The nice folk at AKQA took us to Microsoft Lifesquared today. It was an interesting experience, especially as I've been thinking about Scott's questions about fakes/authenticity in the comments on this post.
I love Microsoft. Have done ever since I really got to know them as a planner on the business. I love the fact that they keep trying to do much harder things than anyone else. Building expensive laptops for art directors is easy, building an impressive OS that runs on everything is really hard. So I'm always willing them to be good, and Lifesquared almost was, but wasn't quite.
Their idea was to present various technologies (or perhaps a 'technology lifestyle') via some vignettes of 'real people' demo-ing the stuff. So we met a guy who ran a marine accessories business, and one of his employees and his wife and they were all loaded up to the gills with Microsoft stuff. Nothing really wrong with that as an idea. It wasn't exactly a show, more like being inside a very dull episode of Howard's Way.
And lots of the techology was actually quite impressive, I'm a huge fan of Tablet PCs and OneNote for example. And they just gave us a little taster of that. Could have done much more. Microsoft/IP TV looks really good - smart applications, clever execution, Media Centre was impressive. The tech was great. So it was really frustrating to be kept from it by all this lifestyle fakery. The actors were fine but they couldn't answer any real questions and you really wanted an actual engineer in the room to demo the thing properly.
I remember when I worked on Microsoft at w+k. We'd have these intense three day long briefings on the newest version of Word or something, and it was mind-numbing, but you learned stuff. And you were getting it from people who knew what they were talking about, you were getting expertise. What you were getting from Life+ was marketing. Which is fine, nothing wrong with marketing, and I appreciate they were trying to make it more accessible and wrap some storytelling around it, but when you go into someone's environment like that you want to really meet them, to understand what they can tell you, what only they know. Not feel like you're walking into a big ad.
They'd obviously put a lot of time and thought into it so it's a real shame that you spend your whole time noticing the artificiality, like the fact that the fake small business had no paper in its files and no kettle. Or the fake wife had no wedding ring and the the fake 15-year old boy apparently spent his time listening to Jools Holland.
I was really itching to sit and get hands on with the stuff and have someone who really knew it talk to me and tell me what it could do. But we didn't get that. We didn't get a vision of the future, we got a vision of a slightly more organised present.
Shame. But I hope they try again, because I bet the next version will be ace.
Wow, that sounds really interesting. I think I would have shared your reservations, but it's great when companies take the trouble to do this kind of thing.
Can anyone visit?
Posted by: Ben | January 17, 2006 at 01:29 PM
We've just got back from here, based on your recommendation.
Overall it was brilliant. And it’s great that a company takes the time and effort to try this kind of thing. It’s different and it’s interesting and both of those are very good things.
However, if you had to pick faults, I think we’d all agree your comments. It would have been nice if it was a bit - dirtier. Some used mugs lying around, that kind of thing.
If they had managed to find a real business that had been transformed by all those gadgets, and you could quiz those guys, that would have been amazing. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking from creative people.
Posted by: Ben | January 24, 2006 at 04:39 PM
hello Ben,
Well I'm glad you liked it -and glad something on here has finally proved useful to someone.
I bet it made you think about how you could do it better.
Posted by: russell | January 25, 2006 at 11:47 AM