14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is working to bring the next killer application and the next-generation engagement model to fruition, under the leadership of Craig Mundie, Chief Research & Strategy Officer. Following his pseudo-retirement from Microsoft, Bill Gates split his role between Ray Ozzie, now Chief Software Architect, and Mundie, who became responsible for looking as far ahead as 20 years and anticipate the evolution of technology. During the Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass. on September 25, 2008, Mundie addressed the issue of the next user engagement mode.
“So today, I think this user engagement model is changing. We've gone from the desktop to the Internet, we've inserted more rich media, we've got sort of computer-mediated communication. Search as a navigational metaphor has become extremely popular, and I think that we can now see the outlines of at least in the user engagement model, what are the key components of this natural user interface, or NUI, if you will, to replace the GUI,” he explained.
Mundie predicted that the next user engagement model would be dictated by the diffusing of computing into all mundane aspects of life. Microsoft has already taken a consistent step in this direction both with Windows Surface and Windows 7 touch computing capabilities, indicating a future where the computers would be seamlessly integrated into the environment. According to Mundie, the evolution of computers will in fact scrap the very concept of a computer from the users' mind, and current devices from mobile phones to cars are an indication of this direction.
“To do this, we're going to have to leverage the arrival of the many-core heterogeneous microprocessor architectures, along with the communications in the wide area environment and these massive sort of exo-scale computing facilities that we'll put in the Cloud. They'll have to be seamlessly connected. They'll have to be more fully utilized than the machines that we all have today. The applications that we designed in the past have been really targeted at being responsive to a user's interaction. As a result, we actually waste a lot of the computing cycles that are available. We really haven't had a class of applications that demanded that type of continuous computing process,” Mundie stated.