And the winner is… a Kinect-based wave of new ways of working with computers. Possibly.
The technology industry doesn’t have anything like last night’s Oscars, of course – though at least some of us will wonder why the brilliantly realized movie about the creation of Facebook, The Social Network, lost out to a film about a minor royal with a speech impediment.
What the tech industry does have is an obsession with winners, and what the Next Big Thing will be – as well as the reverset: the things that don’t work and never did change the world.
Thus Microsoft took a bit of a risk with its PR exercise in which it invited the BBC to take a peek behind the scenes of its R&D work in the US, India and Cambridge (England, not Mass.) as detailed here.
The firm, we are told, spends an eye-watering $9bn on blue sky thinking, which is possibly more than any other commercial enterprise on the planet, employing (it says here) "900 of the world’s top computer scientists" to figure out what comes next in the movie of human-computer interaction.
Which, it seems, are variations on new ways to use its motion-capture Kinect Xbox gaming technology – something even the populist BBC says may give some pause for thought (should it not have found "more than a new way of playing video games," it asks).
What’s going on here? The basic idea is the underlying work on things like voice recognition and smart motion sensor techniques that went into Kinect in the first place can easily provide other innovations. So how about a way for two different users to see different (tailored) content on the same screen simultaneously? Or holding up an object and having the system capture its dimensions and produce a 3D simulacrum in a telepresence scenario? Or an avatar that is less LittleBigPlanet’s Sackboy and more photo-realistic? And so on (see the clip for examples).
It has to be said at once that thinking these things don’t seem very "enterprise ICT" is the wrong way of looking at it, as we know that at least at the moment consumer tech is king and that Gen Y-oriented is a very sensible thing to be. By the same token, MSFT is as much a home/gamer facing operation as it is a SOHO/midrange/enterprise one.
But equally, are any of these neat little tricks a game-changer the same way the ix range was from Apple, or even the Nintendo Wii was when it debuted? Of course, in a lab somewhere that the BBC didn’t get shown is what Ballmer and his crew think, or would like to think, or hate to think (you get the picture) is such a thing. You don’t show the real stuff to the press if you think it will kill the opposition; you keep it secret until CES 2012.
We have to say we don’t think so… and that what’s really going on with this bit of spin is another sort of Hollywood: a bit of dream factory, a bit of glitz.
900 of the world’s best computer scientists in one team sounds like a great line, as does $9bn in R&D. But the reality is that all R&D, no matter how well resourced, is a bit of a gamble, most of which means "waste". And in any case the good ideas may not come from MSFT direct but a Kinect third party developer, inspired to play with the underlying technology.
All in all, it’s no gold statuette for the team here – but plenty of good ideas for real hit movies by other ‘independents,’ studios and (why not?) the real back room in Redmond itself.
