Future dreams: What are Microsoft, Apple and IBM working on?

If you want a glimpse into the near future, the just over the horizon thinking in research and development labs of major tech firms, Microsoft, Apple and others often create videos that seem more like sci-fi film trailers.

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However, some of the videos from just a few decades ago show us things that have come to pass, although not always exactly how they were foreseen.

Here is a video just released from Microsoft’s Office team peering into their crystal balls to show you technology in 2021. They make work seem seamless, effortless. If you’ve ever wrestled with PowerPoint or Excel to the point of aggravation, you might want to look away now. However, this video has caught the attention of the tech press, and it shows a frictionless future where we’ll have flat, super-thin phones and tablets.

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Soon after the release of the iPhone 4S and its virtual assistant, Siri, this video from an Apple educational conference in the late 80s was making the rounds. Some of the ideas weren’t far off even this if this vision of the future has a feeling of being very much from the past. Except she wasn’t named Siri in 1987 but had the rather dry name of Knowledge Navigator.

From 1993 to 1994, the US telecoms giant, AT&T, ran an ad campaign showing off what it thought people would do. They got a lot right including GPS and many wireless advances that we now take for granted, although I am sure that we don’t think of sending faxes from the beach, just email and the Facebook updates.

We expect futuristic visions from computer and telecoms companies but from what about from glass maker Corning? It’s not as far fetched as you might think. Corning makes Gorilla Glass, and the super-tough glass now is found in 20% of the world’s smartphones including the iPhone. Here Corning shows a vision of 2020 complete with self-dimming windows and touch-screens everywhere.

For the last several years, IBM has released a series of videos called the Next 5 in 5. In the series, IBM looks into the near future and highlights technologies that it thinks will be game changers. Here is one from last December.

Which of these technologies do you want the most? Which predictions do you believe are the least likely to happen? Which technologies do you want to see in India first? Lastly, let us know how you like this video roundup. If you like them, we’ll definitely do more.