Apple showed us the future in 1987 and pretty much hit it dead on

Why Microsoft’s Vision of the Future Is Dead on Arrival
[Via Daring Fireball]

John Pavlus:

What “future of” tech/design videos need is a little less Minority Report and a little more Alien. Director Ridley Scott famously told his production designers to make Alien’s spaceship and costumes look roughed-up, slightly messy, and above all, lived in. Otherwise, it just isn’t believable enough to see yourself in — which is a design problem that both horror movies and corporate promos need to solve. Microsoft’s film is probably going viral as we speak, but imagine how much more reach it would have if it dared to depict a guy stuck in a meeting that sucked, or using his smartphone in an airport that was full of noisy assholes and long lines, or searching his touchscreen-enabled smart refrigerator for a quick meal because his kids are bouncing off the walls and he’s bone-tired from a long day at work?

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Watch Microsoft’s vision or Blackberry’s vision. You see lots of manual interaction with screens of some sort in a very clean world of happy people. Living in all new spaces with new types of rooms that are all so spic and span.

And just nondescript shades of white and gray. No real living colors.

They are so wonderful that they simply do not looked lived in. There is no personality, just  clean lines and sharp edges. Everyone uses the same OS apparently with the same font and colors. There is little human interaction at all. The vast amount of time is spent interacting with the devices around them.

In fact, I do not think there is a single scene in which here is not some sort of digital interaction.

All these amazing things happen in a world that seems quite different than ours. It actually does not seem lived in. Ridley Scott was correct.

I’m not sure I want to live in such a world but if I did, it would require buying a huge number of new things, completely redesigning buildings and living structures. It would need a whole new us.

Now look at Apple’s vision of the future from 1987.

It has real humans doing really human things in an environment that is actually quite normal. It shows a room that is highly personalized and people with definite personalities. Not some sharp-edged simulacrum of a person but real people with real problems interacting with both real people and data.

It shows people actually talking with each other. It uses touch, speech, AI, video all to make slides and other media.

It shows a tool that makes their life easier, not a whole new ‘World of Tomorrow.’ That is the real problem I have with the other visions.

Its all about the dramatic. Little about the pragmatic. Their view is about the fiction. Apple’s was about the reality.

And note the dates. From the video, it is obvious that the time period is 2011. With the release of Siri – now with a female voice rather than an bow-tied man – Apple actually has all the pieces shown. Its view of the future was surprisingly accurate, even though this was done 10 years before Jobs returned to Apple.

Touch, speech recognition, Face Time, graphing, cloud based networking, etc. And the reality is that the real device is smaller than shown.

Google Reader becomes less useful

Farewell Google Reader – We’ll Miss You – Forbes
[Via Forbes]

Word on the street is Google Reader’s social functions, its funky community of shares and comments, and the archives of these interactions, will all be flushed down the memory hole tomorrow.

I check my Reader every day and it’s always a minute or two before I realize that these people I’m following, these comment threads I’ve become accustomed to, these excellent finds – will all be gone.

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Google messed with Search, to its detriment in my opinion. It is messing with its Maps, now charging perhaps $10,000 for a license to put tMaps on a website.

And Now Google Reader is messed around with. I think Google’s focus on social sharing to compete with Facebook will harm it. It is competing head to head with way too many companies – Apple with regard to mobile devices, Facebook for Social sites, Microsoft on Search.

Can gmail be far behind?

I just do not believe it will be able to keep its eyes on the prize in so many different areas. We can see this in the problems each area has. Google is starting to fall into the same sort of trap others have of trying to be all things to everyone in all the cutting edge areas.

I simply do not trust Google like I used to. They are becoming more and more interested in doing things for their own purposes rather than making my life better. They are focussing on copying others, becoming the second to market in areas rather than the best.