How Microsoft quietly built the city of the future
microsoft.comIn 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know bashing Microsoft is oh-so-tempting, but can you at least try discussing the actual article here?
But some people can't even read the "actual article" because the navigation is so broken.
I was reading it on a Surface tablet using Metro-IE10 and thought the design and navigation were very slick. It works very well on it, every page starts with a fullscreen image, scrolling down the text appears while the image fades, at the bottom of the page the pagination links appear.
I looked at the NY Times project article and that did not work as well on Surface. They were undoubtedly inspired by it, maybe they optimized the design of this article as a showcase for their own tablet.
This, pretty much. It's so distracting that the article is unreadable.
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.
Thanks.
I didn't realize there were more pages. I just thought it was a very short and fluffy article.
What? There's more than just one page?
I know MS is a favorite target, but this honestly looks like it was designed by an intern.
More importantly, it reads like a jewelry advertorial in an in-flight magazine.
Is anyone able to watch the videos to the end? They seem to stop mid way for me- all of them. And I have a pretty fast connection.
They also die when I attempt to go fullscreen. Gave up.
Same here, now I have to got back to the story. Funny I don't remember seeing a way to get to another page...
Is it not relevant that they've copied a design straight from the NY Times?
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.
And even then the "next page" button wanted to play peek-a-boo with me.
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.
FWIW, I'm seeing next page fine in Firefox.
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.
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.
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.
The typography is screwed because of the seemingly faulty font stack in:
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..ncDcParagraph { font-size: 14px; font-family: Segoe,Verdana,sans serif; }Details, details...
I just double checked using Opera Firefly and it seems to be fixed. I see Seqoe UI now :).
The page looks like a wreck. It's like it's trying to look cool and tripping over itself.
This is how nearly all of Microsoft's products are, at least they are consistent in their user experience.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
Agreed. unsatisfactory to read an article about data with very little data in it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
Thanks for your insightful comment and help on the problem! I'll make sure to remember that about Microsoft software.
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?
There's probably a button called 'power cycle' or 'manually open/close'
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.
Breathless in tone and lacking specifics. Seems like interesting work, though. Frustrating.
This is what happens when the maintenance crew finds the keys to R&D.
I believe this is the most interesting comment on this thread. Almost everything else is bashing. huh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
that's redmond in the foreground and seattle in the background
Yes, but does it add anything to the piece?
It's a picture of the campus that they're talking about. Everything below the big tree line in the middle of the picture is Microsoft's campus. Note that it's not even the whole thing. The campus is huge and extends outside of the picture in every direction but north.
It's relevant because it puts into perspective how massive their campus is.
> Everything below the big tree line in the middle of the picture is Microsoft's campus. Note that it's not even the whole thing. The campus is huge and extends outside of the picture in every direction but north.
Thanks for the background! Where did you get this information (it sounds like you're already intimately familiar with it)? The caption on the image certainly doesn't convey it. IMO one shouldn't have to go to the comments section of an unrelated news site to learn the significance of a photo on your website.
I wouldn't be railing against it if it actually contributed to the article as supporting evidence (e.g. visual aide), such as if it was implemented with some sort of informational overlay, or if it was presented as a flat map (like the default Google Maps view) with labelled structures, zones, etc.
But it's not; it's just a photo lacking context.
I know this because I used to work on Windows :) Our part of the campus is (or was?) in the lower left portion. My office was just outside the lower left of the picture.
The big hole in the ground (right in the middle of the image) eventually became this: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails...
In that picture, you see the common area. The buildings on the left and right both have places to eat, as well as some shops for employees only (like an AT&T store, a UPS store, and a few others). There is also usually an art exhibit in the left building. In the background, the green field you see is an olympic (iirc) sized soccer field. In the winter, they sometimes put an ice skating rink on a portion of it.
Surrounding the area seen in that image (but not visible, unfortunately), are four new office buildings in the same style as the common buildings (but twice as tall). They're referred to as Studios A, B, C or D. One of them houses a lot of the XBox teams (and Microsoft game studios), not sure about the other 3.
The Microsoft campus is truly a marvel. It's giant, has it's own transportation system, has the world's largest underground parking garage (it's actually underneath the buildings in the image I linked above) and every day over 50,000 people come and go to it. It's a mini-city in every way.
The buildings in the foreground are the Microsoft campus. They show a model of some of the same buildings in the article. So it appears to be related.
Related, yes. Adds value, no.
Your axe is plenty sharp already.
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.
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).
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.
Also, NASA has been doing prototyping for this tech since 2007: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/sustainability-base/index....
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.
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?
Likewise, I had no problems in Firefox 20. I don't know why people are complaining so much.
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.
Oh, I didn't even notice there was a page 2...
Interesting though, wonder if there's any crossover with their "Smart Home" projects.
Microsoft realizing it can no longer compete in software and turning instead to real estate ... will be the mother of all pivots.
Technically, they dominate the desktop OS and office suite markets.
They didn't need the "Technically" before.
I don't think I understand your comment. If you are referring to the english words of the post, yes, the word "technically" can be used. The parent comment stated an opinion, I stated a fact.
It's not "quietly" if you spend $20k in engineer time to make a parallax-scrolly webpage to show it off to the world.
Did anyone else get a 404 when they went to this page?
i like how Microsoft is quietly reinventing itself -- by stealing everyone else's great ideas. Nonetheless...
If that's a city of the future, then I don't want any part of it...
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.
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.
How many campuses have you seen, that are covered in that much concrete?
While greenery is great, I'd rather be able to walk to a proper park than have it in the form of a glorified berm between parking lots.
You have clearly never been to the Microsoft campus. There's trees and green everywhere, and parking, for the most part, is in a parking building or underneath the buildings. There's actually very little overground non-enclosed parking.
Hell, even the photo itself doesn't have that much exposed concrete apart from the buildings themselves. You can clearly see that there's a lot of greenery surrounding buildings.
I was looking at the pictures on the site. The first image and the fifth. The fifth, specifically, makes Microsoft's campus look like a dime-a-dozen corporate/suburban landscape.
Granted the images don't show any parking structures or buildings that appear to have integrated structures. So it's quite possible the images aren't representative of the build-out you're referring to.
And, aside from the ballpark, the 'greenery' surrounding the buildings is exactly the sort of glorified berm I'm talking about: that's hardly functional greenery. It's better than none, but far less desirable than a proper park with functional spaces for laying out, taking walks, playing frisbee or catch, etc.
Kudos to Microsoft for having the ballpark though, and more is due, if it's one of several such spaces. The rest of the campus though, as characterized in those pictures, does not look great.
Why not? Just curious
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.
I don't think this is entirely accurate. I used to live in Seattle, and my parents currently live in Redmond (about a mile from Microsoft), but virtually all of the people I know in that area have nothing to do with Microsoft. It's dominant to be sure, but not absolutely everyone is affiliated with them.
Plus it's not all that remote. It is a typically boring suburb with tract houses and squat apartment buildings punctuated by strip malls, but it is only 20-40 minutes from downtown Seattle (I've done the trip many many times). I think living in Seattle and commuting to Microsoft via the 545 is a reasonable commute. I used to do something similar when I lived in Green Lake and worked in Kirkland.
But don't get me wrong, I agree that locating a major company there instead of Seattle, or at least Bellevue, is a mistake. I just don't think calling it a remote company town is a fair characterization.
That's an exaggeration. While Seattle is painfully distant (painful really is the word for the 520 bridge) Bellevue is right next door. Bellevue is a city of 122k people, bigger than Ann Arbor. It's no great cultural center, but it's certainly more than just Microsoft people.
And unlike Ann Arbor it has neither the diverse industrial or academic base to provide for a diverse population. Bellevue is still largely an extension of Redmond, though admittedly not as thoroughly MSFT-dominated as Redmond proper thanks to some tech presence in Kirkland.
Bellevue can hope to have the diversity of Ann Arbor when they import a state school and a few cornerstone employers that aren't Microsoft or Microsoft-affiliates. I don't expect this to happen soon.
Hell, "Bel-Red" exists as a word for a reason.
In any case, I don't think my original point is at all an exaggeration. Redmond is a modern incarnation of a Company town, though it doesn't come with many of the stigmas of industrial company towns. Its proximity to Bellevue has meant the Microsoftification of Bellevue, rather than the diversification of Remond.
"The diversity of Ann Arbor"? The goalposts have fallen somewhere weird here. I don't particularly like San Francisco, but Ann Arbor is basically Noe Valley transplanted into central Michigan; that is, it's got the diversity and culture of one neighborhood of a real city.
Redmond must suck a lot.
... "Bel-Red" is the road separating Bellevue and Redmond. That's why it exists.
lold
I'm not going to comment on the substance, but OMG Micro$oft sucks!
Anything with Microsoft in the title is trollbait I guess.