quintessential Big Data application, even though it arrived long before the term itself became popular.
Google took a vast storehouse of data that was originally compiled by another company, then put a seamless interface on it, and presented it to a whole new audience.
However, early on, Google made one more critical decision: It opened up Google Maps to third parties, so that anyone could overlay their maps with other data, whether it’s the location of car dealerships or where smartphone users have spotted graffiti in a city.
Google’s decision awoke a generation of users to one of the key lessons of the Big Data era: Well-packaged information is valuable. But some of the most innovative applications will come where enterprising users cross existing data streams, whether public or private.
Whether its geography and retail availability, customer information with public health trends, or the weather. we live in a wild world of information, and the Big Data mindset gives businesses a whole new lens through which to see it.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Other stories can be found on the Web Strategy section of the Report on Small Business website.
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