Life... squared
A renovated turn-of-the-century primary school in Chelsea Harbour, south London is the rather unusual venue for Life2 (Life Squared) - Microsoft UK's showcase of the near future of IT at work and at home.
Visitors – mostly journalists and Microsoft's business partners, including distributors and top resellers – are taken on a 90-minute walkabout that's intended to be a technology tour de force. Presentations are given by actors playing the parts of people whose lives are being transformed by technology.
The message is that all our lives can be revolutionised - at home, in the office and when working out on the road - by using Microsoft's programs and operating systems. These Microsoft concedes need the support of hardware and a strong comms infra-structure. So, Life2 also highlights the canny use of email, internet telephony, local wireless networks and 3G phones, paired with lots of up-to-the minute (and beyond) computer hardware and peripherals, mostly supplied by HP.
Anyone who, like your correspondent, starts out on the tour not realising that the main talkers are thespians can feel their grip on reality rapidly loosening. Even so, the game is only really given away by the actors' lack of in-depth knowledge about the products they're supposed to know how to use.
Well, that and the strangely limited use to which the former school is put. There's an IT-bedecked office contrasting with a library that has no books and, just as odd, no IT. There's also a café with a giant Sharp monitor on one wall but no customers apart from tour members. Last, and very far from least, is a luxury home that encapsulates every techno-freaks' dream.
This, apparently, contains much of the IT gadgetry found Chez Simon Darby - the man behind the Life2 showcase and Windows client marketing manager.
First stop on the tour is the office of the Microsoft-empowered master of Marsh Marine – a fictional yachting-supplies retailer and fittings service. Actually he's Marsh minor – the founder's son.
Rick (for it is he) is now the boss but was only prepared to take over if he could find ways of freeing up more time for his family than his dad ever could in the bad old paper-shuffling days.
Invoices are generated and accessed electronically, likewise job sheets and inventories. Bad debts – the bane of every small business – can, Microsoft would have us believe, be made a thing of the past.
That's all thanks to intelligent and easy-to-use databases that hold together all elements of the business and make it simple to identify late payers and chase them down before the firm's credit lines are breached. This is theatre though, so forget that big organisations seldom pay small operators in a timely fashion time, no matter what they do.
