The future is amazing, and Microsoft has video to prove it
This might be as close as we're going to get to a time machine. Unless they're working on that, too. — Microsoft this morning is premiering a new video that shows how the company believes technology is poised to evolve …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest installment in a habit Microsoft has been building for years: its researchers showed off more than 100 computing innovations back in March 2007, and the company previewed future features of Project later that same year. The new video continues that tradition, packaging lab-grade ideas into a produced narrative about how technology will evolve.
What makes the timing notable is the surrounding month: GeekWire had already traced how Kinect and its offspring are reshaping Microsoft's future in February, and October brought Ballmer publicly swinging at Google Apps, Android, and the iPhone at the Web 2.0 Summit alongside a solid $17.37B quarter. The vision video lets Microsoft argue its case through imagination rather than litigation or executive sparring.
First-order effects
- Microsoft gains a marketing asset that reframes the conversation away from this month's Android patent-licensing roster and toward natural interfaces — touch, speech, gesture — where its Kinect-derived research gives it a visible story.
- Developers, OEM partners, and enterprise customers get an official signal about which interaction models Microsoft expects to matter in coming product cycles.
Second-order effects
- Rivals like Apple and Google face implicit pressure to answer with their own forward-looking narratives, since a polished vision video sets a public benchmark competitors can be measured against.
- Hardware partners watching the video gain early direction on where to invest in sensors, screens, and form factors for the next Windows-era devices.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds — research showcases in 2007, Kinect-driven interface work in 2011, produced vision films on top — corporate future-vision videos become a standing genre through which big platforms pre-narrate product categories years before anything ships.
- The longer-term bet embedded in the video is that the interface itself, not any single device, becomes the competitive battleground between platform companies.
The trend: Major platform vendors are turning produced future-vision videos into a recurring strategic tool for pre-narrating natural user interfaces — touch, speech, gesture — as the next front of competition.