If you want a look at the future, hang out at Microsoft for a while.  You are quickly inundated with programs, projects, and products under development – some of which won’t be used by people for years.

What’s interesting is the effect this has on people here.  Imagine for a moment that everyone you worked with was working on a project all year, for a product that has another year to go before people see it. All you think about, all your time, all your creative work is going into unreleased, improved technology. By the time this gets to the public, while wholly new to the world, it’s seems been around for years to the authors. Uptake rates kick in and by the time the product is widely adopted, the authors are 4-5 years ahead of that curve.

That’s a pretty serious discontinuity and I see it all the time. I edited a powerpoint deck last week on Longhorn installation processes that referred to current technology as the “old” way. Another example, this week a presenter asked the audience how many were running IIS 6 and about ¼ of the room raised their hands, much to the surprise of the presenter (and this was an IIS 7 presentation!).

The risk here is that new technologies and organizations that create them become over time more and more distanced from the current experience of the customers. Eventually, technologies are released that improve on technologies that haven’t yet been widely adopted. At this point, companies that create these technologies run the risk of simply running too far ahead of the customer and eventually leaving the realm of dealing with their significant day to day realities. Yes the new stuff is way cool and really does have a lot to offer, but adoption rates do not keep pace with the torrent of new technologies, and this gap has got to have larger and larger impact over time.