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Gavin Shearer, of the Microsoft Mac BU talked about his tour of the Microsoft Center for Information Work and the Microsoft Home on his site. It's an interesting article, mostly because unlike the Scobles of the world, Gavin brings a good critical eye to such things, and points out that the future has an annoying habit in developing however it damned well feels like. It's usually messy. I love the fact he compares it to Epcot and Disney, because they both have the same problems as the Microsoft version
Let's start with the Microsoft Home
The big problem with the "WON'T THE FUTURE BE AMAZING" exhibits, in addition to the amusing things Gavin listed, (Gavin, you should have seen it circa 1986...even.funnier!), these houses always look like an episode of Cribs. In other words, these things never ever look like people live there. (Seriously, in all the years I've watched Cribs, I've seen lots of houses, but 3 homes: Jerry Cantrell, Gene Simmons, and Hugh Hefner. Those three places were homes. People lived there. The others? Not so much.
- No one outside of Bill Gates' personal circle has this house. It's a 3 mil. home, and I mean in Kansas City, much less Seattle. Seriously, that's Larry Ellison's house. There's nothing in there that looks like a home that the !super-rich have. I mean...the sliding panel giant TV? This isn't even a concept house, this is a geeky episode of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"
- I honestly think dirt doesn't exist in this world. There's nothing here that's going to survive 6 teenagers on a Halo 3 binge, or a room full of college students. The Surface is the same way...none of this stuff will survive kids, pets, or a good New Year's eve party. Can you imagine a Surface the first time the dog pees on it, or the cat scratches it up? Hairballs? There's a reason the only people buying Surfaces are high-end hotels and casinos. Dear future people, the real world is dirty.
- It's just...disjointed. Putting the TV behind the head of the "Dining Room" table? What, so someone has to twist around? Who has that dining room other than Bill and his echelon? What's the tablet for? So I can send mom an IM to get me some water, and she can twitter back "Get it your own damned self"? The woman in the kitchen HAS to make food that far from the screen...it's either be close enough to read, or coat it in cooking detrius. And who the hell preps veggies and raw meat 4' from the sink? What, it's the MS home workout program? "We make you RUN when you cook, or it's salmonella for you!"
- So much of it is totally impractical. Look at the "teen bedroom" pic. How much juice is needed to keep that shit running? The glowing wall? WTF, is that an OLED wall? Who affords this? LEDs UNDER the bed? Dude, that shit was uncool in the 90s, stop trying to bring it back. Is this a girl's room? A boy's room? A human's room? Look at the chair...seriously, those no back chairs? Only if you're proving how big your yoga dick is
The Center for Information Work is just as silly. Take the big StrataTech monitor. Please. Now, for a gaming rig, where you're sitting back a few feet and going for total immersion? Fan-fucking-tastic. Release it now, the gamers will blow you on the spot. But for IT work? Look at where the guy is sitting. Unless you have amazing peripheral vision, you cannot see that entire screen clearly without turning your head. So throughout the day? Like an all-day tennis game. Looks cool, but unusable in a business situation. Well, if you wanted an impressive NOC monitor, but I think the world is done with that bullshit. At least I hope so. DigiDesk? Two Words: Coffee Spills. Can you imagine doing anything but playing "Minority Report" on it? Now, I know some artists that would love that, like a Cintiq on 'roids, but for routine office work? Dude, show me shit I can use. Stop hitting the Star Trek crack pipe. At least the "next generation work spaces demo" isn't insane. Nicer way to have dual monitors, although stop with the over-complicated keyboards already. Also, lay the fucking phone down, only pretentious idiots who want you to know OMGLOOKWHOCALLSME set it up like that. On the other hand, props for Microsoft realizing people still manual dial numbers. I just wish they'd stop pushing the Table PC. It's a great vertical market solution, especially for warehouses, hospitals, etc. But the general world has said "We don't want to fucking write everything out longhand all fucking day, now give me a faster portable with a fucking decent keyboard." Maybe once Bill leaves.
I hate to tell them, but their "Doctor's office of the future"? It's not the future. The medical profession is jumping on tablets like panthers on meat. Why? Because for that industry, tablets rock. Right tool for the right job. Same thing with the PHARMACY OF THE FUTURE. It's already here guys. That, by the way, is a problem with THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE. They're either out in left field dropping acid, or they're actually a bit behind.
And again, pushing the tablet crack, is the MEETING ROOM OF THE FUTURE. Okay, here's a test. Take a notepad. Now, in a meeting, write notes for a few hours, but, don't look at the paper as you write. See how well that works. With a keyboard, and a little training and practice, I can easily type notes and only occasionally glance at the screen. When you write shit longhand, or use a pen at all, there's no way to create the tactile references that nubs on the "F" and "J" keys do. So you have to look at the screen constantly.
As well, two separate meeting tables in the same room? Why? You put 11-12 people in a room, and have half of them talk about one thing, the other half talk about something else, and measure the volume levels over time. Yet with all that shit, there's no goddamned outlets, not a single ethernet port, and they put the fucking old-school whiteboard over the AC return. There's a couch UNDER an LCD screen. Come on people, room ergonomics count, and there are better choices for 'electronic' whiteboards today. Now. And what the fuck is up with the color scheme in that room. Does someone at Microsoft have a huge love for gastronomic colors and patterns? What is the deal with the relentless 70s decor? Where's the acoustic tile on the rest of the room? It's almost an echo chamber.
But then, Microsoft has always missed the small practical details of things, and hoped you don't notice that it only looks great at a glance.
I'd love to see a "Room of the future" that shows someone actually designed for how people use that room, and planned ahead, rather than just pushing their tech. That might be cool.
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Futuristic Bullshit
Posted by John C. Welch at 09:03 | Permalink
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"Dear future people, the real world is dirty"
Just ask Ridley Scott, fer chrissakes.
Posted by:
flargh 
|
May 6, 2008 9:42 AM
Ye gods! Apparently in the future, every house has a small tokamak reactor powering it.
Posted by:
Angry Drunk |
May 6, 2008 10:31 AM
Just one comment on the phone being upright. In my last job we used Cisco VOIP phones which it looks like that one is. Everyone had theirs upright, although not quite as far as that one, because it was the only practical way of reading the damn screen on the thing. This model looks like it has a better LCD display though, our models were from the first or second rev of the device.
Posted by:
Michael Krzyzek |
May 6, 2008 10:35 AM
I went to a doctor's office where all docs had tablets. Every single one of them (in other words, both) used it in flipped-open laptop mode.
Just sayin'.
Posted by:
Hans Derycke |
May 6, 2008 11:31 AM
That meeting room of the future? Every company I know of would partition it in half and make that two smaller rooms. There never seem to be enough meeting rooms (possibly due to other people realising my dream of booking a three hour meeting by myself and sitting there, reading a book behind the frosted glass panels... always the dream...).
That house? It's not for living, it's for executive retreats. That's why every room except the kid's bedroom looks like a meeting room. Even the kitchen looks like half a dozen people in suits should be making soufflés in a team-building exercise. The display in the lounge room even says "Team Higgs," while the bozos around it are no doubt discussing strategies or leveraging their mission statements or whatever they do on those retreats.
There's one thing I really like about the kid's bedroom, and it's not the careful representation of ethnic groups in the display wall. It's that if those entire two walls are really displays, you could completely freak your kids out. When they're naughty, you put up the punishment images. Scenes from awful movies, pictures of parents kissing, tooth decay images, flames, demons, clips from political speeches, that sort of thing. I reckon I could drive a kid completely insane within a year with that equipment.
Well, it'd be something to do to pass the time until the next executive retreat comes in for a team-building weekend.
It's like some kind of neon-lit isolation chamber, which is apparently what technical people think kids want. Do any of them actually have, or know kids?
What is it with people predicting how we'll live? If it's not some utopian dream that can't possibly work and we can see that from here, it's some dystopian nightmare that we'll do anything to prevent even though it's far more realistic. The near-term future isn't Gattaca, nor is it Blade Runner. It's somewhere in the middle and is going to look a lot more like today than either.
Posted by:
GaryPatterson |
May 6, 2008 6:38 PM
Phuul beat me to it, but Cisco phones are entirely fucking unusable at anything but the tallest few settings. This includes the new fancypants models with the color screens, which are actually even worse than the old monochrome ones. (And that phone doesn't have a miraculously better display—it appears to be a first-gen model with a paper insert for the screen. Which is the least of the improvements that could actually be made to those phones...)
Speaking of the CUBICLE OF THE FUTURE (which is evidently the cubicle of today plus an awkwardly-sized tablet), apparently Microsoft and Cisco have dissolved, leaving HP the only remaining brand. And apparently everybody leaves the showroom display stickers on their monitors. And apparently sticker-installing robots have been replaced by blind three-fingered epileptics with Parkinson's disease.
While the workspaces are bad, that house is just truly inexplicable. Who designed that set and thought "Yep, this looks good"? How many layers of middle management looked at the result and didn't stroke out? I know I'll be looking for kanji-laden stone monolith monitor ... things in my next house.
Also inexplicable is why Microsoft couldn't afford to hire a professional photographer to shoot their press photos. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig, but all the fancy never-gonna-happen displays being washed out and everything being weird colors from bad photography isn't helping anything.
The link to Gavin's blog is linking to this post, by the way.
Posted by:
Colin |
May 7, 2008 12:58 AM
Can anyone still believe this sort of "exhibit" looks like anything more than lame advertising? This takes me back to the old Con Edison presentation at the Hall of Science on the 1965 World's Fair grounds in Flushing Meadow Park (which ran for over a decade, as I remember). Apparently, their "clean" energy was going to solve all our problems and give us luxury undreamed-of.
I'm certain that original World's Fair had a far-cornier sampling of this sort of corporate swill. But I was only five when my family took me there, and have to rely on newsreels and old guidebooks. Thanks, Prelinger Archives!
Posted by:
Moeskido |
May 9, 2008 6:26 AM
