What could this post be about? Michael blasting Microsoft again?
Yep.
They make it too damn easy for me. This bit of exhaust has to do with the new ‘vision’ piece for 2019 posted over at istartedsomething.
Microsoft has a vision for things in 2019 and it involves lots of touch screens and e-ink – all networked together. That’s great. And the film short is beautifully produced. It reminds me of of The Island and Minority Report combined with a good helping of Target – all mixed together.
The vision piece is the easy part. A lot of other companies could have produced something similar. The hard part is applying that vision. Maybe if another company were proposing this vision I might have an easier time believing it was possible, but not Microsoft.
This is a company who originally claimed Longhorn (aka Vista …aka Windows 7) would have 3-D rendering within the OS because, you know, 3-D immediately makes thinks better (that pesky 2-D Exposé on OS X sucks!).
Steve Jobs nails it when discussing concept cars in a Time magazine article from 2005:

“Here’s what you find at a lot of companies…You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! …What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that’s the situation he found. He and Jonathan Ive, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-ray tube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. “Sure enough,” Jobs recalls, “when we took it to the engineers, they said, ‘Oh.’ And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit.”