I’m not sure what I was hoping for. Maybe something akin to Intel’s 1997 ad featuring a bunch of bunny suit guys dancing to Boom Boom Pow in the world’s lamest rave. Or a vintage, circa-2000 Steve Ballmer flip-out.
But the video that Microsoft produced in 2009, imagining what technology would look like in 2019, isn’t the massively embarrassing tech giant equivalent to a senior photo that I expected. The decade-old video, which was recently unearthed by Reddit, feels oddly contemporary. In fact, based on the technology it envisions–from gestural interfaces to urban green roofs–it could easily have been produced in 2019.
From the looks of it, the future of technology is a flat circle.