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Microsoft's Concept Videos From 2000: Why Didn't Ballmer Build Any of It?
- Oculus 13y agoKind of reminds me of the Windows tablet being way before the iPad, yet the iPad blowing it out of the water. Microsoft had all these great ideas, but failed to execute. It really reinforces the 'ideas without good execution are worthless' motto.
- saurik 13y agoFWIW, Windows Journal was epic, and nothing on the iPad even comes close (nor really can it, due to the inaccuracy of the input compared to an active pen digitizer). I provided some more details on this a long time ago on Quora (which kind of sucks, but it at least saves having to go into a long description ;P). http://www.quora.com/Tablet-Devices-and-Tablet-Market/Why-doesnt-Microsoft-understand-tablets/answer/Jay-Freeman-1 http://www.quora.com/Tablet-Devices-and-Tablet-Market/Why-do...
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoPen and touch computing are not competing technologies: you could have one or the other, or both, and the experiences would be complementary. Touch seems to have led to a much larger market than pen, which is still quite useful, just not something that everyone would wind up using like touch. Would love to see Apple get into Pen computing, and this is one area where I think Surface could have really distinguished itself (including a digitizer on a low-end Surface RT, for example).
- mabhatter 13y agoThe problem with Pen computing is that it's too close to Mouse and Keyboard, so NEW user paradigms aren't developed or encouraged.... In short the entire story of MS Office on tablets. Steve understood with the first iPhone WAY BACK that Touch was the way to go and people needed to be "reprogrammed" how to use it. Remember iPhone was only "Steve's way" for the first 18 months before only a few developers were invited to play too in a proto-App store. The whole path from iPhone to iPad was carefully mapped out with the next piece coming only when enough people agreed with "Steve's way". People still want iPad to be "just a pen based Mac" shows a large number of very important people don't get the subtle chane in HUMAN BEHAVIOR required to take the next step.
- dreamfactory 13y agoOneNote is incredible, couldn't find anything close on iPad - but feels like zero effective marketing there. If Apple made anything like that it would be all over their keynotes and ads as a USP.
- xal 13y agoOneNote exists on the iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-onenote-for-iphone/id410395246?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-onenote-for-iphone... Right, it's not quite the same.
- dreamfactory 13y agoIt really doesn't compare, don't think it even has OCR so notes aren't searchable.
- Pent 13y agoIs evernote not a good replacement? OCR searching in notes etc
- dreamfactory 13y agoYes it looks like the nearest thing but doesn't seem to compare with OneNote usability from what I saw (had a co-worker who used it for everything).
- devx 13y agoBecause they saw everything through Windows lenses - and in the end that's how they built those tablets anyway. They still see things that way. They killed Courier for the same reason - it wasn't Windows.
- alrs 13y agoThis video won't play in Firefox on Debian or in Chrome on Android. Anyone know where else this video can be found?
- evanm 13y ago<< "Kristy, guess what? I got tickets to the fatboy slim concert!" >> "Shut. Up."
- acchow 13y agoIdeas are worth nothing. A 15 minute conversation with any expert in HCI 15 years ago would cover 95% of these ideas. Execution is everything. Microsoft tried to execute on some of these ideas, but the result was always too cumbersome/confusing.
- educating 13y agoFrom what I understand, like you said, the problem was that they spent too many years in "lets fix that later" mode. They couldn't be agile because they had too much crap on the plate. MS needs to have a haircut like Marissa Mayer gave Yahoo. Hardware and SAAS are not the way for MS; they need to get back into large(r) system OS dev in a big way, to run house and building automation. The game console should only be part of it. If they want to do hardware, it better be to run the code they write, otherwise they will be stomped.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoSpeaking of Yahoo, have Mayer's ideas turned out to be very effective yet?
- presidentender 13y agoWell, we are speaking of Yahoo.
- cremnob 13y agoThey're definitely seeing more traffic. http://readwrite.com/2013/09/11/yahoo-marissa-mayer#awesm=~ohbfUjbayJ7bJz http://readwrite.com/2013/09/11/yahoo-marissa-mayer#awesm=~o...
- InclinedPlane 13y agoPart of that is due to the way they do employee reviews. People are rewarded more (in the form of control over their own job, promotions, and bonuses) for building new things in a short time frame than they are for fixing old stuff that's broken or flawed.
- Maarten88 13y agoBut they did build a lot of that video. A few things even succesfully, like Lync/Skype (video conferencing) and SharePoint (document sharing) However, they failed at most things: - they were too early and the market and technology was not ready for it (Pocket PC) - they were too late (Zune, Windows Phone) - plans were blocked by companies who's support they needed but who were scared of them (music/movies/mobile phone industry) - execution sucked and products were not good enough (Windows Mobile, home server, media center, everything speech) - their reputation with consumers was tainted and the press wrote very negatively without really understanding much (hailstorm, drm) - they made it cost money and other offered it for free, ad supported (MapPoint) - negotiation power and influence in the market diminished after the monopoly abuse trials - it took a long time before they understood their problems
- mynameisvlad 13y ago> everything speech To be completely fair, Kinect Audio recognition is awesome.
- Maarten88 13y agoYou speak English, i'm sure. Another thing Microsoft has severely lost in the last decade is catering to the needs of customers outside the US. Case in point: Bing
- mynameisvlad 13y agoSince we've just barely gotten English audio recognition at a good state (and I'm talking in general, not just Microsoft), there hardly should be any surprise that non-English recognition is where it is. I don't see how "catering to the needs of customers outside the US" is related to "audio recognition" other than that one of them is a thing. If you didn't realize, Microsoft products are available in a dozen languages, and localization tests take a long amount of time as it is. As a company, it supports an incredibly large number of countries, more than almost all companies posted here on HN, and definitely just as much if not more than most in the world. Just because one or two products is hard to localize does not mean that Microsoft has "severely lost in the last decade to catering to the needs of customers outside the US".
- jgreen10 13y agoBecause they did. Windows-powered touch-screen Pocket PCs and Tablet PCs existed years before the iPod. Microsoft just didn't find mobile devices important enough and wasn't willing to re-invent Windows for it. Windows Mobile was pretty terrible to use.
- pohl 13y ago...and wasn't willing to re-invent Windows for it. And thereby, being unwilling to disrupt themselves, made themselves ripe for it.
- lumberjack 13y agoTheir version of the web seems to be mostly A/V which is not really realistic as most people can't afford the time nor have the skills to contribute content in that fashion. Does that mean that they were underestimating how valuable user generated content would be?
- dimitar 13y agoI was reading about the worlds navies around the turn of the 19th century. The British dominated the seas and were very innovative during the wars with the French and Dutch. But then they stopped. They knew that they had the best sailing ships and knew that changing the technology will only disrupt seas in a way threatening their supremacy. And so the torpedo was invented by the Austrians, the steam and iron ships were pioneered by the French and Americans. This continued even in the 19th century - the century was of Pax Britanica was a century of catchup. In the end economics was important - Britain remained the worlds leader in industry and trade.
- Steko 13y agoWhat's become more and more clear is that while Ballmer is resigning now, he actually largely abdicated the powers of CEO to the heads of the office/windows/mobile fiefdoms over a decade ago.
- Steko 13y agoHere's the article I was reminded of, and I've read variations on the same theme many times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagew... early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType... Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows. When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow. So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.
- aswanson 13y agoFor the same reason they wont execute anything on that Microsoft 2019 video in 6 years. They'll ride Office to their deathbed, which is coming into clear view. Nice run.
- edvinbesic 13y agoThis is how I feel as well. For a while I thought that Windows RT might be their stepping stone into these waters as a sort of clean break from the burden of backwards compatibility of x86 windows, but alas, it seems as though enterprise rules now until 6 feet under.
- feniv 13y agoBallmer building any of that would be equivalent to Microsoft actually building some of the technology from their latest "Vision" clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0 All of those things seem simple in hind sight, but there were very real hurdles preventing them from being realized at that time (for example, the Internet infrastructure for real-time video chat). Concept videos like this are just the tech world's version of concept-cars by the auto industry. They make the company seem innovative and research oriented without the significant resources required to make a practical product. True, they sometimes yield useful research, but most of the time they're just meant to be good P.R.
- x0054 13y agoYou know what's really sad about that Video, even in the future Microsoft imagines them selves using low resolution displays. I mean, for god sakes, every time they would zoom in on that frameless phone thing you would clearly see pixels. Since it's all CGI, they actually went out of their way to give it low res screen look my painting in the pixel lines. I think, at least for me, the true failure of MS Surface was the crappy display it came with.
- sahaskatta 13y agoI played with the Surface Pro for a week or two. I felt the display was actually one of the best ones I've seen. Especially considering the quality of the pen digitizer inside. Are you maybe referring to the lower-res display on the Surface RT? (I haven't played with that one much.)
- x0054 13y agoYep, the RT. Have not played with the Pro yet, I should stop by the local Windows store and take a look.
- x0054 13y agoI wish the RT screen was as good as the pro. Played with it yesterday and it was great. Not as good as iPad, but so good that I think most people, including me, would not care. And I think the Windows 8 os is just marvelous, I just wish they would finish it. Right now it feels like beat still.
- cheery 13y agoConsidering how shitty the concept art there is, it should be obvious why they didn't built any of it - They couldn't make it real.
- com2kid 13y agoSome of these were built, other ideas just don't scale. But most of these? They exist now. Not quite as nice as the video shows, but they exist. Kinect actually enabled a lot of the voice control experiences, Skydrive and Sharepoint do some of the other sharing scenarios, just not as nice as they all should be. I saw some awesome mapping stuff working on Windows Mobile well before the iPhone came out, including actual building maps and linking into ones "social network" (however limited that was at that time) to show where one's friends sat. It is actually sort of sad that none of the experiences have been polished nearly as well as they should have been, by any of the players in the market really. Google Hangouts comes close with some of their collaborative tools, but then something falls apart in the experience, for example in the case of Hangouts, it can be a pain to start one depending on which UI path ones chooses to take, and various bugs pop up and just break the immersion of the experience. MSN Messenger had a lot of good stuff, video and voice conferencing both worked long ago, but then that market fell apart. Collaborative Document Editing was done right by Microsoft with One Note 2007, and then completely ignored from then on by the rest of the Office line. Amazing technology, not sure why it wasn't more widely adopted (I'm guessing due to file format needs, presumably the One Note team had the advantage of building up from scratch). Perhaps most amusing in this video is what people thought LCD screens would look like! I am thankful the ID on LCDs did not go that way!
- RachelF 13y agoDon't forget Microsoft TerraServer which was a 1998 version of Google Maps.
- csel 13y agoBallmer and his stooges were too busy making fun of Apple and Google (aka. Microsoft's version of marketing). Gosh, when Ballmer leaves, I hope all his VP's would be taken out as well.
- general_failure 13y agoDid you forget who is the prime candidate to replace Ballmer? Elop...
- wsc981 13y agoApple's 1987 vision on computing is nice for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w
- Paul12345534 13y agoI think they may have been a little gun shy in some of their later actions due to fear of monopoly claims after they had been smacked down.-
- milesf 13y agoFTA: "Ballmer's Microsoft wasn't lacking for ideas; it was lacking execution." Derek Sivers said it best "To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions." (see https://sivers.org/multiply https://sivers.org/multiply) Whatever the reason for Microsoft's inability to execute, the history shows that Gates (a programmer) could get stuff done, and Ballmer (a salesman) can't. IMHO it's probably stack ranking that killed their execution (http://slate.me/19Jf74r http://slate.me/19Jf74r). Salespeople (like Ballmer) use external fear to motivate people (Make the sale or my boss will fire me!). Programmers (like Gates) use internal fear to motivate themselves (Make this code work or my colleagues will think I'm stupid!). How can any programmer execute properly in an environment of both internal and external fear?
- kvb 13y agoWasn't stack ranking in use during Gates's tenure as well?
- milesf 13y agoI know Gates was/is in favour of stack ranking, but I don't think it was in use during his term as CEO. Ultimately the answer doesn't matter to me. The company has always been a bully, both in the marketplace and internally towards their staff. No one wants to see a bully succeed. Edit: Wikipedia says "Since the 2000s, Microsoft used a stack ranking similar to the vitality curve." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms_of_rank-and-yank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms_of_ra...) Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft January 2000.
- kvb 13y agoRoot against Microsoft all you want - I just think that stack ranking is too convenient a scapegoat. Valve and Google stack rank, too, but that doesn't mean they're not great companies. Also, Wikipedia's not necessarily an infallible source; see [1] for evidence that stack ranking dates back to '96 or so (at the latest). [1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/08/30/microsoft-review-time-capsule-1997-bill-gates-ceo/ http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/08/30/microsoft-review-tim...
- rbanffy 13y agoMost of these devices were built, some of them with Microsoft technology, but the technology wasn't ready, the implementation was bad (the interfaces are horrendous, for instance), the licensing was prohibitive and Microsoft didn't see themselves as a device company. They saw themselves as building the technologies that supported those devices, not the devices themselves. We must all keep in mind these concepts were showcased 13 years before in the famous Knowledge Navigator video or in Sun's less known 1994 Starfire video. And, probably, on many others that remained unseen by the masses.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jere 13y ago>Business users did get some of the promised technology. SharePoint and Lync provide project sharing Strange how the promised land looks like hell on earth.
- venus 13y agoLike all MS concept videos, it's all very pretty but useless except for the most shallow kinds of collaboration - it's not so much promising any specific technology so much as a future in which you don't actually have to do any work. How many people do companies really need whose role in its entirety consists of quickly slapping together pretty-looking "reports" full of 3D graphs? These superficial concept videos have about as much relevance to the world of actual usable technology as porn has to the complexity and compromises of married life. The encyclopaedia we have today is Wikipedia, not Encarta, and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.
- maratd 13y ago> and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning. I care. I think Wikipedia would be greatly improved with relevant embedded video content. Unfortunately, getting high quality relevant public domain video is virtually impossible. It is nice to think about though.
- venus 13y agoHm. Well, I agree actually, and in fact it does have some media at least associated with articles, via the "wikimedia commons". I was more trying to illustrate that multimedia alone does not make a high quality resource, as proved the downfall of the "Multimedia CD-ROM" era of content production, which I feel these concept videos are rooted in.
- joeblau 13y agoSo in that video, I saw: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google Docs, iPad...
- TimJRobinson 13y agoI've recently came across "The Road Ahead" written by Bill Gates in 1995, and in it he details many of the technologies we have today with surprising accuracy (We'll all have digital wallets that contain all our info, take movies and photos, allows us to converse with anyone anywhere wirelessly etc). Microsoft had a great vision for the future they just failed in execution.