By Jo Maitland at Comdex
Microsoft Corp chairman and CEO Bill Gates put the company’s forthcoming Windows 2000 operating system at the center of his opening keynote at the 20th anniversary of Comdex in Las Vegas, yesterday. Making light of the company’s infamous antitrust battle with the US government, Gates walked into an auditorium of over five thousand industry representatives, media and analysts and said: Anybody here heard any good lawyer jokes recently?
Windows 2000 is important to us, it’s comparable to Windows 95. For the business user Windows 2000 will be the same leap, Gates said of the delayed OS, which is due on February 17. Desperate to persuade the industry that Windows 2000 is scalable and robust enough to handle high-end data center applications, Gates attacked the Big Box Business – presumably a slight at IBM Corp – for taking away mobility choices, being too costly and having a single point of failure. He said the PC model with its high volumes; breadth of software and low barriers to entry will be the model of the future. The challenge has been scale and how to stop the big box world, he said. The problem of scale is a software problem he added, and this has been solved with easy modular expansion, no single point of failure and powerful management.
XML is the backbone of his company’s vision for the next wave of the internet, which Gates called the Personal Web. He said it was dependent on XML becoming the ubiquitous language for web sites to compare and exchange information, overtaking HTML as the language of choice. This will mean users no longer have to enter their contact details every time they visit a different web site they want to register with. And this capability will be available across a whole spectrum of computing devices including PCs, TVs, cell phones and PDAs. Each device will not have to learn ways to replicate this information, Gates said. Users will access information from any device, any time and anywhere – the web is becoming more and more personal. In a few short years we’ve watched computing become personal computing, and we will now see the World Wide Web become the Personal Web, he said.
However, its was not Windows 2000 or the web visions that drew the only applause heard from crowd during Gates’ speech, but the Microsoft Applications Center, a network management product not due until sometime next year. This software is intended to stop IT managers having to manage individual components on single servers and allow the automatic translation of existing information and properties when new web server is added to a network, rather than today’s complex and time consuming manual process of converting data.
Gates also touched on Digital Dashboard, another product still a fair way down the pipe. The Dashboard – Microsoft’s concept of a collaborative desktop user interface – includes a set of tools that can grab XML text and graphics from a web site and insert them into MS Office applications. Gates added: We recently announced our Office on-line which offers Office 2000 as a service over the net. The key advantage of this is that customers can get the most up to date software without having to do a single thing.
