How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/stories/88acres/88-acres-how-microsoft-quietly-built-the-city-of-the-future-chapter-1.aspx

by raghavsethi • 13 years ago

167 93 13 years ago

microsoft.com

mturmon2• 13 years ago

Breathless in tone and lacking specifics. Seems like interesting work, though. Frustrating.

bretthopper• 13 years ago

This is a pretty poor attempt at copying the NY Times design for their Snow Fall project (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...).

It's lacking the top nav and the typography is terrible. Generally just lacks some polish and execution.

astrodust• 13 years ago

The page looks like a wreck. It's like it's trying to look cool and tripping over itself.

monkeynotes• 13 years ago

This is how nearly all of Microsoft's products are, at least they are consistent in their user experience.

tansey• 13 years ago

That was the same thought I had. The worst part is that they split it up into "chapters" which are really just one page of text and a pic each. The whole point of these designs is to be able to scroll down through the whole story like you were casually flipping a magazine. Instead, the MS article makes you click a "next chapter" link at the bottom right.

alyx• 13 years ago

I know bashing Microsoft is oh-so-tempting, but can you at least try discussing the actual article here?

cmelbye• 13 years ago

But some people can't even read the "actual article" because the navigation is so broken.

danso• 13 years ago

I was going to agree with you but the execution of this article is quite awful. The worst part of it is how there was no reason for this to be subdivided into pages.

An average page in the Microsoft story has fewer than 700 words.

In the NYT's Snowfall, the average chapter is 3,000+ words.

The NYT has an incentive to increase pageviews with pagination. Microsoft is paginating their press releases.

pc86• 13 years ago

Is it not relevant that they've copied a design straight from the NY Times?

chubot• 13 years ago

Wow, "next page" is broken/nonexistent in firefox. I could only read the first page with it... Had to switch to Chrome to get past the first page.

bonzoesc• 13 years ago

And even then the "next page" button wanted to play peek-a-boo with me.

leviathant• 13 years ago

FWIW, I'm seeing next page fine in Firefox.

mturmon2• 13 years ago

I'm on Chrome beta (27) on Mac and I also could not get nav to the next page to work. (It does work at the bottom of the final page.) I had to edit the freaking URL by hand, on a guess that the article was truncated.

tseabrooks• 13 years ago

I was in the middle of typing up how disappointing the article was because it appeared to be some sort of fluff PR piece. I noticed your comment before hitting submit and realized I had only read page 1.

shmerl• 13 years ago

Further pages can be found by clicking the next button that floats up when you approach the end of the screen - it worked for me in FF, though I don't consider such design comfortable.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

At least they are trying. I really, really liked the Snow Fall project, and I really want to see more stuff like it. The first step of taking that ball and running with it is naturally going to be imitation.

duncans• 13 years ago

The typography is screwed because of the seemingly faulty font stack in:

    .ncDcParagraph {
       font-size: 14px;
       font-family: Segoe,Verdana,sans serif;
    }

I think it should be "Segoe UI" which is a very nice font (on Windows) and it's falling through to Verdana which makes it look dated.

Details, details...

Pwnguinz• 13 years ago

I just double checked using Opera Firefly and it seems to be fixed. I see Seqoe UI now :).

navs2• 13 years ago

I'm on Chrome (OSX) and the bottom nav nauseatingly slides up and down, up and down, up and... you get the idea.

Looks like they rushed to push this out. Expect more from Microsoft.

epa• 13 years ago

I was about to comment on how it is such a beautifully designed site, yet you get to the 'next page' button which is a low res scaled arrow graphic.. this totally ruins the experience.

jkuria• 13 years ago

The page takes forever to load and imposes a mental tax trying to navigate it. A real waste of bandwidth and my precious man hours. I don't care how much energy you save if you waste my time!

archangel_one• 13 years ago

Sounds interesting, but totally lacking in specifics, or enough explanation of how some of the claims would work. Like the statement on the first page that engineers would be able to fix a stuck damper or leaky valve with "a few clicks" - how's that gonna happen, exactly?

bluedino2• 13 years ago

There's probably a button called 'power cycle' or 'manually open/close'

freejack• 13 years ago

It might just be me, I found that initial scrolling transition to be brutally distracting.

And I wanted to give the article a proper chance, so I read down the page and stumbled over the navigation to the next page, which gave me this error:

"We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found."

And then after a few seconds, that page redirected me automatically to a Bing search for this string:

"en us news stories 88acres 88 acres how microsoft quietly built the city of the future chapter 2 aspx"

At least Bing had the good sense to return the original article as the first result.

rlu3• 13 years ago

Hm, I get a similar error when trying to download the whitepaper on the fifth page. I can change pages fine, but when I try and click on the link it does a "download microsoft" Bing search...

tempaccount9473• 13 years ago

> stumbled over the navigation to the next page, which gave me this error

> I get a similar error when trying to download the whitepaper on the fifth page.

So... first time you two have used a Microsoft product then?

Well, in case you're wondering, pretty much all Miscrosoft software is a stolen design wrapped around a buggy core when first released.

pattern• 13 years ago

The navigation was so poorly executed that I didn't even realize there was more than one page! I admire people experimenting, but this feels like taking the idea 80% of the way there, and just kind of leaving things unrefined/unusable.

rlu3• 13 years ago

I had originally commented saying that this was a great read. I was only half-way done though. After finishing the entire thing, I agree that it could have used more details.

Overall I do think it's a good read (so, you know, some of you should read it instead of just posting about the layout of the site..). It just could have had a little less fluff and more details. You do end up getting a solid sense of how useful this could be to other companies.

I thought the whitepaper linked on the fifth page might be a good source for more information, but unfortunately the link didn't work for me.

dsdjung• 13 years ago

Looks like smart building and smart city concept is a continuation of the things that were happening in his previous work at Cisco. Great potential and a good vision. Only seeing this moving at any speed in small patches, but a real difference when you have it.

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

If that's a city of the future, then I don't want any part of it...

andrewguenther• 13 years ago

Why not? Just curious

potatolicious2• 13 years ago

I think the complaint may be more about the location than the campus itself. Redmond, WA, is for all intents and purposes a Company Town.

It's pretty remote, and the entirety of the city revolves around a single employer. Everyone who works there either works directly for Microsoft or is closely affiliated with Microsoft business. Ditto everyone who lives there.

It's far from the nearest major city (Seattle), and to make matters a bit worse, there is a large natural barrier between the Company Town and the city (a huge lake in the way, with highly congestion-prone bridge crossings).

The negative side effects of this are too many to fully enumerate. Beyond the general boredom of living in a place where everyone works for the same company, there's also the issue of not having ready access to cultural events (which tend to be urban), the lack of proximity to competitors or indeed actual users of your products, etc.

Being outside of a major urban area is also limiting for employees in that there is substantially less choice in where you can live. Companies based in Seattle offer employees the full gamut of commuting options and accomodate both urban and suburban lifestyles thanks to the hub and spoke model of transportation. Being outside of a hub reduces the number of places that are within reasonable commuting distance.

clauretano• 13 years ago

Agreed. As you can see from the image at the top, the "city" they built is a sprawling mess of buildings quite far from the city (Seattle, in the background). Depending on your team, you may need to frequently take Shuttle Connect to get to meetings, or walk a mile or more. If you live within walking distance from campus, you'll be dependent on a car for everything else. There's just endless cookie cutter suburbia around there.

bluedino2• 13 years ago

Don't most large software companies have a 'campus' feel to their headquarters? I would imagine back in the 80's when they were designed/created, nobody wanted to go work inside a towering, souless, black glass skyscraper for 10 hours a day.

A lot of people would kill for a view of water and trees and the ability to walk outside at lunch.

johnohara• 13 years ago

In one building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66,000 of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected.

And also why this work is important. Environmental and conservation arguments aside, it means $66,000 worth of product and services had to be sold to pay for one simple mistake.

In large organizations, these types of mistakes occur every day and can add up quickly.

The article was light on specifics, and the ROC control room doesn't seem to bespeak a 500 acre campus, but actively pursuing the problem looks very interesting.

spydum• 13 years ago

what they don't mention, is how much it cost to build and support this massive sensor infrastructure and analytics. I would wager $66k/year is a drop in the bucket.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

From the article it seems that they took whatever they had and tied into a single sensor network mesh, possibly adding some new sensors along the way. So a lot of the cost is fully depreciated already.

dhugiaskmak• 13 years ago

Well, they saved quite a lot by not paying the billion and a half dollars that they owe Washington state in taxes, so they can afford it.

salvadors• 13 years ago

It means that a lot more than $66,000 worth of product and services had to be sold to pay for one simple mistake.

Even Microsoft don't have 100% gross margin.

deckar01• 13 years ago

This is what happens when the maintenance crew finds the keys to R&D.

simplyinfinity• 13 years ago

I believe this is the most interesting comment on this thread. Almost everything else is bashing. huh.

k3n4• 13 years ago

Since this is obviously a marketing piece from MS, I'll attack the delivery and not the substance (since the substance is propaganda anyways)...

But are we back in the year 2000? That header image is 936kb! And for what purpose -- to show that they're in-tune with the over-saturated photo hipsters? Seriously, the image doesn't even lend anything to the article; looks like just a generic shot of some random 'burb. I see no signs of high-tech or futurism represented. What...the.....they have another gigantic, completely useless image on each of the next 2 pages as well?

And this horrid navigation thing that slowly slides in at the bottom? It doesn't even queue (if you scroll up/down rapidly a few times the nav bar will bounce up & down several times in succession).

This might be the worst website I've seen all year.

rubyrescue• 13 years ago

that's redmond in the foreground and seattle in the background

k3n4• 13 years ago

Yes, but does it add anything to the piece?

morsch• 13 years ago

No, in 2000, my home connection had 64kbit. We're in 2013, where even the kind of mobile devices you'd be viewing this piece on come with 1 Mbit/s+ connections. This lets us put beautiful, high-resolution photos alongside texts, using our equally high-resolution displays for something other than sharp fonts.

Not a fan of the navigation, either.

eykanal• 13 years ago

Very interesting overview. I wonder how the sensors work... can they detect a broken pipe at a specific location? The article also kept referring to "equipment"... how granular does that get? Is an entire heating system one piece of "equipment", or can they get down to the component level?

Still, very cool. I know we trivialize dealing with lots of data, but still, this is a huge amount of information they have to automatically receive, triage, prioritize, and possibly even act upon. Impressive.

ronbo• 13 years ago

My thought is that even if they are only detecting water and electricity throughput in each building and the temperature and light in each room, they can see hot-spots where too much energy or water is being used. If they have a model of the wiring, piping and heating conduits, then a defective part might be identified or at least a limited set of possibilities be found.

I think MS is one of the greenest IT companies in the world - folks here should give credit where its due. They have also been setting standards for energy conservation in co-lo facilities.

mrcactu5• 13 years ago

i like how Microsoft is quietly reinventing itself -- by stealing everyone else's great ideas. Nonetheless...

zenbowman• 13 years ago

lold

gamblor956• 13 years ago

As a counterpoint to all the negative comments about this article's typography and navigation, I viewed this article in IE9 at work and had absolutely no problems with the typography (which properlyl displays as Segoe UI) or with navigation.

Who would have thought that a Microsoft website looks best in a Microsoft browser?

dublinben• 13 years ago

Likewise, I had no problems in Firefox 20. I don't know why people are complaining so much.

l0c0b0x• 13 years ago

Thank you for building the city of the future Microsoft, now please build a simple website that isn't broken for Firefox and Chrome users: >50% the users on the planet.

kragen2• 13 years ago

> That data has given the team deep insights

What a shame they didn't bother to include any of them in the article. Instead they filled it with shitty similes like this:

> Microsoft’s buildings were experiencing data dissonance that would make the works of Igor Stravinsky sound like a barbershop quartet.

I was no fan of Microsoft in its Gates days, but I can't imagine it would have produced anything as bad as this article. Apparently the reason for this content-free article is that Microsoft hired some dumbshit to write it who couldn't be bothered to learn enough to understand what they were writing about:

> He projects the algorithm on a screen, and then launches into a deeply technical explanation about when a discharge air pressure set point is something-something, then the air is being overcooled by something-something for a duration of 900,000 milliseconds.

The Accenture white paper linked http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/8/8/4885BBB9-2675-4... is slightly better, but only very slightly.

Sensor networks are a promising approach for improving the efficiency of existing buildings, but the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivhaus approach seems much better for new buildings. Instead of removing unwanted heat with finicky mechanical systems with valves that get stuck, you don't let the heat in in the first place; and similarly for maintaining warmth in the winter. There's plenty of solar energy to keep your temperature pleasant year-round, unless you're in Siberia or something, and solar energy used to heat your house is 100% efficient, rather than the 20% provided by photovoltaic panels. It's mostly stupid to use marketed energy to heat and cool things.

astangl• 13 years ago

When I hear somebody say 900,000 milliseconds, it makes me wonder why he didn't quote the number in nanoseconds or worse.

On top of all the other problems with this puff piece, I couldn't shake the feeling that Microsoft will probably end up leading the way in buildings susceptible to viruses and other malware, consistent with their security record.

My expectation with implementing anything like this is that you immediately pluck some low-hanging fruit (fixing some inefficiencies) when the system goes online, and then it quickly becomes way more difficult to find further inefficiences to eliminate. The article makes it seem like there's an endless stream of inefficiencies they're finding.

kragen2• 13 years ago

He was probably quoting a whole series of time intervals in milliseconds: "if the valve doesn't open within 200 milliseconds or the air is being overcooled by more than two degrees after 900 000 milliseconds".

thestoic• 13 years ago

Agreed. unsatisfactory to read an article about data with very little data in it!

cybernoodles• 13 years ago

Also, NASA has been doing prototyping for this tech since 2007: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/sustainability-base/index....

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Microsoft realizing it can no longer compete in software and turning instead to real estate ... will be the mother of all pivots.

umsm2• 13 years ago

Technically, they dominate the desktop OS and office suite markets.

otikik• 13 years ago

They didn't need the "Technically" before.

blaines• 13 years ago

Oh, I didn't even notice there was a page 2...

Interesting though, wonder if there's any crossover with their "Smart Home" projects.

bazzargh• 13 years ago

I'm not going to knock the story (oddly I was checking my home's year on year power reduction just before I read it) but I have to wonder if there is a connection to the previous story about SuperDaE (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5274345)

Specifically the bit that purportedly showed a screenshot of "Control power to individual outlets" on the MS network?

I know, probably coincidence.

rocky1138• 13 years ago

Did anyone else get a 404 when they went to this page?

zem• 13 years ago

am i the only one who found this exciting? sure, the tone and content are puff-piecey, but reading between the lines they are doing some genuinely interesting things with data acquisition and centralised control, and proving that it works on a largish scale, with measurable (not to mention large!) savings in terms of money and energy.

rurounijones• 13 years ago

Yea, it was pure PR BUT I am a big believer that data analytics are underused in industries all over the world that could be making huge improvements.

malyk2• 13 years ago

All the technology stuff is great, but as for this being the city of the future? Pass!

It's far to spread out. It's not very walkable. There's too much space dedicated to parking. etc. It fails almost every test for being a good city. It's basically a technology enabled suburb. Gross.

kabdib• 13 years ago

Not too different from a large college campus (the U of MD was like this, with approximately the same number of people on campus).

It does put a damper on cross-group communication, but it's probably better than having a collection of skyscrapers. Also, Redmond doesn't like buildings more than 3 stories tall (their fire equipment can't deal -- why MS can't buy Redmond different fire equipment is beyond me).

malyk2• 13 years ago

College campuses are pretty nice for college, but I don't think they translate well as a city. I'll admit to being a bit of a new-urbanism and walkability snob, so when I look at a campus as "the city of the future" it makes me gag a bit. They are ok, but missing most of what makes "real" cities great.

sneak• 13 years ago

It's not "quietly" if you spend $20k in engineer time to make a parallax-scrolly webpage to show it off to the world.

3dptz• 13 years ago

I'm not going to comment on the substance, but OMG Micro$oft sucks!

Anything with Microsoft in the title is trollbait I guess.

How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future

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