No one knows what the future will look like, but it’s always fun to guess, right? Microsoft has an entire position dedicated to the task, titled “Director of Envisioning,” which is held by David Jones. In an interview with GeekWire, he claimed that the future holds “an expanded definition of productivity where it’s not just about getting things done. It’s also about doing the right things, and doing them well and enjoying the process with other people in a very natural way.”
And that’s just what the sequel to Microsoft’s “Office 2019” video shows.
In the video (below), Microsoft paints a world inhabited only by beautiful people, in which smartphones are about the size of a business card, and just about any surface you come into contact with has a touch-sensitive interface. Everyone is also wearing the same clothes as we do today, which is curious but comforting all the same.
The video shows cloud connections as the primary form of content transference, whether that be from a phone to a book-like tablet, or from a tablet to the kitchen table. Interestingly, the “phone” type device (which no one actually speaks on throughout the whole video) sports a “live tile” interface very similar to the current Windows Phone Mango platform. There’s not a shred of paper in the video, which is bad news for the print industry should Redmond’s vision come to fruition. But on the whole, I wouldn’t mind living in Microsoft’s world in the next five to ten years.
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
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