Remember Steve Masters?

I’ve been doing a lot of work on future thinking of late and what the technology trends we see today will enable over the coming years. It reminded me to go back and find this old video that became known as the Steve Masters video – the accident prone, smartphone toting guy from Microsoft Devcon back in 2001.

I can remember seeing the video back then and thinking it was all possible – all of the tech was there to enable what you see in the video but joining the dots between the devices, the platforms needed to meld his world together was always going to be the hard part. Much of what is in the video has been realised today – at least from the device side but there are still gaps in the experiences. Joining a smartphone to something like HealthVault would get us pretty close but it goes to show that this stuff takes time. Even if we have all the technology, knitting it together is the tough work and dependent on a lot of interoperability. That’s not evening mentioning the social norms and protocols that would need to evolve to make this reality.

Anyway, fun to go back and look to see how long it takes for dreams to become reality. Here’s how Steve Ballmer described it back then…I was surprised to see “the cloud” used as a term back in 2001.

 

Steve may have problems, but those intelligent devices sure helped him a lot. The phone that maintains information about his position, a phone from which he can plug into the services in the cloud and give up personal information, pay for things, about himself. The smart card and the intelligence in that device. The X-ray imaging system built with the right kind of intelligent technology to provide information released from the smart device. This is the kind of world in which we're moving. And the only devices I think that will make sense as we get into the future are devices that are smart, that do plug in, that do connect into this infrastructure. And if they have an end user connection, they really are smart devices about me. They store or allow me to access information about my personal preferences and data, my schedule, my contacts, whatever the case may be. The experience has to scale. There's an appropriate user interface that scales from very small screens, from low resolution screens on to much larger screens like the one we saw on the Bally's Gaming machine.

These devices need to be smart about other devices. They have to be able to announce themselves to other devices across the network. They have to be able to say what services they export, and they have to be able to discover other services provided by other devices that are participating in the scenario, in the solution that is relevant. Connectivity, we're going to move, people are going to increasingly move these devices around. And the infrastructure has to be smart about quality of service, and deciding at what bandwidth and what capabilities to provide the user at different bandwidth

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And last, but certainly not least, the software infrastructure that you want to have available to you as an application developer in these devices gets richer and richer. You shouldn't have to worry about your own networking. You shouldn't have to worry about your own management of people's personal preferences, and some of their core data, payment, identity, et cetera. You shouldn't have to worry about basic infrastructure that allows you to create inside the smart device a Web service that talks to other devices.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  The first time I saw iPad i remembered this vid showcasing the nurse using one at around 3:40. We did miss touch (and UI on the smartphone) in the scenarios but man were we close!  Thanks for the post Steve.

• Anonymous
  September 21, 2010
  the cloud is what we used to call the Internet when we drew a network diagram; it just got overloaded with the 'as a service' meaning in the last year we've been saying for years that Microsoft shoudl update this with a where we wanted to go/where we got to video