A tale of two houses, or, 'It looks like you're baking a casserole...'

REDMOND, WASH. - As seen by Microsoft, the good news is that the future includes music from Frank Sinatra, the book "Goodnight Moon," grandmothers' visits, koi, comfortable couches -- a 360-degree vision of middle-class America at home.

The bad news is that Clippy will be there, and will also have 360-degree vision.

Yogi Berra said that "the future ain't what it used to be," and that's fine. Widespread pet cloning would just lead to an increase in cat ladies, and personal hovercrafts would have been a bear to insure. But what do you do with a future you don't want?

Microsoft thinks a great deal about the future. There's Microsoft Research, the division that's charged with doing long-term computer science research and finding interesting academics with whom their people can collaborate. They don't build products, in fact, there's a "technology transfer" team summoned when it's time to turn a research project into something more concrete.

The next step toward concrete existence involves, in part, concrete. Microsoft's Strategic Prototyping team, for instance, takes the thinking of the Research crew and asks, "Why would anyone care?"

To explore some of the reasons they might, they've built the Microsoft Home, contained in the Executive Briefing Center on the Redmond campus (and thus, I suppose, technically a Microsoft Condo or Microsoft Co-Op). In it, Microsoft showcases some of the technologies it believes will be ordinary fare around your house in five to ten years. They're been doing this since 1994 and, according to Consumer Prototyping and Strategy Team director Jonathan Cluts, their batting average is pretty solid.

But yes, it includes a descendant of Clippy, the character that made "It looks like you're writing a letter" into a household phrase. The current name for Microsoft's home tech "assistant" is "Grace," named for the brilliant computer scientist who first dubbed the faults computer glitches "bugs." Now, Adm. Hopper's namesake in cahoots with technology that makes privacy advocates pale with disgust.

Clippy, meet RFID. Millions of RFID chips, meet every single object in the Microsoft House.

There are striking visions of the future in the Microsoft House, including the mobile of tiny hot-air balloons that lit up as family members exchanged messages with each other and far-flung relatives (yes, the future has wireless ambient data), the movie and music recommendation services that actually made thoughtful concierge-style recommendations, the banks of LED lights that did a creditable, non-compact-fluorescent-style job of lighting the rooms.

But the desirable stuff was swamped by the absolute ubiquity of RFID chips -- enough chips to track every object and map it to a database to "assist" every facet of your day.

RFID chips were in the phone that, if you ever want to get into your house again, you'd better not misplace or forget to charge. In the cheap tourist knickknacks, which trigger changes of images in the digital photo frames. In the stuffed animals, which know if your kids haven't put them into the designated toybox. In the bulletin board, which can read and act on a piece of snail mail pinned to it. In the blender and the bag of flour, which when placed on the counter caused ClippyGrace to ask if we needed recipes or help.

I lost count of the number of chips I saw in action, and I couldn't even hazard a guess as to how many others would have to be embedded in The Future to get it to do what Microsoft says it will do. The curators of the house spoke enthusiastically of Wal-Mart's efforts to have every product in their stores chipped, and of various companies' work to develop RFID circuits printed with magnetic inks -- no actual chip required, and none that can be removed if one day you hold up your favorite shirt in front of the mirror, the mirror suggests that you wear it with your black jeans since the grey pants are at the dry cleaners, and suddenly you realize that you have lost the ability to dress yourself without Clippy's help.

That may be leftover paranoia from my IT-security days, but Microsoft House didn't just make me feel paranoid. It made me feel unimportant to the ecosystem of The House. The House does a great deal of basic thinking for you, and those who suspect that our brains work a little bit differently now that we've always got Google and IMDB and Wikipedia to hold our data will sense that a house that thinks for you just might make you think less on your own.

The house of the future is about structure, consumption, and immersion in very controlled environments. But humans aren't like that. We do random, time-wasting things. We like to create, not just to consume. Dear heavens, sometimes our cell phone batteries run down. And something tells me that if any of that happened in The House, ChippyGrace and her RFID-chip myrmidons would shrug, in a computerized sort of way, and resolve to work around the weak link in the system: me.

I don't want to be permanently tangled in a matrix of chips and bickering with Chippy.

But not only does Microsoft not dictate the future, they don't always guess what we want from it very well either. Our little journalism tour group saw a second house on Wednesday, one designed by a senior Microsoft executive who not only had potentially fabulous resources at his disposal but who very clearly enjoyed the heck out of envisioning and planning his home.

On Thursday morning, I wrote about how impressive this exec's home was, but if you were absolutely non-tech you'd still be perfectly functional in it, and might be too busy admiring its rather classic lines to worry too much about where the gears might be lurking.

Near the end of our tour, we asked the exec what aspects of the Microsoft Home he'd incorporate into his own. Maybe some of the RFID-chip functionality would be useful in the gym for remote personal-training, he said, and made a few other suggestions. But with all the choice in the world -- and perhaps even a bit more foresight than most of the rest of us -- the exec chose a very different way to live in the home he designed for his own future.

I like the way he thinks, even if Clippy might not approve.