Microsoft's ’90s vision for the smart home looks a lot like today [video]
theverge.com
theverge.com
I'm pretty glad I don't have a house that yells "COOKING PERIOD IS OVER" at me while flashing the text in bright red letters on my TV when dinner is ready.
If you went back to the 90's and showed a concept video featuring pervasive personalization based on data mining, no-UI uis, and things that just work, people would see fever dreams at best and unwholesome value-destroying privacy-invading witchcraft at worst, the brand of which informed science fiction of the time.
I don't think the iPhone would have sold back then. But if you gave them the flashy stuff in this concept video, Microsoft would have been Google and Apple combined.
Oh yes. The hacker subculture, even parts of the tech industry in general at the time was dealing with things like the Clipper Chip, the V-Chip, and Operation Sundevil. There was a love of tech, but a good dose of distrust as well.
There was also a certain aesthetic to 90s tech. It needed to be obnoxious and tech-looking. Well, everything needed to be obnoxious & in-your-face in the 90s.
Microsoft still maintains its "home of the future". I think they update it every 3-5 years or so. Here's a newer one I found on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vsoBsgqoEg. It's pretty funny to see how the set, from what I can tell, is basically identical.
And here's another Microsoft video about the "future of productivity" made back in 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
It's funny how for the most part, houses haven't got any of that stuff. I'm in a house that was built in 2008, and it has something like 5 RJ45 jacks, none of which are in particularly good locations for anything except maybe hooking up a TV.
Most smart home things have fallen flat on their faces. About the only 2 things that have come together are smartphones, and that kid using the computer at the piano would have been using a tablet instead. The connected TV thing barely works, if at all.
Once you've got that network, its just an art project. No wonder Apple won.
And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it’s that process that is the magic."
~ Steve Jobs
This is why Apple doesn't make "vision" videos now, and it didn't during the Jobs years. During the period they did, they had serious problems in shipping any of the visions they have shown the world.
Microsoft is a bit like that. They know where the world is going, and Bill Gates himself knew from the very start where the world is going (short of a brief period where he conveniently ignored the Internet will happen). But they thought the fact they knew, that they had this cool idea and projection of how things will happen was giving them enough advantage. Nope.
It's risk-free to ship vision videos. They're like free T-shirts. There's infinite demand. But when it comes to shipping products based on them, most people can't live with the compromises and risk-taking a real product requires in order to ship.
With a new product you can't just look at the competition and confirm that what you have will work. You're on your own. Do you have the guts?