Chairs with no backs... I'll stay in the present.
Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#12I'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.
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#14I'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.
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.
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#15Remember the gorilla arm. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html
Yep, touch screens got totally destroyed by this.
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#16I'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.
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.
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#17It 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…
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.
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#18It 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…
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".
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#19So 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.
Re: Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.