Microsoft gives ultimate advantage to a average human being to effectively own a personal work computer, and use it to get work done effectively, on an average. Think about how windows computers are the cheapest PCs you can buy, and how you cannot live without the Microsoft Office Suite. And this offer is going to grow 10x, I will explain how.

To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Microsoft’s Mission

Most popular computing hardware and software systems have always strived to reduce the communication latency between the machine and the human, and machine to machine; think about how your smartphone user experience is changing, and how your smartphone gets connected to the internet easily through wifi and 4g. So what would be the best way to give input to a machine, process then transport it from machine to machine, and finally get the output to human senses?

Human visual system consists of most of our input, couple that with auditory, and its almost all of it. Touch, smell, taste are also there, but we use them lot less than the first two, and in a modern professional setting also, you are dependent mostly on first two. Yes there are wine and dine rituals, and fancy perfumes to attract people and assert dominance, but in a post covid remote world also, the first two senses rule.

The fastest output from human system is probably voice, then comes writing. We had mostly been dependent on writing for providing long term long distance record kept output and communication, whether it is letters, books, journals or notes in the old days, and emails and text messages in the new days. With cheaper internet bandwidth cost, usage of voice, and video(which contains facial expression and body language as well) is increasing for communication for long distance human to human comms, and voice for human to machine instructions through text recognition.

But compared to the input bandwidth of human to machine through audio visual system, output from human to machine is much much low bandwidth and high latency.

Pop culture has always been the source from which engineers take inspiration to build things, because in many cases they tend to be the original vision of feature-set requirements that will give the best user experience. Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale, Accel World, and Ready Player One are such content that gives a glimpse of a near and long term future.

The reason we are heading towards system such as these are their magnification of human and machine back and forth communication bandwidth, and in a very mobile setting. The most mobile thing we own is our own body, anything connecting to this body that we can constantly interact with becomes part of it, just like a smartphone, or a laptop for work. An AR/VR headset, or a brain implant makes it further mobile, frees up your hands, doesn’t require you to sit in a desk. Thus you can use your full body to make movement, simultaneously giving more output to physical world and machine, and getting more inputs from the physical world and machine.

This is definitely the next human computer interaction platform, after desktop, laptop and smartphones. That is why enormous amount of investment is being done to be a winner in this platform. As evidence from iphone and android has shown us, from winning a platform game, you own everything else that is built on that platform.

Neuralink raised 158MLN by July 2019 and just got started, Magic Leap raised close to 3BLN since 2010 and yet to produce any good results. Augmented Reality has been deployed to 200MLN plus android phones, and lot of IOS ones. And microsoft released Hololens 2 at the end of 2019. Oculus launched Quest and GO in 2019, both are independent from third party computation device. There has also been auditory and voice augmentation with devices such as pixel bud 2. Apple is reportedly working on a AR glass as well, and as the lightweight glasses will process its data in iphone, the current iphones all come with AR processing chips.

The benefits with devices such as hololens and oculus is it frees up the human body to move more and interact more with the digital and physical world. Neuralink however, requires you to drill a whole in the skull, and plugging small wires in the brain cells, which sounds scary and is not very well proven still how it can scale. Neralink type devices are targeted to increase the human system output many fold, and fix brain injuries through circuit repairs. It will be a effective tertiary layer of the brain where symbiosis with personal AI layer of the brain is possible. There are also EEG headset devices that are plug and play and non invasive, that can read your brain waves, and the people working on them promised high bandwidth human system output by reading someones brain. Lot of these systems came out in the last decade but still to deliver on promise. Facebook however, recently made some breakthrough on this field.

The most likely winner of these technologies are likely to be something like hololens, with a successful EEG reading. And hololens IS THE BEST augment reality hardware available right now. One advantage of AR over VR is you can constantly use it, and be mobile outside a room, interact seamlessly with real world. The only problem it has is the size of headset, and battery life. Both being solved is a matter of couple of years.

So the most efficient professional cyborgs will look something similar to Tao in the anime Carole & Tuesday. Low code interactions with Machine Learning and AI systems are heavily emergent in lot of the cloud products provided by Azure cloud by Microsoft.

The most similar system to this is combining PowerBI with hololens, the experience is now totally dependent on hololenses image input to eyes, which could still use some improvements.

Couple this with the capability to build AI model in azure in a point and click manner, with access to thousands of compute clusters with a click of a button, where you train deep learning models. Also they made a deal with OpenAI that will let them grow their ML product for the modern AI Engineers. Training AI models can bring in some of the biggest portion of cloud revenues. As these artificial deep neural nets are modeled after human brain structure, you can consider these cloud AI systems to be essentially a tertiary layer of our brain that we communicate with a low bandwidth, and increases one individuals customer serving and production capabilities million or billion folds.

So it is pretty clear how a human becomes superhuman with the modern Microsoft suite, but the questions remains, how is microsoft going to distribute these products to everyone? How will they thwart competition? How does it help them with their software piracy problem? And most of all, why did i spent so much time explaining the direction of human computer interaction at an individual level?

The answer comes in the next part of this series at How Microsoft is Changing how We Work : Empowering Organizations.