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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About john.mullinax
John Mullinax is a Platform Strategy Advisor with Microsoft's DPE Team. Before joining Microsoft in 2006, John held a vartiety of positions at Ford Motor Company, most recently leading IT services strategy to support explosive business growth in China. Other positions included: Enterprise Architect, Application Portfolio Management, Technology Governance, and Product Manager. Prior to joining Ford, John earned his MBA at the University of Washington. Before that, he was Director of Elections for Douglas County, Washington, where he conducted the first Federal mail-ballot election in the USA. Subsequently, he joined the Secretary of State's office as a consultant working with county election officials in Washington state to improve operational effectiveness, integrity, and security (aka, to prevent the kind of debacle we saw in Florida in 2000).
