High-Tech Changing Ways of Human Interacting
I today was at the headquarters of Microsoft Switzerland, where there was the launch of MS Office 2010. They had invited me and a few other representatives of organisations, companies and agencies, who are “early adopters” of MS Sharepoint 2010 (here is a video, not from our meeting, but a later one today.) At my office we are about to introduce a document management system for better collaboration, which will be done with this new technology and I’m the responsible for the project. An agency working for Microsoft had done an interview and a video with me for their product marketing presentation a few weeks ago (it should go online next week). That’s why I got the invitation…
The meeting was in their solution and innovation center near Zürich, one of 6 such centers world-wide and of 3 in Europe.
They presented a number of new features and their reflections behind. The keynote speaker showed some interesting slides, one of them showing that in our society more and more people are knowledge workers and it will increase in the future. How to work with knowledge and what challenges come out of this development. There is a profound impact of the demographic shift to less births and less people in the productive age, who have to be more productive. And the way the different generations work and live changes profoundly: the “boomers”, born from 1946 to 65 have different attitudes to work than the “generation x” from 65-80 and again a shift to the “generation y” from 80 to 2000…
After a discussion of the people present about their experiences with the new technology we were invited to have a tour through the headquarters 4th floor. There we saw a fantastic interactive computer with intuitive handling, just touchscreen and impressive ways of dealing with visual objects. I typed a bit on a virtual keyboard and played with the finger-zoom. It is really getting the imagination substantiated and working like with etheric manifestation on a screen – by the way the opening screen was like a water pool: the whole surface of the screen was full of little ripples, and you had the impression to put your hands into water, when touching the screen.
The “magic” was coming out of this “box” under the screen…
We then walked through the offices, where there were no more individual workspaces, but different kinds of rooms, for silent concentration, group work, small exchanges or relaxing. The lady who lead the tour explained how working and leisure time are more and more intermingling – people work during the weekend, but take off time during the week for private activities. Their teams meet less physically and people coming to virtual meetings are spread over different places or even continents. Aquarian waves of living expressed through high-tech surroundings, and not at all in a context where they would consider this as Aquarian…
May 12th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
Very interesting.