Window on the Future?

The world's preeminent consumer electronics show kicked off this week in Vegas with a bold prediction that everyone in the future will travel by personal astrocars and jetpacks.

Well, not quite, but sorta. 

Microsoft's Bill Gates delivered the keynote at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, in which he outlined how Microsoft will deliver home and mobile connections with the Internet.  A variety of services and devices will let consumers access and swap news, photos and conversation, all enabled by the company’s software and hardware. 

In other words, Microsoft will be the window to Internet ubiquity, just as its Windows operating system has been the interface between people and their personal computers.

Now, Bill Gates is a billionaire genius, and Microsoft has allowed just about all of humanity to benefit from PCs.  His company has lots of money to spend on manufacturing and marketing things, which probably means that even its public detractors privately want to do business with it. 

And Gates is describing an all-inclusive Big Picture chocked full of opportunities to sell gizmos delivering digital stuff every which way from Friday, along with an infinite variety of ways to connect and integrate them.  There will be displays everywhere.  So, overall, the CES show promises to be a bumper year for tech companies creating more choices to people, in the hopes that more choices will prompt more decisions...which should mean more sales. 

Only I don't think Microsoft is going to become the window to this Big Picture.  For that matter, I doubt that consumers will willingly piece together this fantasy future of a digital lifestyle or workstyle in the ways that gizmo makers and .com services have been promoting for years. 

It's all starting to just feel a little old.  Like astrocars and jetpacks, perhaps we're seeing the wrong details, even as we're catching glimpses of the true future.

Remember that last-Century gee-wiz imagery?  Streamlined skyscrapers, networked by layers of suspended highways and lanes of flying craft?  Commuters driving Jetson-like astrocars?  Jetpacks that let people lift-off and land on their driveways? 

According to the vision back then, we should all be walking around today wearing helmets that look like Raymond Loewy's locomotive engines.  That's because the old Big Picture was based on the idea of travel...on freedom of movement.  On people going anywhere they wanted, any time they wanted to do so.

The vision was right, but the specifics were wrong.

It turns out we are moving around the globe freely...instantaneously, really...but because we're doing so with our senses and minds, not with our bodies.  We don't need astrocars to travel to cities when we can visit them via Internet multimedia.  We don't even need those cities anymore. 

Now consider tomorrow's Big Picture, courtesy of Microsoft and, generally, the hopefuls displaying at CES.

People are going to want to integrate information (and shopping) into every moment of experience.  Move it off desktop PCs and clumsy Internet searches, and away from dedicated retail outlets, and put it in cars, pockets, entertainment content, and anywhere else it would improve lives.  Accordingly, our lives are going to change immensely. 

I think this Big Picture is unavoidable, let alone a forecast or prediction.  It needs no propaganda, and no promotion.  It's about ubiquity of information, and its going to happen whether we want it to or not.

The branding and marketing comes in when we consider how it's going to happen.

Like astrocars and jetpacks, Microsoft sees variations of its Windows operating system, and gizmos (like the Xbox 360 gaming console and Zune .mp3 player), as the tools that will deliver the Big Picture.  It hopes to place itself -- screens, gizmos, software -- at the key junctures of this integrated web of communications.

It's an Orwellian fantasy.  Microsoft won't deliver the future, any more than any of the aspirants at the show will necessarily own large segments of it.  That's because the details won't have any more relevance to today's Big Picture than astrocars and jetpacks did. 

Instead, isn't tomorrow's Big Picture emerging from three broad trends?

First, usage.  Enabling connections isn't the same thing as getting people to use them.  There have been any number of linked thingamabobs that pretty much rotted into obscurity because they didn't fit into established needs or habits.  Instead of promoting a glorious future, why not build it, piece by piece?  Get people using the stuff that'll integrate and all that.  Microsoft could actually help do this with more focus on its Xbox Live offering (see the essay on how it ignored the most recent opportunity here ), and less propaganda about its misplaced hopes for the Zune player.

Second, for usage to be natural, it’s probably not going to work like a Windows screen, or voice-activated menu commands.  Think ambience instead...intelligence and information built not into machines, per se, but into the fabric of real experiences.  Smart alarm clocks that react to weather traffic delays vs. flashing menu options at bedsides.  Stock price notifications by the changing color or intensity of a lamp on your desktop.  Social media results, and participation, somehow available without screen or mic.  Perhaps products and services packaging that comes media-enabled to present the latest conclusions of the mediascape to potential buyers?

Third, proprietary technology will be key.  We can talk open source and standards until we're left penniless, but for any company to own a part of the Big Picture, it must actually own a part of the Big Picture.  Combined with the trends of ambience (integrated into experience, not forcing users to integrate with a tool) and usage (more people using something at less sales/use is eminently preferable to less people using a high-margin product, in that an expensive tool is a time-sensitive dare to somebody to displace it), ownership means you can't just do something differently, but rather need to do it uniquely and exclusively.  The proprietary aspects of the Microsoft Big Picture fail this litmus test; you'd think with its resources, it would be introducing not also-rans (Zune again) but never-befores.

Gates described how Microsoft plans to steal market share from today's competitors, instead of telling the world how it's inventing the markets of the future

Actually, why didn't Microsoft announce a patented, branded jetpack?  Tomorrow's Big Picture might be built on something so crazy, assuming it could get enough people using it.

But outlining tomorrow's integrated, ubiquitous, digital infosphere with the ideas and technologies of today is the stuff we might one day look back at as quaint and misplaced, not as a prescient window on the future.

Comments

[Scott White]

Love the idea of an alarm clock that may actually set itself off early because of traffic or weather delays. Take it one step further with a GPS alternative route to arrive at destination faster.

That's a product!