Microsoft Corp has laid out its concept of the future of computing, while keeping a weather on the antitrust trial in its final days in Washington. Executive vice president and chief operating officer Bob Herbold told the audience at his PCExpo keynote speech in New York yesterday that the PC Plus era was upon them, that simple, application-specific devices would replace PCs for many consumer and business uses. This would naturally mean the end of Microsoft’s monopoly in desktop operating systems, but Herbold said that incredible fragmentation…just means that the market’s maturing.
In the future, Herbold said that computing devices would be very simple, tuned to a specific set of applications, with flat panel displays, wireless networking and high-speed internet connections. The dream, Herbold said, is creating a variety of tools that anybody should be able to use. The PC won’t die, Herbold told his audience, but rather PCs will continue to exist for high-end uses. However, personal information is the way forward.
And what operating system will herald the new era of computing? Windows CE, according to Herbold. He said that Microsoft’s small footprint operating OS was everywhere. The second half of Herbold’s speech was basically a hymn to Windows CE. He highlighted its use in embedded systems, saying that, some amazing things are happening in gas pumps and spoke of a fast food ordering system that used CE. Herbold also demonstrated a variety of handheld devices based on CE from Casio, IBM and Compaq. However, a walk around the booths of PCExpo showed surprisingly little work being done with CE. There were no new CE-based devices announced, in contrast to Psion Plc’s Java devices. And Palm Computing assembled a vast array of developers behind its various Palm devices.
