I subscribe to Jon Udell’s feed from his blog, and he recently interviewed Bill Gates. While there was much in it that was interesting, one thing Gates said in particular caught my eye:
Ultimately the whole problem of notification, of what is it should I be paying attention to next? Is it the e-mail that came in? The phone call? The bid we’re supposed to make? That’s actually a very deep user interface problem, you know, having all these things understand your context and their priority and who’s saying that they think something is urgent. And then you just go to your computer screen and it’s ranked for you. You know — first pay attention to this, then pay attention to this. That’s the holy grail that these technologies are in service of, is that the thing where you always had to go find things, now the system is being a bit smarter for you in terms of now you’re not polling the world.
I’ve been getting more and more curious, lately, about what I’m going to in for using Windows Vista and Office 12. This is where the computer nerd in me really comes out. I get all excited by this stuff. Some friends of mine are really into open source, and I love the way that open source thinking is infecting the business world like a beneficial virus, but when Vista and Office 12 come out, nothing in the open source world will be able to hold a candle to it in terms of network deployability and in terms of a rich user workflow experience.
And what Gates said above shows he’s heading in the right direction, and that bringing computational power to bear on the attention problem is the way to go. The folks working on open source operating systems and software aren’t thinking about stuff like that at all.
