The problem is, we’re usually very wide of the mark. Just look at some of the science fiction books and movies from twenty years ago, and see what the people of the time thought 2011 would be like.

If anything, the future has turned out to be a complete let down. Where are our flying cars, and where are our meals that come in pellet form? When predicting the future, we’re not quite good at it, we suck, to put it in simple words.

Which is why it’s particularly intriguing to see a rather fancy-looking video come out of Microsoft. Surely this has been put together by their Windows team, or perhaps their Windows Phone team, you presume. Well, you’d presume wrong because the team behind this video are the creative visionaries (does sarcasm come across well in text?) in, wait for it, the Office team!

The whole video shows what Microsoft thinks will be a whole new level of connectivity, with all our personal devices talking to each other, and linking seamlessly, or more importantly, wirelessly, with each other.

The six minute video is certainly worth your time to watch, assuming you can stand the music, but we wouldn’t be expecting anything shown to be appearing in your local Best Buy any time soon.

The news comes from Engadget – a blog dedicated to covering consumer electronics – in a post where they talk about the leaked video. The video comes from user ivazques71 over on YouTube who goes through nearly all of the next Xbox Dashboard’s menus to show us how it is shaping for release later this year.

The New Xbox Experience was announced in June at Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference. This year’s upgrade is based on Metro: a simple, clean and modern design language developed by Microsoft which is currently used in Windows Phone 7 and is slowly being introduced to other major products from Redmond like Windows 8, Xbox 360 and the company’s suite of services under the Windows Live brand.

From Engadget:

… the budding update can now be seen in a slightly blurry piece of French cinema. This leaked video shows a Dashboard with a smidge more polish than the demo we saw in September, and silently plods on without so much as a bleep or bloop. Our mute host briefly peeks at the Xbox Live Marketplace, casually glances at the Bing search page and scrolls leisurely through the new Dash’s very Metro menu.

The video gives a sneak peak into the upcoming Xbox Experience. The Dashboard shown in the video is in French language but one can still easily figure out what is what in the video. The person recording the video goes through Marketplace, Bing search and basically just about every menu offered by the new experience. It all looks very much Metro to us and it is something which Xbox 360 owners should be looking forward when the dashboard becomes available later this year.

There hasn’t been any official announcement regarding the availability of the new Xbox Experience, but according to the video itself, it is rumored to be released on November 15th. We think it just might actually roll out earlier than mid-November, as Microsoft did, after all, release last year’s Dashboard update in early October last year.

If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on Windows 8, now is your chance: Microsoft is making the same developer preview it handed out to developers at BUILD today available to users around the world, free of charge and without requiring a registration. This is a departure from what Microsoft has done with previous versions of Windows, where developer previews were only available to a narrow range of users, and only the next milestone, the first Beta, would be available publicly, and always with a registration. With this move, Microsoft is clearly trying to get more users in the game as early on in the development process as possible.

As promised, three versions of the Developer Preview are being made available today: a 64-bit version with all the developer tools built-in, along with sample Metro apps to get developers started; a 64-bit version only with the sample apps and without the tools; and a similar 32-bit version without any developer tools. All of these three versions should operate in a similar fashion, so unless you’re aiming to develop Windows 8 apps, you’ll probably be fine with either one of these.

Keep in mind that no in-place upgrades are possible using the Developer Preview, only clean installs are supported, which is understandable given the system’s early development state. If your machine currently works with Windows 7, chances are it will work with Windows 8, since the requirements are the same: 1GHz Processor, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB of free hard drive space and a DirectX 9 graphics card with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver. You’ll also need multi-touch capable hardware in order to try Windows 8′s multi-touch support, of course.

The next version of Windows, currently known as Windows 8, was showcased in depth by Microsoft’s own Steven Sinofsky and other members of his team. Teased as a system that would “change everything”, Windows 8 indeed includes new usage paradigms that are unheard of on the Windows platform, such a full-screen tile-based user interface and an app store, among others. Microsoft has pledged to keep the Developer Preview fresh by issuing periodic updates.

Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) with Developer Tools
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) without the developer tools
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (32-bit)