Mint
As Microsoft Corp.’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie has perhaps the most powerful job in the software world. Tasked with deciding where the world’s largest software firm by revenues is headed in the long term -- defined by Mundie as three to 20 years -- he, in a sense, sets the bearing for the eco-system in the tech world. For, nine out 10 personal computers in the world run on the company’s Windows platform; any change the company makes to its products, strategy and market approach has ramifications around the industry.
In an exclusive interview, Mundie, on a three-day visit to India, talks about trends that will shape the computing world in the next decade, Microsoft’s Internet search strategy that will take a contrarian approach to the one adopted by archrival Google Inc., ad-supported business models, and how his company is dealing with the economic slowdown.
Edited excerpts.
Its not every day that one meets someone whose mandate is to look 20 years into the future. So, here’s the question: when will the recession end?
(Chuckles) When it ends. I’ve a lot better shot at picking technology trends than picking up horseraces or how the economy will fare.
Okay... tell us about technology world will fare and the broad themes there.
One of the biggest changes will start to come by about 2013, and roughly beyond, I think you will see the influx of new styles of microprocessor (with parallel computing capabilities) machines. With that, for the first time in decades, there will be a requirement of new ways of writing software to harness the power of the hardware. It will push the threshold on the way people interact with computers. Today, when everybody talks about a computer, they think of it mostly as a laptop or a desktop and their interaction model is mostly point-and-click. But, many millions of people do not know how to use that technology and to get the benefit of technology to all those people, we have to do better than that.
I think the biggest change will be the modalities of man-machine interaction, more natural ways of the computer supporting people in many more dimensions than today.
The other thing will be that computers will become more like an anticipatory assistant. Today, it is like a tool. If you know how to use it and call it into action, it does something for you. But, if you think how great personal assistants work, their value grows over time because they know what you (as the boss) want. They can anticipate what is important for you and what isn’t. Today, computers are not there yet. Both of these will represent a fairly revolutionary change in the way computers are used.
Tell us with examples. Will voice activated computers be one example of this?
Not quite just that. That’s still an alternative way to the click-on-file-open-it command. This will be much more conversational, much more natural user interface. If you think of it, the era of computing we’re now is defined by the graphical user interface, which Microsoft popularized over the last 20 years. Everything has been developed within that paradigm. That won’t go away; there’s still very, very useful. But, it also constrains how many people can avail of (computing) and the computer can present what it does.
In natural user interface, you take a bunch of individual technologies that we have been researching on for a long time: speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine vision, natural language processing, machine learning capabilities... each of these are individual technologies that Microsoft has been developing for some time now. Yet no one of those things has proven to be useful in the way we use computing except in an incremental way. But, if you blend them together, I’m predicting, at least, that they will create a natural model of interaction with computers that will allow us to task them in a broader range of activities and provide those services in many more people.
For example, we’ve a robot receptionist in test at lobbies at Microsoft office. It can give you directions. It (the concept) can be used in healthcare. For non-acute situations, in a world of sophisticated digital medicine, it can help like a general practioner. It can help in villages of India, Indonesia, China, Africa... I think that can be possible in the next few years.
Moving a little more short term, tell us about Microsoft’s presensce to Internet search. The reason we are focussing on search is because it is the biggest defining force, if you will, on the Internet.
Even if you think of search in the conventional sense, we certainly aspire to be one of the top providers of that search capability. We have invested heavily to do that, we have made dramatic progress in that regard. I don’t think there will be a big technological gap between us and Google in the conventional sense in the near future. But, we don’t think search as we know it will remain the way it is. Because as the corpus of knowledge grows ever larger, the ability to just take the algorithmic search that people have used in the past or gives the fastest answer is clearly not the (best) case.
We tend to think domain or task-specific searches will be increasingly more important. Also, the blending of private corpuses of data along with the general publicly available bodies of knowledge... We’re quite interested in that. We hope to have some leadership in that area.
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