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November 01, 2004

Center for Information Work

I went on a tour of the Center for Information Work a few weeks ago. The CIW is designed to give visitors a sense of what productivity software will look like in a few years -- or at least to show that Microsoft is thinking about what productivity software will look like in a few years. It's housed in the Executive Briefing Center on Microsoft's campus. Normally tours are for Microsoft customers, but they have started giving employees tours when time permits. It's a nice perk of being an employee (Microsoft, to its credit, has started doing this more often -- realizing that one way to make employees understand customers is to have them experience some of what customers experience, including the cool stuff).

I'm never sure of the NDA status of things like this. But there's a press website for this, with a bunch of pictures, and here's an article about it winning an award that features a big closeup screen shot. So it's not exactly a deep dark secret.

The tour I took started in the work center, where computers were set up with a variety of different monitors -- some with multiple flat panels, some with regular monitors and tablet displays, and some with the Broadbench, a big wraparound screen. All the various displays on a single computer were seamlessly linked into one big virtual desktop. Afterwards we moved to the conference room, which featured the RingCam 360 degree camera, as well as some atmospheric props that included a hard hat, a section of airplane wall, and the dashboard of a semi truck cab (really).

It's not clear exactly what group within Microsoft is funding this, or reading survey results, but if you pulled on the right string you would undoubtedly wind up untrying the shoe of Jeff Raikes. Raikes is in charge of large sections of Microsoft's product groups, most importantly the Information Worker group (Office, basically). If this were another company showing off this technology, it would come across as trying to commoditize the operating system; but coming from another group within Microsoft, it seems more likely they are simply deciding that the productivity of the Information Worker is too important for any of it to be left to the Windows team to solve.

As you can see from the screen shot, the productivity software takes over your entire desktop. Office has had notions along these lines in the past, if you recall the Microsoft Office Manager toolbar that it used to install (which I think has now become the Office Shortcut Bar). In the CIW demo, there is Office goop all over the screen, with nothing of the operating system visible (except perhaps that fancy orange background).

Another view would be that this is part of a plan by Office to blunt an attack by Google. I know nothing of Office's strategy, but one of the directions it is moving is towards becoming a server platform, but of course this plays directly into Google's strengths. Google's weakness is its reliance on the browser; the CIW demo uses the desktop in a way that browser-based client software would be hard to match. Unfortunately the timing is probably wrong for this particular theory; the CIW opened two years ago, before anyone was too worried about Goozilla and Gooffice.

A more likely probability is that the CIW is simply the result of some happy hackers, with no particular connection to a product group and too many Xbox hours logged in the past, coming up with the coolest UI they could think of. Since people like playing games, why not make your daily productivity software experience as much like a video game as possible? Who knows if users really need a surround-sound, "Whole Lotta Love"-like whoosh when email arrives, but why not give it to them just in case? While the CIW is a neat demo with some great hardware, it's not clear that it was designed by people who have really spent a lot of time thinking about increasing the productivity of the Information Worker.

Yes, it's a nifty demo and it undoubtedly impresses customers. But if you believe in the Sally McGhee/David Allen theory of productivity, the ultimate aim is to have a single, leak-proof task list. Computers are uniquely suited to this, and I believe that the true productivity leap that computers have always promised will only arrive when the operating systems and applications are redesigned with the task list as their central model. Instead of moving in this direction, the CIW demo has your tasks scattered all around the screen...in fact the little buggers don't even sit still.

Posted by AdamBa at November 1, 2004 09:03 PM

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