An Interview with Microsoft Chief Futurist

Gizmodo's Wilson Rothman has posted an interview with Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie. The bulk of the interview are Quantum Computing, Neural control, retinal implants, Windows in the Cloud, Multi-touch patents, and suspension of disbelief in interface design.

As written:

When you say 3 years, you're talking about new UIs and when you say 20 you're talking about what, holographic computing?

Yeah, or quantum computing or new models of computation, completely different ways of writing programs, things where we don't know the answer today, and it would take some considerable time to merge it into the ecosystem.

So how do you organize your thoughts?

I don't try to sort by time. Time is a by-product of the specific task that we seek to solve. Since it became clear that we were going to ultimately have to change the microprocessor architecture, even before we knew what exactly it would evolve to be from the hardware guys, we knew they'd be parallel in nature, that there'd be more serial interconnections, that you'd have a different memory hierarchy. From roughly from the time we started to the time that those things will become commonplace in the marketplace will be 10 to 12 years.

Most people don't really realize how long it takes from when you can see the glimmer of things that are big changes in the industry to when they actually show up on store shelves.

Is it hard for you to look at things that far out?

[Chuckles] No, not really. One of the things I think is sort of a gift or a talent that I have, and I think Bill Gates had to some significant degree too, is to assimilate a lot of information from many sources, and your brain tends to work in a way where you integrate it and have an opinion about it. I see all these things and have enough experience that I say, OK, I think that this must be going to happen. Your ability to say exactly when or exactly how isn't all that good, but at least you get a directional statement.

Go on and read the interview here.

BOOKMARK FOR REFERENCE