InformationWeek

ur image of the future and its eventual reality rarely match. I was reminded of this recently when I attended a dinner for physicist Stephen W. Hawking, who was in town on a lecture tour.

What first set me off was that the dinner was held in Seattle's premier symbol of the future--the Space Needle. I clearly remember coming to the 1962 World's Fair as a kid and being wowed by the vision of the future it represented.

Our dining room window looked out on two of Seattle's latest symbols of the future. On one side stands Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project, a building that reminds you less of a building than brightly colored sails, billowing in the wind, or maybe a crumpled race car. Across the street is Fisher Plaza, a spanking new broadcast facility that houses KOMO TV. I've gone there every Saturday morning, for over a year, to chat live with the news anchors about the latest tech developments.

Looking out on this, munching my salad and waiting for the guest of honor, I was taken by how different the three buildings are from each other. I flashed on a small exhibit of "antique" TV technology in the station's newsroom. My favorite: a Philco "Predicta" television set, circa 1950. It looks a bit like a TV. But more than anything, it resembles something out of the 1936 British sci-fi classic movie, The Shape of Things to Come.

No wonder early critics called TV "the Cyclops." To look in the new production booth at the HDTV flat panel displays fed by gigabit Ethernet links today, you'd think that, instead of a one-eyed monster, TV has evolved to be more of a window on the world.

Later, at Hawking's lecture, I was struck again by the disparity between vision and reality. About the time that early sci-fi "talkie" was made, another famous physicist, Albert Einstein, dismissed quantum physics with the declaration that God does not play at dice" with the universe. But, Hawking says, today it is clear that "God plays dice all the time." That doesn't negate Einstein, but it certainly modifies our view of his theories.

The Shape of Things to Come
So, other than letting me wax wistfully about cosmology, architecture, and industrial design, what has this got to do with the title of this column? Visions of the future are what propel our industry and, over the past ten years, Microsoft has been extremely successful at repeatedly selling us on its vision.

I have a collection of video visions of the future that Microsoft chief visionary Bill Gates has presented at Comdex, going back to 1990 and his famous "Information at Your Fingertips" keynote presentation. Watching that video--which spoofed "Twin Peaks" David Lynch's cult TV series--is an eye opener today, as much for what didn't happen as for what did.

For instance, we still don't have the portable, keyboardless, notebook-sized computers with great handwriting recognition, massive power, and wireless connectivity that Gates predicted. Microsoft hopes they will come out in two or three years as the so-called "TabletPC," a mock up of which he showed in 1990.

Other 1990 predictions included the merger of fax, E-mail and voice messaging. Two out of three aren't bad. In one scenario, Bill searched every chart on the corporate network to quickly find the one he wanted. Maybe I'm being miserly, but that sounds distinctly like the SharePoint Portal Server, set to ship later this year.

In another scenario, Bill showed a customer's digital signature verified over a wireless link to a vendor's database. Digital signatures just became legal last year, and vendors still aren't using wireless technology to verify that signatures are authentic. There were plenty of other things that Bill missed--including, of course, the Web--though the video contained navigation tools that look remarkably like browsers today.

Gates did get some things right, including our reliance on embedded "links" in documents, though what we ended up with was primarily hyperlinks plus the ability to embed Excel charts in Word documents. And to be fair, some of his longer-term visions look like they'll come true in the next five years.

Soon, we'll see the first installments of Bill's latest set of visions--.NET and "HailStorm" services. Be careful, though. Hindsight often proves that many things are further away than they seem today. After all, Shapes of Things to Come missed most of its predictions... at least, so far.

By the way, isn't it just a little spooky that Bill still looks the same as he did in 1990?