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Microsoft's Vision Of Future Workplaces
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft unveils their new office of the near future in a swanky center in Redmond. Inside this article you will find clear evidence of institutional navel gazing like never before and a staggering ignorance of current technology (much of this seems retreaded) not to mention actual business needs or wants. Want proof? How about: '"Surround sound is going to be increasingly important in future offices," says group marketing manager Tom Gruver in leading a tour of the new facility.' Right. More chestnuts inside."
"The lines between home and office are blurring,"
And that, my dear friends, is what will decide its success. Ever-increasing workloads and unreasonable expectations of "productivity" from cost-cutting employers mean there's a good chance the above statement will come true, even if the rest [of the vision] doesn't.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Your choice, Mr. Anderson:
- Receive your message via some old Gleep rattling on about the weather, his latest aches and pains, finally getting to the point 13 minutes into the message..., or
- Skimming the email until you get to the part that matters, reading it quickly and then hitting a ^D to send it to hell.
Well, Mr. Anderson, which is it? Listen to 5 messages an hour (if you're lucky), or processing 30 emails in the same amount of time? Where do you want to go today, Mr. Anderson?My name is Neo!
THUD.
Yeah, right.
1) That wraparound screen actually looks pretty cool and potentially useful. I find myself glancing back and forth slightly across my large screen, so something like this could help with limited screen real estate. Not everyone's comfortable with X-style multiple desktops. My one worry is that this monitor would be MS-only (insert quote about GM requiring GM wheels here...)
2) Surround sound being an important part of an office? If your office is a production studio, maybe - but if your office is a studio, chances are you know more about what you need than a bunch of marketing hacks from MS.
I kind of hope this was a joke that the article didn't quite make clear.
3) The lack of a focus on security - on the one hand, MS might not want to overhype something they've been horribly deficient with in the past. On the other hand, it sounds like even the visitors noticed a lack of focus on secure computing, and I'd be a bit concerned about a company that promotes style over substance as the "office of the near future".
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
At one desk, users can move a wireless mouse's pointer from the screen of one computer to the screen of a laptop, with no wire or wireless connection between the computers themselves. That allows copying or moving material between the computers, a task that would otherwise be more difficult.
Yes, that normally is difficult if there is "no connection between the computers". So is the mouse also a base station for wireless ethernet?!?
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Prefences->Homepage->Exclude Stories from Homepage->Topics: Microsoft. Theres also a filter for JonKatz if anyone out there doesn't already have it checked.
They don't have to get it - they have the resources and the drive to catch the horse *after* it has bolted. A prime example of this is IE, whose early versions were truely aweful but is now the best browser on the market (though Mozilla is real close, maybe even better*).
Another example is DirectX - they kept plugging away at it. Now it has surpassed OpenGL in terms of functionality and is the place where new technologies appear first.
Another example will be the Xbox. If Sony, et al are grinning now then they won't when XboxII comes out.
Microsoft can afford to play follow the leader - they have the money and the bloody minded resove to catch up from the rear.
* - haven't tried 1.1 or 1.2a yet
no that there weren't a few interesting things mentioned in the article.
- being able to move the mouse pointer between computers (assuming these are separate computers, not just multiple monitors); I assume this indicates some sort of network-transpart clipboard (and that the user is signed onto both computers). cool, that.
- the larger, semi-circle screen - mostly for the cool wraparound aspect (semi-inevitable considering increasingly thin monitors and e-paper (somewhere) down the line, though).
Otherwise, it sounds like they're just hashing out more variations of video/audio conferencing - whoop-de-whoo.
There seems to be a problem of understanding the _purpose_ of business communication, vs. just the _forms_ of communication. Video and audio voicemail are high-bandwidth, low content, and do little to guide the sender towards composing a coherent message. When using text, OTOH, we are often forced to skip the details and focus on the meat of what we intend to say.
However, neither of these formats truly _aids_ us in the actual composition of our thoughts - one can easily compose a syntactically perfect text message with zero content - and this is even easier in audio/video formats.
A spreadsheet and a database are useful in that they assist use in ordering large amounts of quanitative data; unfortunately, we have few tools that assist us in bridging the gap between quantiative data and qualitative data, in other words, making our intent clear while exposing the reasoning behind it.
Step-by-step-"Wizards" are a (mostly) futile stab in the general direction of this, tending to assume a very rigid result (as well as presuming that we know the final format of the ends result from the start!); what we need instead are tools that allow us to begin very broadly, and then assist us in narrowing our concepts down until we have a clear set of assumptions, observations, related analysis, and conclusions.
Yes, there are many _people_ who are good at this, and there are processes for _teaching_ people to be good at this, but we don't (yet) have automated tools that are good with helping people accomplish this.
And until someone manages to construct the fundemental versions of those tools, we'll have to deal with new versions of tools that make it easier to transfer nonsense back-and-forth, vs. actually developing, refining, and communicating ideas. Anything less than this is just another improved method to pretend that we're in the same room with someone who's not.
Or, God forbid, another variation on Powerpoint (shudder).
- Surround sound is an importent part of the workplace, because surround sound advertising embedded in the operating system that must be watched in order to continue to use the system is making Microsoft millions. Thanks to Palladium, there's no way around this.
- You try to copy a snippet from a webpage by simply moving a mouse pointer from your desktop to your laptop, but you don't have permission to copy the snippet from the webpage, and the copy action fails due to DRM.
- A worker tries to email his boss a clip of the broadcast news story about their company, but the embedded watermark blocks him from doing so.
- An email is forward to the CEO's car dash. The CEO's car 'blue screens', and literally crashes, killing the CEO, because for all the Microsoft rhetoric, they are still interested in neither security, nor correctness.
- Two of the six feet of the screen are dedicated to advertising.
Sarcastic? Yes. Overstated? Yes. Am I any more guilty of twisting things then Microsoft in this article? No.It's amazing how hard Microsoft's actual actions are working to block as much of this as possible and ruin it in every way, even as they talk this stuff up.
My ass. They can try to blur them all they want, but it will be a cold day in hell before my office is in my home. When I go home, I want to get away from work. My employer gets fully a third of my weekday existence as it is (8 hours of 24), plus occasional weekend work when things get tight. I don't want to go home, only to do more work. That's my time for family, friends, or just plain sitting on my couch in my boxers drinking a beer.
We've been way to permissive in allowing our employers to demand increasing amounts of our time, particularly those of us on salary, who don't get overtime pay. We need to grow a backbone, stand up, and declare, in one voice, "NO MORE!" If we fail to do so, we will all be changing our job descriptions to "wage slave," because that's what we'll be.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
That's what I find so fascinating about the whole MS thing - by and large, they're a bunch of highly effective morons. Obviously, there are some very intelligent coders in there (there'd have to be to get that mess known as windows to run on anything), but by and large their strategy is totally reactionary, and all they seem to know how to do is totally whack competitors. Nothing original or useful.
Yet look at their position in the market. I find it incredible.
-- james
And email is the only thing that really caught on........
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Thanks for the insight... it sounds like a very nice environment you have. However, this simply underscores the problem.
It has been my experience, reflected by the popularity of cultural icons like Office Space and Dilbert, that organizations (both corporate and US Government) tend not to have such a wealth of workspace. The average employee does not get their own office space. They're lucky if they get their own cube. Furthermore, management seems eager to explore ways to further share a shared workspace - witness the interest in "hoteling".
This leads to two points. First, sound is more a disruptive entity than enhancement of this shared space. Secondly, a business is not likely to invest in the extra money for a good set of surround sound speakers to further that disruption.
Scoffing at Microsoft's claims that surround sound will be an important part of the office is not simply dismissing the point out of hand. It is recognizing the current environment. And it might further question whether Microsoft's visionaries are too removed from the reality of that current environment.