The Next Next Next Big Thing

Stephen Elop is an interesting guy.  He’s President of Microsoft’s Business Division, but he’s also been a leader at Juniper, Lotus, Macromedia, and Adobe.  He spoke recently to Wharton students about the future of business technology.

Most of his presentation was organized around an “envisioning video”.  First, he sets the stage for the video with some context on demographic and economic trends, and how Microsoft thinks about R&D  investment during the current period of economic uncertainty (hint: now more than ever). 

Then he shows the video – itself only about 5 minutes.  Now, I’ve seen this particular envisioning video in the past, as well as others like it.  It’s fun to notice bits and pieces of the imagined future experiences, and try to connect them back to some of today’s technologies. 

But Stephen did something in his Wharton presentation that I hadn’t seen before: he spends 15 minutes or so walking through each of the scenes from the video – which appear very futuristic and far away – discussing some specific, very real technologies people are working on today to bring the vision in the video to life. 

Definitely worth a look.  If you want to skip the context setting and jump straight to the video, it starts about the 14:00 minute mark. 

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