Microsoft Innovation According to Network World
January 10, 2009
Mitchell Ashley wrote “Top 8 Microsoft Research Projects to Improve Our Lives” here. Straight away, let me remind you that I am a goose, an addled goose at that. I doubt very much that Mr. Ashley was thinking about geese when he penned his headline. What are the eight research project that may improve a human’s life? For starters, these eight “socio-digital systems (whatever that phrase means) include “I know it’s here somewhere.”
The idea is that big hard drives are available, economical, and sucking data into their depths. But wait, humans use other digital devices like SD cards and USB sticks. (Not this goose. I lose them.) So there are two socio-digital innovations that address this problem. You will have to read Mr. Ashley’s article for the other six innovations. I focus on search and content processing.
The first innovation is called “digital shoebox” and “family archive”. Here is what Mr. Ashley wrote:
It’s like the data management version of the cryogenic-freezing program: We all keep creating personal digital content and buying more disk drives in hopes that someday they’ll discover a cure for the information archiving, searching and retrieval of all that stuff before our time on earth is up.
Now I must admit that I had a tough time figuring out what these innovations are. I turned to Microsoft Live Search for elucidation. I noted a reference dated 2002 to this technology, and I saw a December 5, 2007, Business Week article here about this innovation. I jumped back to the 2002 reference to digital shoebox research here and then back to the 2007 reference. Same invention. I asked myself, “At what point does an innovation become JAT or just another technology. I think five years is a long time to move from innovation in one part of the R&D to the public relations office in another part of the R&D department.
From my quick scan of these documents, I think a server that indexes and points to where information objects are. I am not sure how the digital shoebox works on non-text objects, what metadata are generated, how the index update operates, or the indexing overhead.
The family archive proved to be easier to locate. Microsoft offers a brief description here. The key point for me was:
This project aims to understand the needs of families to interact with, manage, and archive materials which are important in preserving and sharing family memories. We are developing a system which allows the input and safe archiving of both digital and physical media, and which allows natural interaction with those media. This work has been informed by our in-depth studies of “photowork” and of “videowork“.
I think the archive adds smarter software to the digital shoebox.
My hunch is that Microsoft wants to make it easy for a Vista user to dump data anywhere. The Microsoft technology will sniff out the data and index it. When the user wants to find something, the “server” (probably a software component, not a power sucking six figure system) will allow the user to browse, search, and click metadata like a date or some other tag like Wesak and see hits that match.
A couple of thoughts.
These are interesting search and content processing ideas. I need to test these systems to see if my life becomes easier with them. My previous brushes with smart information object metatagging systems is a love-hate affair. Some systems I downright hate. Others I sort of love. So far none of Microsoft’s search technologies has made me swoon. I am thinking about search in Outlook, native search in XP, free SharePoint search, and the Byzantine Microsoft Fast ESP system.
Second, the notion of dumping data locally is out of step with what my research suggests young people want to do. The notion of dumping stuff is viable. The last set of interviews I did revealed that dumping should be automatic and the data dump should be located on a server somewhere. The idea was that when the device dies, a new device can suck data from the dump in the sky.
Finally, with Microsoft’s share of the search market slipping, Microsoft needs to make market share gains. R&D is okay when it yields more than words about innovation. I want innovation.
Stephen Arnold, January 10, 2009
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