Microsoft and the Metaverse. Interview with Mike Pell – Envisoneer, Director at The Microsoft Garage (NYC) & Author

Transcript

Nick Abrahams:

Joining me today on the show is Mike Pell, Envisioneer and Director at the Microsoft Garage. And Mike, I’ve got to say, is one of the world’s great creative forces. He’s a prolific author. He’s had The Age of Smart Information, Envisioning Holograms, and he’s got a new book coming up called Visualizing Business. And I’ve got to say, Mike is a guy who sees the world and information very differently to the rest of it. Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Pell:

Thank you, Nick. So great to be back talking with you.

Nick Abrahams:

Very kind of you. Look, why don’t we just go back into i? Because you’ve had a fascinating career. Can you give us just a bit of a sense as what’s the ride been so far? How did you end up as an envisioneer?

Mike Pell:

Well, I’ve been very lucky throughout my entire career. I’ve been on the leading edge of technology and business and design. I’ve just been very fortunate to work with some incredibly talented people. And I started off as a designer, an artist, and just happened to love science fiction and technology, got a chance to do both when I learned programming. Anne was doing art at the same time. And throughout my whole career, I’ve just been able to be that person who helps people to not only have these ideas of things that they’d like to do, but make them real. And that’s through my ability to do both the design and the engineering behind prototyping or trying things out. That led me to being an envisioneer, right? Someone who can both envision, imagine what’s possible, but make it real through engineering.

Nick Abrahams:

And it feels like now is your time because now more than ever we’ve seen the worlds of art, and design, and technology really come together in Web3. It’s a very exciting time. Maybe-

Mike Pell:

Just like the creator economy is real.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s no longer our artist folks who, I guess, struggle for your art somewhere on the left bank. It’s front and center, so it’s been fascinating, but maybe just to get a sense of … So you are a director at the Microsoft Garage and that in itself is a fascinating proposition. Can you talk us through what exactly does does happen at the Microsoft Garage?

Mike Pell:

The garage program worldwide is the ability for Microsoft employees to take their ideas and their passion and do something with it. Eight years ago, when Satya Nadella took over as our new CEO, he had heard about hacking and hackathons and wanted to try an experiment, which was to turn everybody at Microsoft loose worldwide for a few days and see what would happen. And that first event that we put together nine years ago now, called the Microsoft Global Hackathon, led to a transformation of our corporate culture to being more experimental, more curious, more I would say able to just try things instead of talking them to death. The garage program has really been helping since that time to change the culture of Microsoft, through helping people to just hack on things, to take an idea, to move it very quickly from just being this amorphous thing to being something real that we can test.

Mike Pell:

We help them form a hypothesis, do an experiment, so the garage has been a lot of fun for me personally, because I’ve seen so many thousands of projects come out of our hackathons over the year or just individual people or engineering teams coming up with ideas and it’s helping them try them out as experiments. At its heart, the garage is about curiosity and experimentation, but it actually ends up being a business value because every once in a while we do come across this amazing new business idea, new product or service or just something that helps the community at large or our customers.

Nick Abrahams:

I’ve got to say the last eight years or so with Satya have been a remarkable time, I think for Microsoft. In fact, for any corporate because Microsoft was already a very mature business. There was the shift to the cloud which was effectively an existential crisis for [inaudible 00:04:45].

Mike Pell:

Remember Nick, eight years ago, nobody cared about Microsoft. We were a faceless tech giant who like basically was just whatever, right? Nobody really paid attention. The difference between then and now, and I think if you ask any Microsoft employee to the person today, they would tell you it’s a very different company. They love working for the company and they’re incredibly excited personally about the future. The reason for that is Satya realizing from the very beginning of taking over that he had to empower everyone to go take their ideas, and I would say make sure that we all understood that our ideas did matter and that we were empowered to do the right thing, and that made a huge difference. And it has taken us from being basically like not on anybody’s radar to being one of, again, the most identified as being innovative companies in the world.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah, yeah. No, it’s just been fantastic the way the Office 365, that became such an extra extraordinary movement. Then the integration of Skype which had been a bit of a lost child in other organizations and then Microsoft bought it over a decade ago. Then Teams is obviously a critical part and has really been important to the world during the pandemic. It’s fascinating to see that, I guess that transformation. What we talk about on the podcast is trying to give our listeners a sense of what’s real about Web3 technologies, and I know obviously in the augmented reality space, that’s a favorite area of yours, but also we talk about crypto and stablecoins and NFTs and so forth. Can you give us a sense of what projects you’ve been working on that are more in the Web3 space where you think there might be mainstream business interest?

Mike Pell:

Absolutely. I talk about this almost every day in the Microsoft Garage, we have some of our biggest customers coming through all the time and they all want to know the same thing. What’s our role in Web3, in the metaverse, in cryptocurrencies, like what can we do today with Microsoft to figure out our place? When you asked what’s real, what’s real is the technology, right? There’s no question that some of the technologies that we’re looking at right now will survive this exponential growth, right? NFTs, I believe there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of nonsense going on with ridiculous marketing schemes tied to NFTs. Do you really have to have an NFT to get into a restaurant? Like, come on.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. That-

Mike Pell:

Like spare me that one, right? But the NFT to me is a digital packaging that has capabilities we’ve never had before, like transparency, persistence, like all those amazing things. To me, that file format, let’s call it, or that packaging is durable and it has a lot of really great benefits. Artists for the first time in history may have the opportunity to be paid. If you were a painter way back when, you sold a painting for whatever you would sell it for, you would never make a dime after that. Now at least we have the promise, whether you’re a music artist, videographer, a fine artist, doesn’t matter, you have the capability at least to benefit from your work being sold and used in the future. That’s great.

Mike Pell:

The technologies are very real. Whether they’re cryptocurrencies or like what we’re doing with blockchain, like those things we’re going to build on as core infrastructure technologies. I would say what is not real is that the notion that somehow Web3 is going to replace Web2 or what we call the the web or like mobile internet. It’s like that is not going to go away. Even when people talk about the metaverse, the metaverse has existed for 25 years. It’s just now, it’s actually faster. We have great bandwidth, there’s amazing capability. People are ready for it. But back in the mid ’90s, we were doing the same things we’re doing now with 3D, right? Communities, commerce, being able to go places that we never imagined.

Mike Pell:

It’s different in that and again, people confuse the metaverse with Web3 with other things. To me, Web3 is really the notion at its heart that we need to decentralize and we need to make things a bit more autonomous moving forward. At its very core, which is very different for me than the metaverse. The metaverse is an extension of the web. It is not a new thing. It’s literally like there’s one metaverse, there’s one web, there’s a gazillion experiences within the metaverse, like whatever.

Nick Abrahams:

AOL metaverse.

Mike Pell:

Yeah. I mean, there is only one, right But the key part, like you’re asking about what’s real, the metaverse is real. It’s here today and it’s inhabited by 14 year olds.

Nick Abrahams:

Right. Is that in the gaming area, you’re thinking, or?

Mike Pell:

Yeah, they are doing everything that everybody promises the metaverse to be, it’s already happening. Look at Roblox. Look at Minecraft, look at Fortnite. Same thing, building community, talking to your friends, exchanging goods, commerce, music, entertainment, it’s all happening in those places. Now, do we recognize those as the metaverse? No. Most people would never recognize that as the metaverse, but that’s what it is. That’s the dream, that’s the goal and it’s already here. As far as like what’s real, metaverse is here, Web3 technologies are here. What’s not here is this utopian panacea that people keep talking about with DAOs like we’re all going to … Nobody’s going to have a boss anymore and we’re all going to band together and make decisions.

Nick Abrahams:

And vote on everything.

Mike Pell:

Yeah. It’s like, that’s a bunch of nonsense. It’s a great vision. But it is so difficult to execute well. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen and I’m not saying it’s not a great idea, but that’s not a real mainstream part of at least business today. It’s working in the entertainment industry to a degree, it’s working in the art industry to a degree, but that’s not quite here yet.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. It is interesting. I think DAOs are very polarizing, I find, because the people who believe in them, it is a techno utopian ideal where we all we all work together and as you say, don’t have a boss and we all vote on things. But I think the reality is for anyone who’s ever been involved in a partnership, you can’t. Everyone can’t make a decision. There’s a reason why we’ve evolved into forms of management and leadership and structures within large organizations. If you want to achieve a complex outcome, there’ll need to be degrees of that. But as you say, I think the underlying technology, blockchain, is really remarkable in terms of how it’s changing things. I think maybe just to drop into the NFT thing for a moment because-

Mike Pell:

Let’s just talk about this thing. To me, blockchain is a database for God’s sakes, right? It’s a database that has a capability for you to have it be completely transparent and decentralized and like okay, that’s great. It’s a technology, it’s infrastructure. Is it like the savior of the world? No. It does open up a lot of possibilities for new business models, for new transparency in both business and art and commerce and community. That’s a great thing, but I don’t know. I see technologies as technologies. It’s what people choose to do with them that’s really the key.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. And I feel like with blockchain, so it’s been around for over a decade now with Bitcoin and so forth, and it has been bouncing around as a solution in search of a problem largely. And I feel like with NFTs, that’s been the first or one of the great entry points for blockchain into the enterprise, because now we’re actually seeing enterprises going, “How can we use NFT technology, like the digital asset concept?” And whether it’s tokenizing things or using NFTs more in a marketing sense as an extension of the loyalty program. I feel like that’s brought it into sharp focus in the enterprise. I mean, do you see an opportunity for NFTs within the enterprise or is it still at that marketing level where it’s, I guess a little bit, as you say, the getting into a restaurant with an NFT?

Mike Pell:

Yeah, right now as you and I talk today in August of 2022, it is clearly in the marketing realm, right? It’s not a part of mainstream business. I have seen very few business application of the NFT technology or packaging or wrapper, like whatever you want to call it. It’s not that it’s not valuable. It’s super interesting. It’s very very cool technology, but it’s not made its way into the mainstream of business or the enterprise. It is squarely remained in the marketing and the arts and the entertainment realm, which is great. People have made some money, it’s opened up new avenues for artists and creators of all sorts to try to market themselves in a new way and be able to maintain their intellectual property, retain their rights to things. That’s all great and I love the shift. I love that the music industry and the commercial art world is turning itself inside out right before our eyes. That’s fantastic. But is it today part of business? No.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. I think that’s right. I think we’re seeing some interesting work around the edges. One of the fellows who I interviewed for the podcast, they’re working on how we can wrap people’s health data in an NFT package. You can then control who has access to your data and so forth.

Mike Pell:

Okay. Let’s talk about this then. I love talking to the people who I see on a weekly basis in the garage about this. Until one of the major financial institutions makes using cryptocurrency and NFTs or anything else like that as easy as using a credit card, there’s nothing to talk about. Because the rest of us are left out. This isn’t the hands of like these black art shamans who like use the command line to move things around from place to place. We are far today, unfortunately we are far from this being an easy to use whatever for the rest of us.

Mike Pell:

It doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. And it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen quickly when it does, but that’s what we’re waiting for. We’re waiting for regulations in taxation, in all the laws that are going to come into place around cryptocurrency and fiat versus like what’s happening. We have to straighten this out so that we can get to the point where it is … It doesn’t matter whether you’re using cryptocurrency or a regular credit card or it just doesn’t matter. And we are very far from that.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. The journey is a little awkward right at the moment.

Mike Pell:

Awkward is being nice about it.

Nick Abrahams:

Terrifying, uncomfortable. I can remember when we spoke last time, you blew my mind about you talked about this concept of room scale data, and the idea that the way that we would see the world or see data, which has been limited to spreadsheets and that sort of format, that we would see it within a room. We would be able to touch and feel it. And I know you’ve got your new book coming out, Visualizing Business. Could you give us a sense? What’s happening in the new book? What’s the theme there?

Mike Pell:

Yeah. Thanks for asking about that. To build on what we had talked about, yes, room scale data really has to do with being able to experience your own information in a way that’s more impactful by using scale and adjacency and being able to really feel it in a very visceral way. I’ve done a lot of it work in this area. I’ve done a lot of experiments. There’s something quite different between looking at a charter graph on the screen, on your phone, projected onto a PowerPoint like screen somewhere and actually being in a space with your information. In a similar way for more than a century, we’ve always looked at business as static snapshots in time. Yet we know that business is chaotic and dynamic and always moving, and that never made sense to me.

Mike Pell:

Why do we always view our businesses, our enterprises, our organizations through this static snapshot and have to fill in all the rest with our imagination or piece together these things in our own mental models? Visualizing Business is a way for me to explain a new visual language for describing the dynamics and the chaotic nature and the ever moving reality of businesses. It’s very fun to be able to bring that to life because in a lot of ways, when we look at how our businesses work, we’re always forming these models in our heads, yet nobody else can see them. I’m providing a way that I believe is going to change global business, because it’s going to give us a new construct, a new entity that makes all of these things that are invisible just below the surface, completely visible to us, and in a way that we can manipulate them, play what if, rewind them, do projections in the future, but make them real and make them shareable.

Nick Abrahams:

When we think about that, what’s our access point to that? Is that augmented reality? Is it HoloLens? Is it VR goggles? How do you see us leaping forward into that?

Mike Pell:

Yeah, it’s all of the above. I mean, it’s everything we do now. I mean, a lesson I learned a long time ago is you can’t drag somebody kicking and screaming into the future, right? It’s like you have to give people a familiar base to start from. The premise of the book and all the work that I’ve been doing lately is we’re going to start from the familiar and we’re going to shift into something new and let you explore and let you come back to what you’re very familiar with and then go back as you need to.

Mike Pell:

This can be done through a normal phone, your laptop, an Xbox, it doesn’t matter. VR headsets, Apple Glasses, it doesn’t matter. The device is really irrelevant. The key part is that we’re making things more real in a way that we’ve only been able to imagine as our own mental models before. The key part is not the device that you view it in. Although I’ll tell you using the immersive technologies, the metaverse technologies, AR, VR, MR, those are more satisfying and they are a lot of fun to do it that way, but it’s not required.

Nick Abrahams:

Right, right. Interesting. I guess for organizations that are listening to this, what should they be thinking about? I mean, are there particular industries that should be looking at augmented reality as the next step? Is it financial services? Is it engineering? Is it mining? Where do you see the big opportunities in augmented reality?

Mike Pell:

Well, whether it’s augmented reality or whatever you want to call it, extended reality, metaverse, whatever label you’d like to apply to it all comes down to 3D, right? An immersion and spatial. For decades, we have been searching for the right killer app or the right use case for where 3D makes sense. The truth is there is not one that makes sense across the board. We know that training and education is a very clear win when you can see whether it’s a physics equation or like assembly line construction or figuring out how to put an Ikea table together, right?

Nick Abrahams:

Right.

Mike Pell:

Any of those things is infinitely better when it’s spatial, Because we’re spatial creatures. That’s how we learn when we’re very young. That’s a clear use case. Nobody can argue about that, but when you get away from that basic realm, there is not one or two clear winners as to why you would use augmented reality or virtual reality or mixed. It doesn’t matter, except in the cases where I talk a lot about the phrase surfacing the invisible. When we can make things clear or apparent, or for the first time visible when they are inherently invisible, that’s a win. For example, if you’re trying to describe a business model to someone, right? And you’re talking about how you’re going to use your channel partners to get this product or service out into the market and things are going to move, everybody’s imagining something in their head, but you’re not seeing it.

Mike Pell:

Being able to actually see that in front of you in a shared way is very valuable. When you look at examples where you have forces at work, so in the sciences, magnets, gravity. These are things that we all know to be true and we all imagine sort of how they work, yet none of us can see them in the same way. That’s a clear win, right? Being able to surface invisible, see the things that we know to be true, but can’t quite have a shared vision of exactly how they should be represented. That’s the area that we’re going to break open.

Nick Abrahams:

I was thinking as you were talking, you approach this in a … Well, in a visual way, obviously. You’re I guess who we would normally think of as a rareish breed in the sense that you are a creator, but also deep within a traditional business. What we’ve done in the past, we’ve identified, we’ve said, “Okay, there are the artists or the creatives,” and they might end up getting lucky and getting jobs in advertising or something like that. But generally speaking, “Oh, the creatives is a bit odd.”

Nick Abrahams:

And then we say, “Okay, but now here are serious people who are on business” and they look at spreadsheets and make important decisions. And those two worlds have rarely collided. Do you see a world now where actually, and I don’t believe that those people who are the serious business types, aren’t creative, I have a belief that we’ve all got that creative DNA. Do you think now there’s an opportunity for people to open up and I guess use both sides of their brain?

Mike Pell:

That’s what I’ve done my whole career. As we’ve talked about, I’ve been fortunate to be … I love business. I love sales and marketing. I’ve been an entrepreneur. I’ve worked in large corporations. I always get to be both creative and I would say more analytic, right? I’m a designer and an engineer. And I tell people, because I work with a lot of people. I coach and mentor people who are early in their careers or just coming out of school. And I always tell them the same thing. You don’t have to be one thing.

Mike Pell:

So many students are coming out of school with so many different talents. They’re just brilliant at many different things. I do think we’re coming into an era where instead of being afraid of someone who has too many skills and as a corporation wanting to put them in a box and say like, “No, you’re going to do this one thing really well and don’t color outside the lines. Don’t try to get out of your box.” We actually have to embrace the fact that they were built to be many different things and we have to figure out how to best utilize their skills and talent. Yes, we are entering that time in history where being creative and analytic, being an engineer and an artist is such an advantage that we can’t ignore that.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. I mean, that’d be a struggle for many organizations, I think, because the traditional even line of sight management and so forth, people are deeply skeptical of those who color outside the lines. Although I did see something just announced a couple of days ago which did warm my heart where ESPN announced that they are live broadcasting the Microsoft Excel World Championships. They’ve got 10 financial modelers who are going head to head for a World Championship of Excel and it’ll be live broadcast. It’s an interesting new world we’ve got.

Mike Pell:

That’s fantastic. That puts eSports to shame right there.

Nick Abrahams:

Exactly. I mean, for those of us that love a good pivot table, that’s exactly what we want to be watching. Look, you’ve been very generous-

Mike Pell:

Wow, I can’t wait to figure that … I would watch that. Is it going to be boring or exciting? Are they’re going to be like throwing their coffee cups? I don’t know.

Nick Abrahams:

Maybe it’s like WWF. I mean, the people that they had who seemed to be the top 10, they didn’t seem like they weren’t wearing masks or wrestling suits, but I think that’s next level. I think we need to start having the characters coming.

Mike Pell:

Oh, well you know they’re going to come to play. They’re going to be wearing their power ties and they’re going to be ready.

Nick Abrahams:

The power ties. The pocket protector. Maybe just to finish off, I guess you’re a naturally enthusiastic person and very much a glass is half full. But if we look into the future and a lot of people are like, “Oh my gosh, we’re all going to lose our jobs and the machines are coming” and so forth, but what do you see the next five to 10 years looking like? What excites you, I guess, about the future?

Mike Pell:

Well, the machines are coming and we’re all going to lose our jobs.

Nick Abrahams:

Okay. We might have to edit that out, Mike. That’s not where I thought you would go. Okay, so what happens once we lose our jobs?

Mike Pell:

Okay. But seriously, Nick, the machines are coming. Many people are going to be displaced, right? Especially, so Microsoft has been very transparent about our read on the future. Artificial intelligence and a lot of the related technologies will displace a lot of people. There are many industries that will find that we can do things more efficiently through technology. Doesn’t mean that people are not needed. It just means that we have to find new ways to utilize them and new ways to apply what’s great about humanity, which is our humanity. I think that many of the things, including yourself as an attorney, there’s a lot of AI and machine learning that could maybe do parts of what you do to free you up, to do more of the interesting part of your job, right?

Mike Pell:

Which is figuring out interesting strategies. Well, what about look at the humanity part of things? What do I see for the future? Technology and robotics and everything else that comes with it is going to accelerate, right? If anybody who’s ever read Ray Kurzweil well and has studied his, I would say success in being able to define and predict what’s happening, we know that the technology acceleration curve is going to continue, right? And it’s going to get faster and faster and we will have to figure out for ourselves what is the important part of what we do and what can we leave to AI teammates and AI assistants and digital entities that can maybe take some of the the manual parts of what we do and automate that’s already happening?

Mike Pell:

For example, as a designer, if I go into the Adobe Creative Suite, in the past I would have to do some operations that would take me some cases, hours. They were like painstaking. Now, I click on one tool. I click on the screen, it’s done immediately. It’s actually quite a good result. Are machines and technology taking my job away? No, but they’re redefining my role. They’re redefining the role of technology as a helper and assistant. Can it go horribly wrong? Of course, like we’ve all seen the movies, we know that this doesn’t end well, but in the meantime, in the meantime I am super optimistic that we are coming into an amazingly exciting and energizing part of humanity where we actually do figure out that we can be so much better than we have been in the past.

Nick Abrahams:

It’s a fantastic note to end on. Mike Pell, you are many things. You’re an envisioneer, you are director of Microsoft Garage. You’re a prolific author, you’re an artist, but I think probably it comes up, you’re just a great human being. I think you’ve got a sense of humanity and what it means to be human and it’s just lovely to see someone like you with such an important role who is thinking about what is the role of the human as augmented, I guess, by the amazing technologies that are coming. Thank you once again for joining us, and people-

Mike Pell:

Thank you.

Nick Abrahams:

… should look out for Mike’s book, Visualizing Business. Thanks very much, Mike.

Mike Pell:

It’s so great to talk to you, Nick. Really appreciate it and I’ll see you soon.

Nick Abrahams:

Look forward to it. Thank you.

Mike Pell:

Take care.