Dinner with Bill Gates

 When you visit Seattle, there are some things you must do – Pike Place Market, Bon Marche, and the Space Needle.  Well, I had the opportunity to accompany my good friend Flora Peabody Goldthwaite to Bill Gates’ house.  As we approached the front door we were greeted with three rather intimidating options; retinal scan, intercom or sensing.  Flora described sensing as picking up RFID signatures from items we were carrying that would identify us.  So if I were carrying Bill’s wallet, keys, jacket, glasses, and shoes it might be enough to recognize me as him and open the door.  Fortunately for us, Flora’s eyes were known to the retinal scanning device and the door swung open. 

As we enter the foyer, lights came on, the blinds began to close, soft bluesy jazz started playing and the door locked behind us.  Apparently our invitation included Flora making dinner, for as she entered the kitchen, the home called out “Its 6:30, do you want to make dinner?”  Flora being the gracious person she is pulled a few items out of the cabinets, put them on the counter, and asked the computer for a recipe. Now I don’t know about your house but at mine, the next step is to pull out the cookbooks or be dangerously creative.  At Bill’s house, the counter reads the ingredients that Flora has put on the counter and projects possible entrées on the counter.  You then audibly select one, mix the ingredients and then place it in the oven.

Are you impressed yet?  How about if I told you that the counter communicated with the oven so Flora didn’t have to set the time and temperature.  Also it read the calendar and saw that we were dining with 4 other people so it adjusted the recipe for that number of people.

Since no one else came, Flora and I ate the dinner for 6 – me 5 – Flora 1.  Feeling like Thanksgiving post-dinner I waddled into the entertainment room and settled into Bill’s couch.  Flora entered the room, carrying a copy of “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown, explaining that it was a tradition to read this classic piece of children’s literature after dinner.  She then proceeded to read the book accompanied by computer enhancements.  These enhancements included illustrations from the book on the TV, room lights changing to match the environment of the story and sound effects – all queued by voice recognition.

As pleasant as the evening was, I was beginning to get a little uncomfortable being in Bill’s house without him there.  When I mentioned this to Flora, she laughed and said I shouldn’t worry – she gives this tour to nearly 10,000 people a year.

Flora, a Microsoft Program Manager, explained that the Microsoft Concept Home was started in 1994 to show people what an automated home could be like 2-10 years out.  Conceptually it connects every device in the house and uses all sources of information to assist you in your daily tasks.  One of the fundamental principles is that the home could be as active or as passive as you wished.  If you wanted to read the book without any help you could do that.  If you wanted illustrations only you could do that.  The message was that it was available but not intrusive.

Some of the more interesting exhibits included the children’s corner.  While a child would have the ability to play a game after their homework was done, they could do so only for a limited period of time.  If they wanted to earn more game time, they could perform chores – like putting toys away.  (see picture the container and the contents know of each others existence).

Turn to any monitor or television in the home and you will see calendars, appointments, messages, and “Grandma is having a normal day”.  The grandma message comes from your home talking to grandma’s home.  “Normal day” may be defined as bathroom light on at 7:45am, toaster at 8:10, kitchen TV on at 8:25, front door open at 8:55, etc.  All of these reports are with the permission of grandma.

If we had a dealer of the future, a possible scenario might be: One of your best customers calls – he wants to put some lime down before tonight’s rain.  You check your display and you have an applicator and a nurse truck that are almost finished with their current job.  You put the order in and it puts the new order on their queue for today – and pops up on the tablet in the truck.  Having committed this amount of lime to one customer the system sees that the inbound truck of lime going to your other plant needs to come here – it diverts that in process shipment as well.  Next, it sees that based upon the acres to be spread your drivers are going to be late for dinner, so it updates their family on a new dinner time.  Finally, it prepares the invoice and sends it to a grateful customer.

Next month we take a look at Microsoft’s Center for Information Work – think you could handle three monitors on your desk? You might be surprised.

Ps: Bill: I had to leave before our game of bridge – Flora thinks we can take you.