Microsoft's vision for the future of Windows, Office and Work

Every few years, Microsoft creates a video that examines the future of productivity. These are usually giant screens, many sensors, ultra-thin tablets, and other software and hardware that can transform our future use of computers. Instead of a vision video for the future for 2019, Microsoft has opened its doors to its vision center this week, inviting a number of journalists to discover its latest vision of the future.

Microsoft is hosting a portion of its prototype in a 7,000-square-foot lab located on the company's campus in Redmond, Washington. Inside, you'll find giant screens for collaboration, meeting rooms with devices automatically recognizing attendees, and touch desks showing how we could work in the next ten years. All this material is based on touch, voice and even augmented reality, with software that reinvents the current operation of Windows and Office.

"The world we're working in is undergoing dramatic changes at a really fast pace," says Anton Andrews, head of vision team at Microsoft.

The huge amount of data we have now can make it difficult for everyone, and companies like Microsoft need to take a more fundamental approach to the future of productivity. While Microsoft may have tried in the past to modernize Windows, Office, its other software and services, the company is increasingly turning to the Web and the open source community to address these broader technological challenges.

Microsoft calls Fluid Framework at the heart of this vision. It's a way to accelerate collaborative Web work by breaking down document structures into modular components. Andrews described the elements of this system as Lego Blocks, allowing Microsoft to split the data so that you can easily move them from one experience to another. "For us, it's just content," says Andrews. "The fluid framework simply allows us to play with all these bits."

Andrews has guided me through a number of demonstrations this week, all involving the idea of ​​improving collaborative work on documents, meetings and everything in between. One of the demonstrations focused on what Microsoft envisions as a "Surface Hub Wall" and combines projection technology with Surface Surface 100-point sensors to turn walls into smart surfaces that support pen touch input. and even vocal. Like the Surface Hub 2, the idea is that businesses could turn entire walls into meeting spaces.

The demo broke the current operation of Windows and Office. He did not use a keyboard or traditional mouse. In fact, none of the demos I've seen have done it. This Surface Hub wall included an interface prototype allowing Windows to become a portal for launching new collaborative working methods. Imagine a home screen containing all your information, recent documents and data in the form of news feeds. Microsoft is doing the same for the Surface Hub 2 software that will be released next year, allowing Windows to be lighter and rely more and more on the Web.

I have seen these ideas appear in every prototype scenario of Microsoft's vision center. Andrews introduced another demo involving a multi-person meeting, a common experience in any office. I work remotely at The edgeI therefore feel the headaches associated with the encounter with technology. Whether it's connectivity issues, strange microphone problems or simply not seeing everyone during a video call, meetings can be frustrating and leave remote employees feel excluded from the conversation.

Microsoft hopes to solve this problem by combining sensors and cameras, which will allow it to better track what is happening in a video call. At the heart of this future meeting, there was a prototype of equipment capable of recognizing up to nine participants at the meeting and using the AI ​​to capture the subtle body language that a participant remote could miss. There is also a live transcription service, Cortana integration to help organize the meeting, and augmented reality to tag each participant so you never forget someone's name.

Part of the demo involves a meeting participant who references a document and automatically transfers it to the meeting transcript stream. Microsoft's Graph platform, which connects multiple services and devices, knows the content of this document and can feed it to an AI like Cortana. Cortana is moving towards becoming a digital assistant helping office workers organize their day with conversational interactions.

Microsoft revealed earlier this week that it would allow developers to access development kits for the developer, which will allow some of the work of this future meeting to come to life. It is likely that we will finally see the Microsoft hardware that aims to replace the Polycom phones that you typically find in business meeting rooms with sensor-filled devices to enable better meetings in the future.

The latest demo evoking the immediate future of Microsoft concerned workstations lined with giant touch screens. We have already seen that Microsoft is already starting to push people in this direction with devices like Surface Studio, but the company's futuristic vision work involves entire offices and workspaces dominated by huge touchscreen computers. With the other concepts largely focused on meeting scenarios, this prototype allows workers to collaborate on multiple documents and combine data into the new Microsoft Fluid framework.

By breaking down documents into modular components, Microsoft plans to allow almost everything to be combined by dragging and dropping. The work of multiple people can be linked into one document, then Microsoft imagines using AI to understand images and text and combine them into one style. It is clear that this vision is far from obvious, but it gives some indication of the areas in which the company plans to take its "Fluid Framework".

"The underlying architecture can handle any type of data," says Mike Morton, program manager at Fluid Framework at Microsoft. "We have not shown any audio or video … but I will say that the underlying technology is fully compatible with this technology." This could mean a scenario in which a live video link in a document is automatically transcribed.

Microsoft also plans to ensure that its Fluid Framework is open so that the community can contribute to it and help the company develop it over time. It's still too early, but Microsoft has been working on it since 2016 as a prototype and launched it in a larger technical effort about 12 months ago. Microsoft has focused its efforts on the Web and CEO Satya Nadella has pushed the company to go faster on the Web and even adopt Chromium for its Edge browser.

"Satya has been an advocate for our Web investments since becoming CEO," says Morton. "Satya has been so forward-looking, and of course, people can always resist change, but Satya encourages them very well. [change] for the direction. "

The challenge for Microsoft is now to bring this future to life before its competitors, so as not to change too much for people accustomed to Office and Windows. We have already seen the company grow too fast with Windows 8 in the past and Microsoft is now considering adapting Windows to different modes for different hardware. This involves a lighter version of Windows, known as Windows Lite, which eliminates much of the complexity of Windows in favor of a more basic user interface and perhaps even a more focused important on the web.

Microsoft did not talk about Windows Lite this week at Build, leaving Windows 10 the most important Windows ads for more developer-centric features, such as Windows Terminal or the Linux kernel. 2 or Surface Hub 2, and if Microsoft wants to realize the vision it describes in these demonstrations, the notion of Windows will change and adapt a lot in the next decade.

We are beginning to feel that Microsoft will open more and more parts of Windows open source and allow the community to improve. We saw this recently with the Windows Calculator and the PowerToys, and it looks like this approach will continue for the foreseeable future. Microsoft is redefining its future to make it much more open internally, and with technologies such as Fluid Framework, it seems ready to materialize the future vision it has dreamed for years.