Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft - Future Visions

I was not very impressed with the stories here, some of which came from authors I have enjoyed in the past. But, it was free (I think), so I can't complain about the price, even though at the end I could have invested the time better.

A solid anthology, though the handling of technology in some of these stories felt cumbersome at times and detracted from what makes stories truly interesting and readable: the human emotional factor. The stories where the implications of technology on human factors took my breath away were the ones by Greg Bear, and Nancy Kress (Nancy's especially), and the stories by Elizabeth Bear and Jack McDevitt were by far the most readable.
Read this mainly for a look at the technology of the future, and look for glimpses at the human implications. It will definitely make you think.

Great collection of sci-fi stories. Crazy to think that it came out of an event where Microsoft invited sci-fi writers to their research department.

Best of all it's free! And will hopefully inspire future technology growth :)

Clearly technology inspired, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but some authors went a bit overboard with it, to the detriment of good story-telling.
MY favourite was 'Hello, Hello', by Seanan McGuire. Worth the read, just for that one story.

Confession: Usually, I am sort of a Microsoft fan.

A couple of these short stories are well written and entertaining.

The bulk of the material is the kind of uninspired, amateurish effort that has earned Microsoft a less than stellar reputation.

YMMV

This was a bit like Iron Chef,where the arbitrary ingredient was "natural language processing". It's impressive to see these authors wrangle up something decent out of that on short notice, but it's a gimmick and not their best work.

An anthology of science fiction stories written with contemporary technology in mind. What is possible now, what will be tomorrow, and what the future may hold if we use what we have created now as a beginning.