Microsoft’s “2019” Video

One of the things we saw at the behind-closed-doors, Microsoft-eyes-only TechReady 8 conference was the “2019” concept video shown to us by Business Division President Stephen Elop. Since then, the video’s gone public, with his showing it recently at the Wharton Business Technology Conference and its appearance on Long Zheng;s blog, I Started Something.

The video is a montage of “slices of life” in the year 2019, and shows a vision for how people could be using technology in their everyday life then. Don’t think of this video as an attempt to predict the future; they’re notorious for being hilariously wrong in retrospect. Instead, think of it as inspiration for future projects, a source of ideas for applications and user interfaces and a way to shake loose any assumptions or fixations you might have about how applications should work. As developers, I thought that you might find the video (it’s 5 minutes, 38 seconds in length) an interesting watch, and possibly even the spark that gets you started on your next project.

For those of you who are the type to analyze still frames from your favourite movies, you can see some close-ups of the future user interfaces featured in the video in the PowerPoint deck that Stephen Elop used when he showed this video.