Microsoft Notebook: Bringing together a worldwide vision

The meeting attended Friday afternoon by Microsoft Corp. Group Vice President Jeff Raikes was, in some ways, like many others. A group from outside the company presented Raikes and his team of executives with a series of suggestions, including one for a new product, and promised to follow up with a formal proposal outlining how they might work together in the future.

But this was no ordinary meeting.


		Gilbert W. Arias / P-I
	Microsoft executives Jeff Raikes, left, and Peter Rinearson take notes during Friday's presentation by 15 college students from around the world.

The people making the presentation were 15 university students from around the world, brought by Microsoft to the Redmond campus for a week. Microsoft assembled the group, dubbed the Information Worker Board of the Future, to help it get a better sense for how the workplace might evolve during the next decade -- and how the company's products might need to evolve during the same time frame, as people now in their late teens and early 20s enter the professional work force.

"One of the things we recognized early on is that we needed to connect with the next generation of workers," said Dan Rasmus, Microsoft's director of information work vision.

The students -- undergrads and graduates ranging in age from 19 to 24 -- were brought to Redmond for the week from 14 countries, including Argentina, Turkey, India, Italy, Japan, Canada, Kenya, South Africa, Slovenia, New Zealand and Britain. Their areas of study range from law and engineering to business and international relations.

Their presentation to Raikes and his team outlined a variety of ways that Microsoft could make its software more intuitive, easier to use, and responsive to a person's needs. The students also talked about ways Microsoft could bring technology to developing countries, suggesting the company start with a Tablet PC with a user interface designed to appeal to people in South Africa.

After they were done, Raikes made it clear that he was impressed. "Some people would describe you as being idealistic about the world, but in many ways it's that sense of idealism that leads to great aspirations, and then from those great aspirations, people who are passionate and dedicated can go drive change," he told them.

In an interview after the meeting, Peter Rinearson, a corporate vice president who oversees new markets for Microsoft's Information Worker division, gave the students what may be the highest praise at Microsoft. "Some of the things they were saying were the kinds of things Bill Gates was saying when he was their age, and still is saying," he said.

But the complimentary tone didn't prevent forthright exchanges. Raikes, for example, disagreed at one point with one of the key assertions the students made. The issue emerged when Raikes asked them what one new tool or product they would want Microsoft to be working on for the future.


		Gilbert W. Arias / P-I
	Anesu Mhlanga, center, a law student in South Africa, said she hoped to give Microsoft a better sense of the importance of that part of the world.

"I think the mindset that you're showing now is exactly what is the problem," answered Øyvind Kildal Stangnes, a 24-year-old business student from Norway. "We don't need more features; we don't need more tools. We just need them to work. We just need to be able to operate them. And we need everyone to be able to do that."

Simon Moss, 21, a psychology and international politics major at the University of Melbourne, Australia, had sounded a similar theme earlier in the week. "I'd really like to convey a sense that the more user-friendly and humanly intelligent software can become, the more productive people will be without necessarily having amazing new technologies come into play," Moss said.

Raikes, whose group includes the Microsoft Office suite of products, acknowledged during the Friday session that it's important to make existing features easier to use. But he also pointed out all the things the students would be missing today -- such as the Microsoft OneNote program they were using to take handwritten notes in digital ink on their Tablet PCs -- if the company had stopped trying to innovate five years ago.

POLL

We asked SeattlePI.com readers which they would rather have:

5.7%

Software with innovative new features

94.3%

Software that works reliably

Total Votes: 2263

"I would caution you about thinking that everything that needs to be invented has been invented except for accessibility," he said. "The progression of technology is such that there's a lot of opportunities to enhance the way in which we work."

The session with Raikes and his team capped a week of intensive brainstorming and discussion by the students on Microsoft's Redmond campus.

The students started the week thinking and talking about what the future could be like under a variety of different scenarios. To help guide the initial sessions, Microsoft brought in Lawrence Wilkinson of Global Business Network, an Emeryville, Calif., group that specializes in helping companies prepare for the future.

Wednesday, the international students met with a third grade class from Samantha Smith Elementary School in Sammamish. Microsoft's Rasmus had visited the class earlier to get them thinking about what the workplace might be when they enter it, and they shared their thoughts and work with the international students, complete with science-fair style displays.

The goal of those initial sessions was to establish a framework for the Board of the Future to make suggestions to Raikes and the other executives later in the week. But even before they arrived, many of the students had a good sense for what they wanted to tell the Microsoft executives.

Anesu Mhlanga, a 21-year-old from Zimbabwe who is studying law at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said she hoped to give Microsoft a better sense for the importance of that part of the world, where she said people can be quick to embrace technology, such as the Tablet PC, when they have access to it.

The manner in which Microsoft brought the international group together reflected one of the ways that business will change as the workplace becomes more global. Working with a Toronto-based organization called TakingITGlobal, Microsoft communicated with the students and made arrangements primarily via e-mail, because of the vast time differences that were involved.

The future workplace will also be different as a result of the fact that the coming generation of workers grew up with computers and the Internet. As the week with the students began, it was immediately apparent that it was almost second nature for the students to adopt new technology. Microsoft gave each of them a Tablet PC and they were quickly testing the limits of what the computers could do, twisting the hinged screens to different angles and figuring out how to draw pictures with a stylus.

"We have difficulty with our generation trying to get people to adopt technology. That is not an issue for this generation," Rasmus said.

The company assembled the students as part of a broader program it calls the Future of Information Work. The goal is to give Microsoft's product groups a strategic backdrop for their long-term planning.

The goal of that broader program is to envision a variety of alternate futures, said Rasmus, a former industry analyst who joined the company in October. He cited past missteps, such as the failure of some in the industry to foresee the huge potential demand for personal computers.

"We don't believe that there is one future that we're planning for," Rasmus said. "We want to look at the crystal ball and keep looking at it and see where the shifts and movements are going and keep track of those. This is one way of doing that."

Microsoft Notebook is a Monday feature by P-I reporter Todd Bishop. He can be reached at 206-448-8221 or toddbishop@seattlepi.com

Add P-I Business headlines to