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Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision

microsoft.com

46 pointssajid44 comments

It seems like most of the things demonstrated are changes to the gloss of interfaces, higher resolution etc... I don't see radical "productivity" improvements - eg. making input significantly easier through BCI. The touch options they show are a scaled versions (larger/more ubiquitous) of what we have now with stylus/touch input and wearables. For example, why is the big drafting table radically better than a tablet or wacom drawing pad and large monitor today? Saying nothing of the holographic 3D table without any HMD or the other "sci-fi" type stuff shown.

I guess to me this looks nice and flashy and all but not really a breakthrough in ergonomics. Maybe I missed that somewhere.

What struck me was that people were there almost as props. It was as if technology had advanced so much (information gathering and intelligence) that the people were more or less redundant and were 'doing things' just to act out our newfound purpose.

Basically all the information was there and people more or less had veto power --yes or no. I know this is just conceptualization, but they may not be that far off.

It looks fun and would appear that people would have lots more free time to do whatever, but for the most part things were done by machines for people.

It looks fun and would appear that people would have lots more free time to do whatever, but for the most part things were done by machines for people.

Is that not the "promise of technology?" That is a world I am trying to create - one where we work not out of necessity but out of passion, so I am fully behind that. I just didn't see anything in that video that blew my mind in that respect.

I would love to see something projected which would reasonably leap us to the (next thing) the way the personal computer did 20 years ago. This MSFT thing falls short of that IMO.

Yes, that has always been the promise of technology, to deliver people from tedium. The unanswered question, if people aren't really needed to do 'work' (giving them the free time) where or how do people earn a living?

Moreover, as machines/automation/computers make us more efficient, this hasn't translated into free time individually but rather made people previously employable, unemployable. So the free time that we might think is due us does't come to us, but is diverted to other people up to a point those other people aren't employed and the people who remain employed work just as long as before.

So, i guess the hope is that as people become redundant at work, that there will be a mechanism to compensate people for their lost earning power. Keep in mind, it's not like the world would switch over on a Monday --it would be gradual and that means lots of people falling through the cracks, _if_ a solution was found.

I would argue this is one of the key questions of the 21st century. The best answer anyone has so far is basic income.

The proles of the future will be futzing with the Sharepoint sites that are no doubt the backend of the future of productivity.

In college (many moons ago, I was a double major in Mech. Eng. and CS), I took drafting for a semester in my freshman year before we transitioned over to CAD. I do remember the initial feeling, hard to describe, almost claustrophobic, of going from a drafting table to the mouse/desktop setup. Overtime, you got used to it and I never looked back, but do wonder now if a freshman ME would feel the opposite when going from a mouse/desktop to a large, wacom "drafting table".

So, a lot of the comments here are misunderstanding what this video is, and focusing on parts that don't matter. First, here are the last two editions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gEWoVCl-xU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0

In addition many commenters are getting distracted by the nature of the displays, the lack of focus on people, and the level of automation in the software. This video is made by Microsoft's Office team, and the key idea here is the content of the productivity scenarios they've expressed. And truthfully, they've made some fairly successful predictions in past videos, including items like Skype automatic translation, services like PlateJoy, natural ink processing...

So what are they actually predicting here? Here's what I spot in order:

Augmented reality in work scenarios (diving)

Gesture control in augmented reality

Sharing of what you personally see

3D printers in the classroom

Pannable panoramic video recordings

Trivial sharing between computers

Flexible screens

Perfect wireless coverage

Advanced budgeting assistance

High quality freelancer-project matching

Use of pens on touch screens for writing and more

Automatic advanced data-visualizations (the types of things that are custom made at the moment)

An armband device using hand gestures instead of touch.

24 hour coworking spaces available on short notice.

Easy window organization

Do not disturb for all incoming contact

Automatic diet tracking

Even better contextual video

Advanced job performance analysis

Looks like a pretty cool and not unreasonable list of predictions to me. They're not saying that this is what this WILL look like, just what it might look like. And honestly, I think we will see at least 50% of those items in the next ten years.

So Microsoft's vision of the future is for us to continue to be touching flat screens well into the future? Pinch to zoom, drag and drop. Those two gestures pretty much dominated their vision.

There seems to be a lot of production value in this video, but it doesn't seem thought out. The interfaces just show drag and drop, and then items spouting animated complex information. There also seems to be a hell of a lot more screens in the future.

It doesn't feel like anyone took a real world work or play scenario and thought it through from end-to-end with future technology.

I don't know where future technology will take us, but I hope it reduces the amount of time we spend in front of screens. I hope it allows us to spend more physical time with the people we love, not just talk to them on giant Skype screens.

As I said in another post, the video pretty much reduces people to a secondary role. It's not so much technology enabling us or aiding us, but more we supplement technology --but only because technology is allowing us to interact.

The good is that people would have a lot of free time (presumably to do good things), the unanswered question, is now that most people are redundant, what do they do to earn a living? Magic? Bureaucracy?

I don't really think the video reduces people to a secondary role. It shows people driving the technology for the most part. My issue with the video is that the technology demonstrated within it doesn't seem to enable or aid any more than what we currently have. It just happens on more screens with more animation.

I would like to see technology take our tasks from us. I love thinking, designing and creating things, but there is still so much tedium in implementation. To take that away would be to accelerate everyone's creative ability.

If we had the ability to automate all tasks then we probably wouldn't need to earn a living. We would need a government could recognise that the value created by our technology should be distributed amongst everyone equally.

I'd love to know why companies even waste time making videos like these anymore. Looking back at past stuff (like the 'smart home' from Microsoft in the mid 90's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V_0xDUg0h0) it's pretty hilarious how out of touch they are with reality.

Think of how expensive all that stuff would be. And all the maintenance of learning it, upgrading it, and powering it...

And for what, really? There's a reason video phones are not used today: it's unnecessary waste (in time and bandwidth) -- and also privacy violating -- when a text message will do just fine.

Skype and facetime get used a lot for video chat, though.

Not when you just want to say five words to someone. It is certainly not anyone's primary means of electronic communication.

It depends on the person.

I don't use video calls much, but my younger daughter considers video calls to be the default.

Science fiction authors change the world with ideas (having ideas of how the world could be). Visualising/putting-in-words what you think the future could look like contributes to what the future will look like. I guess companies know about this and want to get ahead of the curve.

That video seemed incredibly prescient. A lot of the features in the video are a couple years off from mass adoption, and maybe it's a bit more geared towards the 90s mindset, but there's a current day equivalent to most of the functionality.

Well for whatever reason it certainly didn't help MS in the long run to produce that video. They missed the technology that actually mattered like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and are still scrambling to catch up to everyone.

Actually we have no idea whether it helped or not. It may have helped a lot, just that there were too many other forces fighting against it. I'd imagine a video like this could serve as something to get the employees talking (even if they bash it).

Really? That kind of looks like 2015 to me.

Remember the gorilla arm.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html

Something like gorilla-arm might be good thing: Humans probably aren't supposed to be sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time; gorilla-arm is just a non-dismissible signal that it's time to take a break.

You can only go so long at a whiteboard, what saves us is that we usually spend more time taking than writing.

Also: glare-free screens. I wonder how they solved that one?

Yeah, looking at this, I got the feeling that it was more "How Hollywood wants the future to look" (see Minority Report) vs. what will actually be useful and, most importantly, economical.

Yep, touch screens got totally destroyed by this.

Ah yes, the failure of white boards to catch on.

Very cool look at how human computer interactions may look like. I especially liked to "co working" segment in which the woman walked into a studio, and transformed a blank drafting table into her personal environment.

I would personally feel better if future computing environments used open standards and be open source.

I know that companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc. have the resources to do the R&D and produce products, but I don't want to see competing incompatible systems slow progress.

I know it is a stretch to hope for, but this is why I favor open web standards to apps, even on small devices.

A lot of what is shown is actually collaboration between 'Kat' and 'Lola' in real-time. Being able to input information from any device, view and present it on some other device, and of course also being able to convert any situation into a conference with someone else is really important and a great vision really. All of that is what we actually focus on at Collusion (https://collusionapp.com/) which is free to use at the moment and does a lot of this in a less slick way.

With the introduction of more and more large screen interactive devices, wearables, pen enabled devices and Virtual reality/AR options, we can open up more and more possibilities that are shown in this clip.

Whats more is that augmented reality is shown a lot here which will become more and more prevalent as a way to blend productivity with the world around us, as well as generally making things more human/natural/fluid, which is also very interesting for the near future, though perhaps not the augmentation without a HMD anytime soon.

As high production the video is and unrealistic or embellished some things might be, effortless and instant transition of information through our systems is certainly possible and I think very probable and I'm glad that MS is showing that in it's vision for productivity in the enterprise. Which is what this video is really about. Microsoft, with its connections to so many diverse electronics business's like Intel, Wacom and Samsung it could certainly deliver on many of these concepts into the future given the right software.

Bill Gates last vision video "information at your fingertips" (1995): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XxeY-OchwY

It shows a wallet PC (=smartphone), digital currency (like BitCoin), touch screen, digital personal agent (next-gen Siri/Cortana/Watson), database based filesystem/shell (like Windows Cairo & WinFS - vamporware).

Chairs with no backs... I'll stay in the present.

What baffles me when I look at all these futuristic interfaces is that they do not take into consideration the most productive combination: keyboard+mouse+voice+3D depth. It would allow you do many things at once and as a result save time. Limiting users to gestures on flat surface looks nice and easy but isn't the fastest way to interact with stuff on the screen.

While not to start a whole discussion about this, is MSFT vision of the future is one where women do all the work?

As long as the vision doesn't contain annoying online advertising I'll take it. The video was neat, but how close are we to solving the battery problem? I'd like a laptop that can last a week. Or charger tech that can charge a day-long device in under 2 minutes. Thank you very much.

If you took a current generation battery, and paired it with current generation processors, but dialed the performance to early 2000s---we might get there already?

(People did good work with that level of performance. And even with much less.)

Good point.

Ever notice how companies like General Motors & Microsoft like to make "concept" stuff like this, while companies like Apple and Tesla don't bother?

Who's actually delivering on great stuff? Companies that talk about it, or those who just clam up and get to work?

Interesting how it compares with their earlier vision of 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gEWoVCl-xU).

Seems to be fewer screens in the new one.

I was thinking the same thing as I was watching it. The interaction hasn't changed as much as the form of the screen itself has become more versatile.

I like seeing this kind of thing out of microsoft - tons of smart people there. Although, how about first things first, and allow excel to handle more than a million rows?

The future is full of smudge marks.

This is all great, and really beautiful and well produced.

What worries me, is that even today, with our simple 2D word / excel, people utilize about 10% of the feature in a good day, and it takes me a few google searches to find where microsoft has hidden "insert your favorite lesser known function here" in version X.

New UX (and by new UX I mean things like holographic / hands manipulate augmented reality items on your HUD kind of UX) should not require user training. I watched this movie 2 times and I still don't understand what exactly they are doing (I get the idea, but if I need to answer a test on what apps they are using and what exactly each gesture means / does, you lost me... is she a publisher? a researcher? a biologist? a teacher? what's the connections between all these movies?)

Having all this gesture based / 3D / eye movement / real objects interact with digital ones - this needs to be making life simpler to make use more productive.

The challenge of the real UX designers of the future is how to make all this unbelievable enormous vector of inputs (mobile phones I'm looking at you too, most apps only evolved to a touchpad / touch screen gestures, mostly swiping with single fingers, how many apps really utilize multiple finger actions except zooming? how many really rely on "shake to send undo", it's still not catching on... now add all the new inputs we saw in the videos, and add Microsoft's new holographic vision, people will go to a mental institute just to turn on a word processor)

The more options we will have to do something the more confusing it will be. And yes, even if kids learn it at school, no technology will have high adaptation rates if it much harder than a mouse click or a keyboard type (or a touch screen tap / swipe which are very small gradual and natural evolutions of the mouse, and only the swipe / tap / double tap / pinch to zoom really caught up out of a myriad of other possibilities)

Also the 2D UX in the video, instead of making sense is just beautiful, and so damn confusing, I have no clue what actual ACTIONS these people do, except joining some project together, wasn't sure if it was a biology project, an aquatic one specifically, an education one, or a non profit one. (but perhaps this is just poor editing)

In one sentence - if this is the future, it's beautiful, and so darn confusing. All people with SaaS here know what I'm talking about - getting users to read a red blinking note and press a button that says X will still get users who simply don't get it. no go get them do a 3D gesture that will launch a floating globe hologram without a 2 hour training... that's the real challenge IMHO.

Confusion is the first step to learning anything worthwhile. We shouldn't be shielding people from it. I have a feeling that if as a species we're going to create some Media for Thinking the Unthinkable, it won't be by continuing to emulate 2D paper. Of course people are going to "require user training" - if we stopped to design for the most common denominator we'd never increase the scope of our expression.

We navigate and create complex systems every day that could be more easily absorbed and understood with more complex, dynamic representations. I see the world as pictured as one where Word no longer exists, where you can send someone a simulation and be understood in a few minutes instead of spending hours with a whiteboard or months getting a proof of concept built by a development team.

"is she a publisher? a researcher? a biologist? a teacher?"

Why not all 4?

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