This is the Microsoft I want to see: A Glimpse Ahead | Hacker News Reader

This is the Microsoft I want to see: A Glimpse Ahead

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25 pointsfuzzmeister23 comments

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.

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).

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...

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.

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.

My old dentist had plain old PC's spread through the office, Many were touch screen but they used Outlook with custom modifications and generally used a keyboard.

It worked pretty well for them. Moreover, I can see them going with that setup for twenty years or more. There weren't any more efficiencies to squeeze out of their system. No one needed web access, remote access wouldn't be worth the trouble, etc.

Outlook may indeed suck but once the consumer actually knows how to use it, it is good enough. Indeed, given that most people dislike computers and dislike learning about computers, the UI which people have learned will be even harder to displace than no UI at all.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Oh they'd really want to, but they can't. It's a way to let off steam.

Given microsoft's history with OSS & recently with products, I'm finding this rather satisfying to watch & only a tad disgusting.

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.

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.

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...]

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.

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

Apple?

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

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

"Here's this phone we made.."

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

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.

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