Microsoft's Home Of Tomorrow Has No Bathroom

Starman9x writes "Over at the The Toronto Star reporter Rachel Ross got a tour of Microsoft's home of the future. She writes with an appropriate amount of humor, given all the easy targets Microsoft has set up. While the writeup is light and witty, there is an unspoken Orwellian undertone to it -- after all, do we really want Microsoft to have that much control over things?"

Comments

Wait till the power goes out!

[fuzdout]

All cool till you have several generations of people who grew up with this stuff and know no other way of life and all of a sudden a big wind storm and the power is *OUT*.

Generators would be even more necessary than now :)

stupid house

[cebe]

These digital homes of the future will only be as smart as the owner. People will yell and scream and curse at their house just like they do to their printer. The main server that runs the whole party will require pretty good knowledge of computers. Unless of course, you are rich and have a 24 hour geek squad a phone call away. Technical difficulties will arise, upgrades will need to be done, and to do it yourself (economically) will require *wanting* to know the guts of the system. Not to mention, a bit of knowledge about whatever language is making everything tick. The interesting thing about these "future" homes is that they are just a concept right now. They will become widely built and used only if simplicity is pursued by the people designing and building them. Whoever comes up with a very simple GUI for some "master controls" that doesn't require every single appliance, light, alarm, and garage door opener to be compliant to only one protocol, or worse, MADE BY MS, will be a very rich person. Of course, the average /.'er could handle the 'super house' (and most likely would not let any other person put their muckers on the design and implementation of it), but the average 'i have 40 gigabytes of ram!' person won't be able to.

More importantly, Microsoft doesn't have a single view of the future. The tours present possible scenarios, not a blueprint for product development.

This is the most important part of the article. Not everyone will want *everything* that MS's digital home showscases... but customizability (is that a word?) of these future homes will be the key. Opting for the econopackage presented by your home builder would be a bad idea. A home owner would end up without enough features that they could make good use of, and too many things that they don't need, or worse, don't know how to work.

It will be interesting to see how these become mainstream.

Home Automation is Hard

[Thomas Wendell]

My wife and I are nerds and have designed automation into our home. We have systems for security, lighting control, media equipment control and HVAC all talking to each other via serial and Ethernet. We are programming everything ourselves, because we can and because we think we'll do a better job than anyone we could hire.

We've been in the house for six months and haven't finished the lighting controls. It takes a while to figure out how you want things to work. Everything works reasonably well and some things are really cool.

However, anything more complex than having a button that turns out all of the lights when you're ready to shutdown for the evening gets surprisingly subtle.

For example, we programmed the system to automatically turn on the hall lights when we get home. The rule is simple enough, if this door opens, and it's between sunset and sunrise, turn on this light. But then, we have a warm winter and get a lot of bugs on the entry and when I take out the garbage, I turn off the light so the bugs don't swarm into the house, then open the door and the light comes back on!

We easily fixed this, but what happens to tomorrow's consumers who buy a mass-produced system that tries to be a LOT more clever than what I just described and it goes wrong? These are the people who couldn't figure out to set the time on their VCR, who don't know how to turn off Word's autoformatting "features" and instead have to learn how to work around them. How are they going to live in a home that is complex beyond their comprehension and that does things they don't want and can't fix?

The answer is they won't. This high-tech home automation for the masses is a fantasy. Software is going to have to get orders of magnitude better before it's even thinkable.

Re:Home Automation is Hard

[swillden]

But one thing your forgetting is that the homeowners of the future will be those kids the parents are asking for help with that dumb VCR. As a member of that people group (I'm 16) I can tell you the geek to jock ratio is looking better all the time.

As a member of the group that thought exactly the same almost 20 years ago when *I* was the geek hacking on my little computer and fixing the VCR for my parents, I can tell you that you're wrong. Human nature hasn't changed and won't change. It's not that people are too dumb to figure out how to set their VCR clock (most of them, anyway), it's that people don't have time or the intellectual energy to deal with crap that doesn't just work. Most people aren't "fiddlers" by nature, and it's only those of us who *enjoy* messing with crap like that who are willing to do it.

Heck, even those of us who like it get tired of it. I have nine or ten computers in my home, run my own mail and web servers, have a wireless network, etc., because I think it's fun. But, you know what? It's also fragile as hell (or at least it often seems that way) and I'm getting tired of screwing with it all. I rarely go more than three or four months without some sort of a problem. Even though most of the machines run Linux and are pretty trouble-free (the one Win2K box gives me more trouble than the rest of them put together), I still end up having to fight with problems with the mail server (which is used by about 30 people as their primary e-mail, so when it has problems I'm in trouble), or my VPN connection to the office goes down, or the mobo in my desktop starts flaking out, or I have to go tweak my firewall and intrusion detection system to make sure I'm not going to get hacked, or the printer sharing stops working, or my wife's USB wireless network adaptor flakes out and takes the USB mouse with it, or ... I'll stop here, but I could go on for pages. And then there's the huge pile of stuff that I'd still like to make all of this equipment do -- but after writing code for ten hours a day, I need time to keep up with all of the other crap I have to do (matter of fact, I've got to go fix the snowblower now; oh, and that tub drain is still leaking), *and* I'd really like some time to spend with my wife and kids, etc., plus indulge myself a bit in other things I enjoy.

So, my VCRs blink 12:00, and my kernels run untuned, and my IDS logs go unreviewed while I take my kids ice skating. I dread those mornings when my wife (ever so innocently) asks "Honey, is the internet down? I can't get to CNN.com" because I know I have a crapload of work to do this morning and don't have time to futz with it.

Now suppose *everything* in my house had the same level of complexity. <shudder>

tech of the future

[t_parker16]

methinks the computerized home of the future is more about technology "fading into the background", making things more convenient but in an unobtrusive way; not the technology being the centerpiece of a "gee whiz" kind of house that would appeal most to a 14-year-old.

but maybe its just the dissonance between a "showcase house of the future", where tech is the centerpiece, and the tech we all really will want and/or need.