Microsoft Video “Productivity Future Vision”
by jfjudah
This video has been making the rounds lately. A few things struck me as I watched:
Microsoft’s Imagined Future of Productivity
- All text will be written in Gotham.
- Only Microsoft can come up with such an abstract title.
- There is no difference between a tap that selects, records, enters a chat, or backtracks. And no one is confused about this.
- The giant Microsoft table has been replaced with a giant whiteboard on your desk.
- There are some really great gadgets going on there. And they look like Apple products.
- The future is filled with iPad- and iPhone-type devices, down to the details — rounded corners, good and neutral typography, gadget dimensions, etc.
- There are no 4-inch handheld devices in the future, only 3.5-inch devices exactly like the current Apple products.
- Interfaces can be created on the fly (1:35).
- Textured backgrounds are important on flat devices (2:52).
- You can select or tap in the air surrounding the device, but touching the sides does not register any extraneous input.
- You can select from the back of a device just as you would on the front.
- Some of that stuff is cool and even helpful. Now make it. Better yet, make it first and then tell me it’s available.
- Black is still in. And Minority Report is still awesome.
- The Microsoft Courier has made its comeback, well, at least into the land of vaporware.
- Overall, I can’t imagine Microsoft actually doing most of this, if any at all. For goodness’ sake, we still don’t have the Surface, but we’re stuck with the Ribbon.
- There is little difference between 3D and 2D, even in interaction.
- The “pause” of holding your hand in a certain position while you wait for your tablet computer to do its thing apparently takes four seconds (4:34–4:37). Whose idea was it to pause the video of the girl so the polar bear can do its thing?
- Mommy doesn’t wear her wedding ring on business trips.
- Siri is a main and natural part of our technology interaction.
- Even with the door of the fridge closed, it still takes forever to decide what to eat.
- How is my fridge going to be run by Microsoft Office?
- Did I mention the Gotham typeface? Because that can’t be overstated.
Opinionated Type 
[…] do not? This seems very unrealistic to us.A detailed list of what is in the video can be found here:http://www.opinionatedtype.com/2011/10/microsoft-video-productivity-future-vision/It all seems very cool, but as i watched the video i checked the top comment and it said:right, this […]
[…] https://opinionatedtype.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/microsoft-video-%E2%80%9Cproductivity-future-vision%… […]
[…] it’s sloppy and lazy. Josh Farmer over at Opinionated Type noticed a few things, among […]
obviously in finland no one has a job in the future
Hi guys, here’s the video from Nokia. They share a similar vision for the future. That’s what I call real partners!
When was the last time you check what’s the latest phone from Nokia?
Just imagine the tech support cue cards to support all this stuff… who do you call when your magical calendar wall blue screens? or when someone hacks your pick-up zone at the airport? At least everybody will be clean and charitable and not actually do any work. We don’t need the future for that, we already have people making useless charts and graphs that they can’t interpret themselves (luckily in the future, the graph will tell us what it means)…
Last of all, where is all this power coming from? That’s a lot of electricity for every wall and street and table to be powered…. Not very green, MS, not very green at all. The one bush-wall doesn’t offset it….
In the future, every screen will be low-contrast washed-out pastel colors on white, which presumably means there will be no more visual impairments, ’cause man that’s hard to read, even in Gotham.
Since we will have emissive displays, the future is far more likely to be colorful high-contrast graphics on black.
In the future, it will be daytime in Johannesburg and in Redmond at the same time.
“In the future, every screen will be low-contrast washed-out pastel colors on white…”
Have any of you seen Google’s redesigned interfaces for gmail, or google docs? low contrast, washed-out on white pretty much defines it. the future is here! 🙂
Lovely piece. The abstract title part reminds me of another vision of the future presented by Bill Gates in 1995 at his Comdex presenation. This was where he introduced all the agents (such as the infamous dogs) and I just found in my archive a document published by Microsoft at the time that is filled with only abstract words and notions:
http://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/8d860959-73d6-4fa8-a8b8-2fa7ea129d84/3c9ed217cc510f7aa0838b02d27f33ce
You make an important point: Without a clear vision, or without something tangible to latch on to, abstract is all anyone can offer.
—Josh
Well, Gotham’s gonna be Helvetica/Univers/Frutiger of the 21st century – get used to it! 🙂
It already is. Didn’t you get the memo from 80% of the rebrands in the past decade?
—Josh
[…] movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today.Opinionated Type has a funny, and pretty smart, summary of the pieces design details and flaws. Including things […]
Hey, man, I want my car to have micro-thin, transparent screens over every window, so that when I drive through poor, downtrodden areas, it can superimpose party decorations and nice paint jobs over all the buildings to make ’em look less depressing. That’d be cool. Then I wouldn’t have to think about reality at all. Also, it could make stray dogs look like exotic cats; homeless people look like royalty, Buicks look like Ferraris, and so on. Hell, the world would be just so much nicer.
Uh, harsh comments, I myself am excited to see any vision of the future. I would like to have a huge workstation like that. I love programming, I hate the way things look so ugly on the screen right now. People are turned off by ugly design and excited by beautiful, elegent design. I’ve seen it when I create UI’s. If the UI does very little but looks pretty, people go ooh, and aahh and love it. If I create a UI that is really useful but looks blah, people complain.
It’s the “magical” component.
Hum, I like the fridge. No need to open the door to look inside while you decide. Save energy. Can someone make it happen.
See, stay positive. If only one thing comes out of this video, it was not done for nothing.
I like your attitude. This is a vision video, not a working prototype. What I get out of it is: in the near future, the vision is to keep the human interaction while being productive and make everything smart and work with each other seamlessly. Whether MS or Apple – or whatever other brand name people are so stuck about being on the side of – will be able to achieve any of it does not matter. There are some good ideas in there as well as some really annoying interactions that are not as well thought of. I wish people would just comment on what’s good about it and build on it.
Excellent point of view; balanced and optimistic. I love cool and beautiful things, regardless where they come from. But I also have a weakness for looking at historical patterns, and from what I see Apple seems to be the frontrunner in most of the areas categorized as innovation. Sometimes they’re the only significant player for quite some time, like with the iPad until the new Kindles hit barely a few weeks ago. I’m biased, sure, but like most people, I think it’s for many of the right reasons. Last time I’ll say this: I only wrote what struck me, and things struck me for various reasons.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, guest.
—Josh
As a developer, I must say that this vision for the future seems great, and I like how everything around you seems to be a display 🙂
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that all those transitions can be made so smooth and simple. Also, I’m not sure that all mobile devices can be made as paper thin as shown.
All in all, it seems like another instance of designers gone wild, loosing touch with what’s plausible.
Another example of Microsoft’s obsessive attention to detail:
The video starts with a woman arriving at Johannesburg airport. There is an announcement in what sounds almost like Afrikaans, but despite being a native Afrikaans speaker I could not figure out what it was trying to say even after rewinding the video a dozen times.
A second announcement follows, welcoming the traveller to Johannesburg International Airport (which hasn’t been the name of the airport since 2006), but this time the woman presses the magic translate button on her magic glasses to hear it in English.
A few seconds later, another announcement follows in (translated, presumably) English: “Please approach the road to create your pickup zone.” When I heard this, the penny finally dropped…
The announcement during the first few seconds of the video is what you get when you type “Please approach the kerb to create your pickup zone” into Google Translate and ask for Afrikaans. (Bing Translate doesn’t do Afrikaans). The translation is grammatically mangled as only Google Translate can do and, funniest of all, it translates the word “pickup” to “bakkie” — the Afrikaans word for a pickup *truck*.
You’d think that in a company of Microsoft’s size they’d be able to find one native speaker… (If they need help, I know several.)
A fancy hotel either does not have any actual name and is called simply “Hotel”, Soviet-style, or else it’s called “Hotel H” or “H Hotel” (and you get 3 guesses to figure out what word the letter H is supposed to stand for), and its logo is an eye-watering op-art nightmare. Or maybe today’s “W Hotels” chain has acquired 25 (or thereabouts) marketing-challenged competitors. Although: I wonder if the U Hotel and the Ü Hotel are suing each other for trademark infringement? Are the locally-successful Ç Hotel and Č Hotel finding themselves frustrated in their plans for international expansion, outside their home nations, by the juggernaut that is the C Hotel?
Computer gadgets don’t have a manufacturer’s brand name or logo on them anywhere, and indeed there is nowhere to PUT a name or logo. The only logos that I noticed on ANYTHING (aside from that H Hotel) were on the oven and the range hood, and possibly the knife block, at 5:53.
So, in the future, marketing is evidently a lost art.
In the future, when a child asks a parent to suggest a recipe to cook something “special” for the school bake sale, presumably cooking against a deadline, the parent deliberately bypasses all the “family” recipes and instead chooses one, apparently more-or-less at whim, out of a published collection of 1200+ recipes. Given how randomly the recipe appears to have been selected, I suspect that neither the parent nor the child has ever cooked this recipe before, which is unfortunate when cooking against a deadline. Fortunately, it does appear to be a SIMPLE recipe.
There is an odd contrast between razor-sharp vector graphics and pixelation, on the hand-held screen at 0:45. Also at 1:33.
From the vid you can see that everything linked to tech has an amazing UI and UX. Really is that what defined microsoft over the years? and where is my start button 🙂
I think this post can be broken down to one sentence: I hate MS, I love Apple.
Yes, Vicomte de Valvert, but your cliché could have used some pizzazz — poetic, alarming, terrorizing, comedic . . . or at least bring something worthy of a haiku.
Apple I loveth
But Microsoft do I hate.
And they deserve it.
—Josh
I’m wondering why Mommy left her family and traveled all that way just to participate in a video conference from the privacy of a hotel room, and never meet them in person.
Perhaps that’s why she didn’t seem that cheerful about the trip: you’re invited to the meeting, but you can’t be with us because it’s guys only at the desk.
If the company that builds these future products shows the same lack of attention to detail as the producers of this video (who did not notice the reflection of the camera rig in the oven window or level the damn camera for that final tracking shot), then I seriously doubt they’ll be able to pull off building products with any of this functionality.
In the future, all your handwritten letters look the same. (5:04)
Touché.
—Josh
Tasks in the future will involve only moving information, like paragraphs and tables, from one presentation to another. Someone else will fix the toilets.
Moving paragraphs of text will not imply changes to voice, tense, or number.
Moving tables of numbers will not require changes to units or sampling scheme. Dropping a set of numbers from one program into another is easy, because both programs use the same conventions.
Despite the ease with which all the above knowledge manipulation tasks are accomplished, the workers doing it are highly paid and well dressed.
Gruber sent me here and you kind of made me want to go watch the video again. More power to microsoft. Not.
All true, though I have to take issue with the ‘Mommy doesn’t wear her wedding ring on business trips.’ dig.
1. Not all parents are married
2. Not all people who are married wear wedding rings
This is the only aspect of this bland sterile future that seems aspirational to me – where its totally normal for dad to stay at home looking after kids whilst his partner is the primary breadwinner.
Tom,
In all seriousness, it it wasn’t a dig, it was a simple observation that “struck me,” as I said. I didn’t qualify why. I found it interesting that MS went out of their way to show a family and their possible communication modes, while either forgetting to have her wear a ring or not noticing it was missing. Is it better or worse whether it was accidental or on purpose? Irrelevant. But it sure is interesting.
As to the reality of current American culture, I don’t want this to devolve into an art-copying-life or life-copying-art debate, regardless how fun that would be. My philosopher’s spidey-sense is tingling.
—Josh
Most of the taps seem to be designed to bring up a microphone icon. The implication being that you speak commands such as “Copy Paragraph”. Unless you are talking about something else?
I get incredibly angry at these stupid videos, what it the point? Wow, one day the world will look like this, according to ad agencies. Is Microsoft bringing this to us? No.
I don’t mean to be nitpicky, but it’s worth considering that “Mommy” might not be married to “Daddy”, or even if they are married in the video, they may not have opted to have matching rings or any rings at all.
We can tell it’s not ever going to happen. There’s no space for the holographic Certificate of Authenticity. These are required on M$ hardware. Also, no Ribbon Bar? No Office? No Stylus? Puh-leeze.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the immortal stylus 5:01.
Don’t forget the stylus. They were happy to remove the Start menu but left us with the stylus
“How is my fridge going to be run by Microsoft Office?”
Don’t be silly, it will be Android-based.
Uh, sync is a microsoft product running in Ford cars, why would you think they would not try to run on a refrig?
I didn’t know Ford made fridges. Do they come in something other than black? More importantly, how will PowerPoint help my fridge?
—Josh
Microsoft is procaliming the facile and the obvious… softcore science fiction combined with the desire to claim the nebulous future perfect. Yawn, no really yawn!
Everyone in the future is metrosexual. And either has excellent cleaning staff or is OCD about cleanliness.
We also never see what happens when the girl gets flower, egg, butter, and milk all over her user interface…
The interfaces looked fancy yet tedious to use in a day-in-day-out fashion. If it really took that much motion or had that much lag to simply turn a page in a book – books would have gone out of business 1000 years ago.
I also don’t know how the office suite knows what to do and when to do it – it just seemingly randomly would merge figures and charts and documents and come to conclusions about things without looking like anyone was driving… Is it Skynet?
And how does the fling of the wrist know that you want that stuck to the fridge and not added to the shopping list or emailed to a coworker? So many things just happened without seeing any real way to determin what it was that actually made them happen…
And finally, I didn’t see a single “undo” anywhere – so you better be darn sure you only touch things you are certain should be touched, and pray no one bumps you when you have your “sel or buy” stock purchase menu open…
What’s the modern touch-swipe equivalent of ctrl-alt-delete? I think maybe hovering a middle finger over the device would be a handy gesture.
+1 I lol’d
I thought I was the only one who used this! Before flat panels you could add a little ‘tong’ against the screen for emphasis – that’s one thing I will always miss.
ROFL!!!! 🙂
Too good!
In the future, South Africans will drive on the right side of the road…
Talk about focusing on the unimportant minutia and missing the point completely. How utterly presumptuous of Microsoft to have a vision and create a video to express some their ideas.
In response to your list…
1. Font. Seriously? Who cares? Obviously fonts are something that can be changed in an interface, and really it’s more a matter of taste than anything. So lay off.
2. Uni-taps. It seems to me that every time a tap happens, a little microphone icon shows, indicating that voice input is being used. Even for the copy/paste operation the nice lady performs. Maybe that’s why it’s not confusing to anyone. I know it’s a stretch, but you need to imagine that they’re speaking even though you can’t hear it.
3. Gadget dimensions. It’s clear that this video represents all future device development, and that all categories of device are represented here.
4. Input methods. So your expectation is that devices won’t get better at handling a variety of different inputs, and manage them more effectively? Or that new input methods will be devised and used in different ways for different devices?
5. The hand pause. Have you actually used a touch device? There are typically a lot of hand pauses while you wait for visual feedback from the device. Try a kids education app (such as the one in the video) and you’ll see that a lot of the interactions are very similar to the one depicted here.
6. You hate Office. We get it. So do we. Get over it and don’t use it.
Seriously, what is your beef? I’m no lover of Microsoft products myself, but this video shows something we don’t usually get from them, including creativity and vision. Rather than smacking them down for it, maybe they should be encouraged to pursue these lofty goals. It might actually help make for a better tomorrow.
My beef? The problem is that they show a vision of the ‘future’ using the ideas and techniques of today. It isn’t going to be that way. That is not how invention and progress works. We don’t know what the future will work out. Get off your *** and ship new product instead of making silly videos. And really its false advertising – Microsoft (and others) are just showing you product that will never ship or even see the light of day.
Personally I would be just happy if Microsoft or Cisco delivered to their product roadmap on time. Just once.
It’s only false advertising if they sold something that said it’ll work as the video and if you’d believe that and bought it and realised it was an MS product after all.
This video is frivolous and vain but not false advertising.
I forgot the iPad was the first touch tablet the world ever saw right. The touch device was the iPhone right? or was it the iPod? Oh no that is right the technology was around LONG before Apple ever used it. Guess they are living on yesterday’s technology and apparently you are drinking the kool-aid.
I like the fact that no cheesy cartoonish OS animations and icons were depicted. Maybe Apple should take note and quit trying to sell kid toys to businesses.
As far as products that will never ship, ever been to a car show? It is standard practice to explore the possible and dream the currently impossible. I did not see anything in particular that truly exists today. Hell I just wish my mobile Safari would not crash every 5 minutes iOS5.
Maybe this *is* R&D, for the marketing department. The lord knows that MS marketing needs to up their game. Their most recent high point was the IE barf video (some will find this questionable, but I liked it).
Also, any “gritty realism” might cause John Dvorak to wet himself. The main cannot abide the least whiff of negativity, people! He’s a beautiful and fragile flower.
Actually sorry, they still drive on the left, but with left hand drive cars?
In the future, South Africans now drive on the right.
Coming Summer 2018ish.
Digital content will be displayed on every surface imaginable, but there won’t be a single ad seen anywhere.
I can get behind that.
—Josh
Not quite sure why Microsoft is obsessed with projecting recipes on our countertops, but they’ve been pushing that little innovation for a couple decades now.
Easier to clean than an iPad?
Just avoid the scratchy side of the sponge, dear.
—Josh
Did you also notice the pin sharp UI’s show pixels when we see zoomed in versions – 1:27.
Just like the future.
But I want a 4 inch device. No larger, though.
Gotham is typography we can believe in.
Ha! When I first saw the video, I noticed your third bullet point immediately and got a good chuckle out of it.
Make-believe ads for products that don’t exist and never will: The only place Microsoft can make magical technology.
Wish it weren’t so.
Rivalry spurs ingenuity. But I’ll settle for jealousy to give a little jumpstart.
—Josh
“I can tell you’re opinionated, too.”
Yes, I am. I’m mostly surprised that so many people misread this video. You are not the intended audience unless you’re in Corporate/Enterprise IT. I can tell that you’re not there because otherwise you would be oohing and aahing over it.
According to Microsoft, Real Soon Now, you will no longer be Mordac the Preventer of Information Services but will instead be the person responsible for the lithe and lovely young ladies getting the right kind of attention from your company’s extremely handsome and masculine servants… uhh, doormen. Your firm will conduct all its business through your Azure portals, which will be accessible 24X7 in Shanghai’s taxis, subterranean bars and every proper home’s refrigerators, mirrors etc.
Are you salivating yet about how you will no longer be the culprit behind security breaches, 7-digit cost overruns and the perception that you carry your beeper in a pocket protector? Oops, forgot, YOU’RE not the IT guy who will sign up his staff to become the High Priests of Microsoft Global-Enabled Cloud Services for Ephemeral Plastics.
Maybe you could consider a career transplant from bit-stained wretch to Suavest Man On The Planet Thanks to Microsoft ®.
In this digital age, when access to produced videos is emphatically guaranteed, the end user IS your intended audience — no matter what the original purpose was.
And what kind of nebulous “IT Manager” is not, at the end of the day, an end user. I think matching the two (IT person and regular joe) is where the sweet spot is.
I ooh and aah over cool stuff regardless where I see it, and I pointed out a few cool things in the list, but I was struck more by the overall irony this time. Maybe next video. Or Microsoft should just give us even one of those things next time it has an announcement.
Could you imagine the publicity MS might get if they announced next week that going forward they would not announce any products ahead of time? Marketing play of the year. You couldn’t *keep* the media away from a story like that. Rumors, expectation, “they’ve gotta have something good cooking in order to clamp down like that,” supply line investigations, stock price goes up — kinda like Apple. Then it’s up to them to pull through. But, man, what a story.
—Josh
Watching the video, it seems that we’re talking Star Trek (voice and pads), Minority Report (gestures), and the computers from Avatar (moving data from device to device).
So, other than slapping their logo all over everything, what’s Mircosoft’s vision again?
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater — a lesser amount of stickers is an epic win.
Maybe that’s their vision after all. I could get on board with that.
—Josh
Maybe mommy isn’t married. Marriage rates are going down, after all.
In the future, Mummy and Daddy have an R-EULA, or “Relationship-End User License Agreement”, which was biometrically confirmed (using the iFace App ‘TieKnot’). Due to the demand for gold by the electronics and energy industries, plus its increased cost due to its carbon footprint, people’s R-EULA status is publicly indicated not by jewellery but by their iSocial/Facetweet relationship status (which can be locked by TieKnot).
Only thing is, most people don’t bother to read the R-EULA before they sign up.
Epic
According to this video, the future is basically PowerPoint everywhere. Which may be true, but that’s as bad for humanity’s future as climate change.
Heh. That’s exactly what I thought when I was watching this. There are a million new ways to communicate information in the future, but they exist primarily to make a snazzier UI for Powerpoint.
How about a future where I can pause a video to appreciate the details without it SLIDING UP INTO A TINY THUMBNAIL.
Yeah, not a good use of snazzy effects. I chose it because it was the largest size video that didn’t cause too many problems.
—Josh
…And in the future black people will still only be employed to carry your bags. (The truly special ones can take meeting notes on special occasions.)
I like the tablet that has the rounded hole in the corner because it looks like you’re supposed to attach the public bathroom key to it. When people went to the bathroom they’d always have something to read, in that lovely Gotham typeface. What a great idea! Thank you, Microsoft.
1. Microsoft just bought Skype.
2. Skype makes many business trips irrelevant.
3. You’re right, mommy has something going on in South Africa.
Devices with no bezel to hold (or too small a bezel) look so awesome and futuristic when you’re not the one that has to use them!
When I saw Minority Report, I keept hearing people amazed at the tecnology and computer interfaces.
I just keep thinking “hey, he used an external disk to pass data from the big monitor to the desk one… cant they come up with decent wireless file sharing system in a future with that holographic technology?!”
Anyways, as for the MS video, i also was shocked that it seems a big white flag saying “OK, Apple will own the future, we will pay them to use our fonts!”
Art Blanc,
Agreed. There are some good things, but there’s really nothing groundbreaking here. That’s what annoys me. How much was spent on that video? Whatever it was should have been spent in R&D for something even halfway close to what they showed us.
And show me the world I want to live in, not something this sterile and unemotional. Make me jealous for your future, with families that are involved with each other and tech that is compelling. That’s what I would say.
—Josh
Microsoft spends eight times as much money on R&D when compared to Apple.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-05-25/tech/30042159_1_apple-s-r-d-data-points-tech-giants
The production cost to make this video doesn’t even hold a candle to the amount of money that they do spend on R&D.
However, much of that is not necessarily directly consumer facing. Take Microsoft Surface for example. Surface is changing the way people interact with content at Auto Trade shows, restaurants, hotels, etc… however, no one is going to go buy a Surface for their home.
Microsoft is doing their part to advance technology.
If by “MS is doing their part to advance technology.” you mean that MS hires exceptionally bright minds, pays them well, then locks up and never uses whatever they produce, then yes, you’re right. Unfortunately for them, this seems not to work so well anymore – bright ppl tend to go less for the immediate payment and more for an environment where their ideas are actually used, lately.
Chris,
For all the R&D cash spent, you’d think that instead of painting themselves into a few corners they could actually *create* new corners. On the market. They have a few hits (Xbox) and a lot of ingrowth (Office), but the problem is that they have very little that inspires, very little that we can’t already imagine.
It’s a weird point to say: They spend more, but create less, whereas another company spends less, creates more, inspires perpetually, and does better in the market. Where would the smart investor go?
—Josh
This video is a classic Microsoft. Like Gruber pointed out. It’s like, the Office team came to an ad agency and say, “Remember Minority Report? That’s golden.”