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May 5, 2008

Microsoft's Own Little EPCOT

Last week, I was fortunate enough to tour the Microsoft Center for Information Work (CIW) and the Microsoft Home (aka, "The Home Of The Future").

If you don't know what these are, they're very much akin to a Microsoft "concept car," a never-to-be-built prototype of a possible tomorrow that demonstrates how people might work together (or, in the case of the Home, live together) with a little extra technology, smartly deployed.

Tours are generally available only to VIPs (and the occasional lucky employee), and most of the stuff that is shown off is strictly under NDA. So I can't go in to any kind of detail about what was shown, or the general direction of the content.

That said, the most interesting thing to me about both tours - and I suppose this was made all the more apparent because I took them back-to-back - was how utterly, completely, and totally Disney-like they were. It felt, eerily, like I was on some Microsoft-sponsored exhibit at EPCOT or Tomorrowland.

Neither exhibit has audio-animatronics, but they do have the Disney exhibit hallmarks - a "concept" or storyline that serves as the narrative for the time you spend in the exhibit, audience interaction that moves the story forward, a series of lessons that are taught as part of the experience (Disney goes with things like, "Protect The Earth"), and, of course, insanely high production values.

Another Disney parallel is that both the CIW and the Home suffer from the "Tomorrowland Problem" - namely, that the future has an awkward (and consistent) way of, you know, actually happening, which means that one year's breathtakingly cool and cutting-edge exhibit is next year's collective yawn. I remember walking through the "Innoventions" pavilion in Tomorrowland back in 2001, and listening to a Cast Member breathlessly describe how, in the future, people would actually listen to the radio through the Internet (...isn't technology amazing?).

I remember laughing to myself, checking my watch to make sure it wasn't still 1995, and strolling over to Space Mountain.

Keeping up with the future is hard problem, and it's easy to get snarky about some of the more fantastical or implausible parts of these sorts of exhibits. That said, both the CIW and the Home are pretty well-done, and I've found that a few of the ideas that were shown off are still sticking with me, popping in to my cerebellum now and again and attaching themselves to some of my other, more "grounded" projects.

Which is, of course, the point.

I wonder how many other companies are doing this sort of thing - producing Disney-fied exhibits to tell the story of their business, product, technologies, or vision. Certainly, plenty of organizations offer plant tours or behind-the-scenes glimpses to the public or VIPs. As the stakes go up for these sorts of tours - particularly among companies that sell ideas - I have to imagine that a lot of Imagineers are going to find themselves lucrative work as private consultants.

Overall, a terrific experience - particularly the Home. The Microsoft Web site has a number of still images from the Home - be sure to check them out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 5, 2008 9:16 PM. Posted to MSFT.

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