machine501

I can’t talk about what I saw at the Microsoft Home of the Future because I signed an NDA.

I’m usually approached by people telling me they want to talk with me about their startup idea but I have to sign an NDA first. This usually doesn’t happen on the street, but at least once it’s happened in a diner. My reply is I have an Anti-NDA policy. And that usually cuts it short and saves me from having to listen to their idea which is absolutely nothing new and everybody and their grandmother has already come up with it so why even bother signing a stupid NDA? Not to mention that they’re unenforceable in california.

Well, I felt the same way about the MS home of the future NDA ; I saw nothing there that was anything new. Go watch minority report, dumb it down, tone it down, remove all sense of privacy, and have some goth girl pretend to be a mom and give you a tour of her home, and you’ve got the MS home of the future. Mostly I was indifferent to it. The current setup was created more than 2 years ago, so it’s missing some things that are most in our minds today, like power consumption, reuse, etc., though it did have some demos of assistive technologies.  Maybe next time we’ll see better ways to conserve energy, turn off unnecessary displays, report power consumption, provide easy ways for recycling materials, and a host of other things to make life better.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under mts2008, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.