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Watch how eerily Microsoft’s smart home of 1999 predicts our lives today (video via Quartz) but is playing catch-up, today

Watch how eerily Microsoft’s smart home of 1999 predicts our lives today – Quartz.

Today, Microsoft is playing catch-up on trends from the shift to mobile to the cloud. But for decades it was pretty universally acknowledged as a global leader in technology. And indeed, the 1999 video above (originally highlighted by Gizmodo), where Microsoft lays out the company’s vision for a “smart home” is remarkably prescient. The video and technology mockups are very much of their time, and the occasional appearance of Windows ’98 can be jarring, but it predicts with some accuracy a lot of technology that we use—or are developing—today. But as it turned out, Microsoft is glaringly absent from many of these services. The video shows a vision where the PC is the main hub device. It has turned out to be the smartphone instead, which is becoming a sort of master remote control. That miss is behind a lot of Microsoft’s troubles.

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