Microsoft has been touting their technology vision of three-screens and the cloud for about a year now (much longer if you don’t include the formal name). For those not familiar with the concept it is essentially a vision that embraces the union of technologies across the PC, mobile, and TV. The common connector in this vision is usually the cloud.

Over the last several months the bits and pieces that Microsoft has shown of this vision have been fragmented and lacked a sense of completion. However, with the recent announcement of the Windows Phone 7 things are starting to come together; at least on the consumer side of things.

This week the GDC (Game Developers Conference) is taking place and Microsoft is showing off the gaming portion of their vision with announcing XNA Game Studio 4. One of the demos that they recently presented showed a game that worked seamlessly across the PC, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone. Even more impressive than simply having a game that can be ported across these platforms is that the game was able to push it’s save state to the Cloud. This allows the end user to pick up where they left off across all of their devices.

This is certainly cool and is exactly the type of thing that gets my imagination going. I innately have a curiosity for all things dealing with technology. And, when I see something like this my mind immediately starts racing with different scenarios of how this can be used.

With that in mind, I had originally intended to take this post and talk about how this technology vision could be applied to business intelligence; more specifically, how Microsoft intends for it to apply to their product lines. But, after some additional thinking I decided that I wanted to take another direction. Instead, I’d talk at a more abstract level. I’d like to bring up some ideas on how to expand this vision and perhaps redefine it a bit. The idea behind this is to allow your curiosity and imagination to run wild as opposed to having me just dictating to you. To me this is a far more powerful prospect.

With this change in direction the amount of content has grown larger than what I’d consider appropriate for a single blog post. So, I am going to break this up into a small series. It is my hope that you will find this not only interesting but that it will prompt you to imagine and, perhaps, help create the future!