The Center for Information Work (CIW) is Microsoft’s new showplace for business client technologies of the future. Constructed in fall 2002, it provides visible—if speculative—examples of future Microsoft technologies that corporate customers and partners might be able to employ to improve business productivity. While the center currently focuses on speculative technologies coming mostly from Microsoft, it could evolve, as other centers have, into a showcase for partner technologies.

Showcase for "Business Productivity" Push

Located in the same building as Microsoft’s Executive Briefing Center, the CIW was constructed for the Information Worker Product Management Group, which reports to Jeff Raikes, group vice-president for the Productivity and Business Solutions Group. The CIW fills a gap in Microsoft’s ability to showcase new technologies: the Microsoft Home demonstrates new consumer technologies, and Microsoft has centers around the world to demonstrate advanced server technologies, but despite the importance of client PC applications to its business and a recently launched campaign to increase the market for Office by redefining its intended audience (see "Information Worker Focus of New Client Plans" on page 26 of the Oct. 2002 Update), the company had no place to show visiting business executives how the daily work of their employees could be transformed by future office technologies. The CIW highlights Microsoft’s concern that organizations will take Office for granted as a utilitarian authoring and document display solution, and will not position it as a core enabler for their business. This concern prompted the company in 2002 to create Business Productivity Advisers who go out to customers and try to sell them Microsoft’s more expansive vision of the business desktop.

The Microsoft Agenda

The CIW pushes Microsoft’s agenda by demonstrating new software, hardware, and collaboration technologies for use in the office.

Visitors are guided through a hallway to a room with several workstations that feature multiple monitors, Tablet PCs, Web cameras, and a huge curved screen, called Broadbench, that integrates data from multiple sources in an effort to give the user immediate access to critical information.

Visitors are taken through a business planning scenario in which they work together to launch a new product and beat a competitor to market. The exercise includes identifying suppliers, crafting the marketing message, determining the earliest feasible shipment date, signing contracts, and working through other stages in the process.

Nearby, a living room and the interior of an automobile demonstrate how workers can keep in touch even when they are out of the office.

Speculative Technologies, Microsoft Focus

Numerous current and future Microsoft technologies make an appearance in the demonstration, including digital rights management and security (e-mail that cannot be forwarded outside the company, for example), videoconferencing, e-mail filtering, Voice-over-IP, smart cards, personal digital assistants, wireless data, sensing a user’s presence, Web services, natural-language interfaces, advanced project planning, and supply chain management. Some of the technologies demonstrated have emerged from Microsoft’s own Microsoft Research division and are not yet in production.

Most of this is delivered in an unfamiliar form, with new interfaces (visitors are advised to click with care, since many components are for demonstration only) that are not likely to appear for three to five years, says Thomas Gruver, group marketing manager for the center.

While the center’s first iteration will not offer visitors much insight into technologies that they can employ immediately, and makes relatively little use of partner contributions (Acer, Intel, and Sony are the only partners featured at the center), it could evolve, as Microsoft’s other technology centers have done, as customers and partners show more interest in the facility.