*That's quite an interesting argument. The part about imagining today as a design-fiction from the year 2000 is especially good. If you could create a fake Microsoft video from 2000 that described 2013, I'd say you were a maestro of design-fiction; you'd have the level of analytical detachment necessary to do a really good job.
*Of course, Microsoft themselves wouldn't have done that in a video; the point of a Microsoft promotional video is to expand the Microsoft empire. It would be very interesting indeed to see a Microsoft design-fiction video that forecast the destruction of Microsoft. It would be a sign of corporate design-fiction escaping the black hole of advertising and really tackling the intellectual debate. It's very common for a political party to say, "things may go badly for us," but corporations never do. Of course the board of directors says that among themselves, but they would never pay to reveal that prospect to the public.
*So as it is, there's something odd about holding Microsoft accountable for a lack of forecasting accuracy, because advertising doesn't tell the truth; that's not its purpose.
(...)
"People often think of Microsoft as wedded to the vision of the PC on the desk, but it's clear from those vision videos that the Microsoft of 2000 was already a very "post-PC" organisation, with a view of the future that was focused on cloud services and mobility. Sure, there have been missteps on the way.
"We should also remember what Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton calls the "Long Nose" of technology — the 10 years and more that it takes to leave the research lab and get into the hands of the consumer. It's an effect I have personal experience of, working in a research lab in the early 90s and experimenting with early versions of cable modems, of ADSL networks, and of pocket sized screens and small radios. At the bleeding edge then, they're in most homes today — costing a fraction of the thousands of dollars my experimental networks cost to build.
"And so, we should look at the technologies we have today, where iPhones with biosensors unlock information in the cloud, where a Windows 8.1 PC shares apps with the rest of the machines you own, and where the same code runs on the desktop, on the phone, and in the cloud. Watch the videos again, and you’ll see much of the technology landscape we live in. it may not all be here yet, and it certainly won't look it does in the video, but that Forum 2000 vision (like Apple’s Knowledge Navigator before it) is part of the foundations of today’s IT world...."
