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>From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1546
No Place Like the Future
Andrew Zipern on Microsoft's House of Tomorrow
IF THE JETSONS expressed post-war America's subconscious desire to live in an effortless, gadget-filled future, the Microsoft house is today's Internet economy version. Filled with PCs, wireless gizmos, and digital music players (all networked together) the Microsoft Home sets the stage "for families to begin adopting technologies into their homes that simplify daily tasks, enhance their entertainment experiences, and increase communication at home and away." At least that's what the press release says.
The 8,000-square-foot loft is essentially a posh suburban estate that's been relocated to a high floor of a Tribeca office building to showcase the Microsoft vision of technological domesticity. Decorated in muted greens and browns mixed with lots of airy white space and blonde wood, the house is also a real testament to the staying power of the Martha Stewart-style design aesthetic. But even if the space isn't jarring, the accompanying stage play is. Actors portraying helpful, gizmo-happy family members pretend to live in the Microsoft Home. "Hi! I'm the older brother," intones a shoeless young actor clad in sweats. He introduces the enormous interactive television set in the living room. (Questions about the technical underpinnings of the unit prompt quick intervention from a real Microsoft employee.) "Grandma" sits at the kitchen counter in front of an Internet terminal, a perfectly white apron protecting her from non-existent spills. A woman who looks thirty years old portrays a teenage daughter who is totally into MP3s. Mom and dad stay sequestered in the home office and master bedroom.
This bit of publicist theater feels like nothing so much as a weirdly flawed version of those kitschy fifties industrial films that heralded the "House of Tomorrow" -- magical, futuristic places where hausfraus in pastel dresses prance around praising the inherent liberation of the robotic kitchen. But where the older films perfectly captured the mix of consumer desire and social anxiety that characterized the newly modern home, Redmond's vision of the future gives the viewer a bad case of cognitive dissonance.
Awash in Microsoft software, placidly gobbling up whatever their gatekeepers send down the wireless pipe, the white bread family that "lives" here seems to be caught between Father Knows Best complacency and Starbucks-fueled work-a-holism. When "dad," an avuncular George Jetson with salt-and-pepper hair, rises from his bedroom La-Z-Boy and removes his half-glasses, you're not sure if he'll offer you the evening paper or a PocketPC. Next door in the home office, "mom" spends half her time e-mailing digital photos and the other half tweaking her portfolio with Microsoft Money. So instead of presenting a vision of a nuclear family brought closer together by technology, in the house that Windows built, they're more isolated than ever. The dining room table has place settings and napkin rings for ten, but nary a diner in sight; separated by hundreds of square feet of prime downtown real estate, the family members never once speak to each other directly.
Maybe the home's designers are just being arch? It's impossible to tell for sure; presumably, Microsoft knows that it's not exactly politic to portray its customers as agreeably empty-headed consumer robots, so that lends some credence to the theory. But even for them, 8,000 square feet of residential space is a lot of space for "arch." And in downtown Manhattan, it borders on the pornographic. So maybe the whole thing is actually a piece of installation art: "deconstructing" the "press event," "consumer culture," and the "Idea of the Future" simultaneously.
Or maybe it's all some kind of brilliantly ironic conceptual joke that only Gates gets. His stock is taking a beating, but the House still wouldn't be much more than a whoopee cushion scale expenditure for Bill. You picture him sitting in his own private and presumably way-better-appointed Tomorrowland under the hills of Seattle, watching the press troop through the house on his wall-sized plasma display. Perhaps he chuckles a little. Or perhaps not.