Microsoft video predicting 2019 shows a strange world of magic and meetings

A promotional video released 10 years ago from Microsoft predicts what 2019 would look like. It shows floor arrows and magical newspapers.

Predictions are a dangerous game.

In 2009 Microsoft released a promotional video with its predictions for where technology would be in 10 years time. It’s always fraught predicting things. It’s a shot in the dark, and you face looking incredibly foolish if you get it wrong.

While technology companies would seemingly have a good deal of future projections up their sleeve, and a lot of long term ideas in development, it would appear a lot of these either never made it to market or were rejected by the consumer.

The video begins with children in a classroom communicating in different languages on a large Google Glass style touchscreen.

They’re having a great time typing back and forth between one another, with a wall between them (possibly for some kind of quarantine reason), with a chat function that seems to be translating their conversation from different languages while they giggle softly and draw pictures of dogs.

The chat function does look remarkably like iPhone screen chats, but that technology was already in existence then. While these kids have great fun with this classroom technology, the camera pans back to show the majority of the classroom still sitting at regular desks working into regular books.

Bummer for them.

In 2019 classroom banter will be pretty adult.

The next prediction becomes a little more out there, when the teacher of the classroom appears to be marking off the day’s tasks into an extremely complicated (but still highly boring) looking spreadsheet.

She then swipes away, to look at in-flight movies (that’s right, she’s on a plane!) and then takes out her teeny tiny paper boarding pass.

But wait, it’s actually a tiny computerised tablet. Why? Because it’s 2019, baby! And in 2019, everything is a glass computer.

The next scene is a man in an office, but his office is just a desk and a glass wall. The glass wall is a computer. Have I laboured the theme enough? Computer glass!

A computer that strains your back in a whole new way.

There’s a scene where a man is walking through a large airport with a tiny glass looking mobile phone, which he slides apart, using one piece to listen to a call and the other to view for the facetime function.

And partial credit for Nostradamus prediction vibes, but we don’t slide our phones apart in 2019 just yet.

Included are some functions that have worked their way into our lives, like location sharing via drop pins in Google and other map applications. But again a lot of these were already functional 10 years ago.

What hasn’t quite made it to market and frankly I think it’s something we all need, is the brief apparition of an arrow that seems to appear from the heavens when the otherwise very capable businessman gets lost.

He looks around momentarily, and then, as if God himself were sensing he was lost, a little arrow from his device appears on the ground and shows him on his way.

Guided by the all-knowing arrow.

The video makes much of what I would label “visualising work”, like a meeting where with a wave of the hand, a man in a suit seems to magically move a mess of handwritten Post-it notes across another glass meeting board.

In the same meeting, a convoluted series of notes appears on the board, and then the notes move around and stack themselves up and maps appear and swirly lines start to circle around a map.

Imagine a world where we could have post its on a wall.

As we head into the home, Microsoft’s predictions for 2019 become their most magical. A man sips his coffee, and it updates saying things like “Awake, but still grumpy” or “ready to work” as he works his way down the cup.

Then he flicks though a newspaper that has news stories that magically appear and disappear as he swipes them. Like in Harry Potter. Expelliarmus!

We're all dying for this technology to enrich our lives.