Center Models Future Workplace

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.