A panel of Microsoft executives touted the company's achievements in the area of security, but said that consumers should expect a long wait and may need to change their own behavior before the goal of "trustworthy computing," as laid out by Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, is realized. The informal panel discussion was held at a hotel near the Las Vegas Convention Center where the Comdex industry trade show is under way and featured a number of senior Microsoft executives including Craig Mundie, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Microsoft's advanced strategies and policy.
Speaking about Microsoft's ongoing "Palladium" effort to build hardware and software-based security features into the Windows operating system, Peter Biddie, Palladium product manager, said that the project represented an effort by Microsoft to redesign its operating system from the ground up, with security as an essential component.
The final beta of Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET 2003 is available, and the development toolset, formerly code-named "Everett," will ship in April along with Windows .NET Server 2003. Visual Studio .NET 2003 is an incremental release. The primary benefits of Visual Studio .NET 2003 will be a 1.1 version of the .NET Framework, the gathering of mobility-related development technologies that have trickled out since the Visual Studio .NET 2002 release and tight integration with Windows .NET Server 2003, which also will include the updated .NET Framework. In the Visual Studio .NET 2002/Windows 2000 generation, the .NET Framework has to be loaded separately onto the operating system.
Hewlett-Packard Co. is running Windows .NET Server 2003 64-bit Datacenter Edition on a massive Superdome server with 64 processors and 512 GB of RAM, HP and Microsoft announced on Monday. The HP server is one of a growing number of choices for customers considering highly scaleable Windows-based alternatives to large RISC/Unix machines. For HP, the announcement delivers on a promise to make its massive Itanium systems available for Windows customers in the Windows .NET Server 2003 timeframe.
HP is leveraging its early lead as a co-developer with Intel of Itanium technologies to drop the largest system yet into the Windows market. In fact, Microsoft on Monday disclosed new scalability limits for Windows .NET Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, that match the capabilities of the HP Superdome server (64 processors and 512 GB of RAM). The Superdome capabilities represent the top-end of HP's move to open its entire Itanium-based product line to 64-bit Windows.
Microsoft has for the third time delayed the launch of its Windows .Net Server 2003 high-end operating system. During his Comdex keynote address on Sunday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates revealed that the company would launch Windows .Net Server 2003 in April, marking the third delay for the server counterpart to the company's Windows XP operating system.
In one sense, the delay makes sense. Analysts expect .Net Server to take off slowly because so many businesses either recently moved to Windows 2000 or are in the process of doing so. For its part, Microsoft believes there is pent-up demand among the 15 percent or so of Windows Server operating system customers still running the older Windows NT version. "There's not a major demand right now for the high-end Windows, so in that sense this delay isn't that big a deal," said Technology Business Research analyst Bob Sutherland. "If they had a lot more customers waiting for it, it would be a much bigger deal.
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Although tablet PCs represent just a sliver of the PC market today, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer says the new category could eventually account for one-third of all computers--by supplanting the laptop. Ballmer told CNET News.com that over the next three to four years, the cost difference between building a tablet PC and a traditional notebook will evaporate, making the addition of tablet-related abilities into all portables a natural. "There will be a zero cost (difference) for tablet," Ballmer said Sunday at a Microsoft party at the swank Aureole restaurant in the Mandalay Bay Casino here. The party took place just as Comdex Fall 2002 was kicking into gear.
As has become standard in recent years, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates used his Comdex keynote address to offer a rebuttal to the notion that the tech industry's best days are over. Gates kicked off his speech at Comdex Fall 2002 here by talking about the coming age in which all manner of human activities will become digitized, from note taking to bill paying.
"It's not just sitting in front of that desktop PC," said Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect, in a speech at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. "That's very important, but that's just a piece of what we are trying to do. The magic of software is spreading out to all different devices--and those devices are connecting in different ways."
Today, Microsoft announced that four new PC maker partners will sell Media Center PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). Gateway, Alienware, Cyberpower and ABS are all unveiling new Media Center PC designs this week at the Fall COMDEX 2002 tradeshow, all of which will be made available immediately or within days. Coming just weeks after the launch of XP MCE, this announcement comes as somewhat of a surprise: Microsoft had previously said that it was working with other partners on Media Center PCs, but I hadn't expected this many new partners so quickly. And perhaps even more exciting is news that many of the new Media Center PCs will ship in innovative form factors and a wide range of price points, making the products accessible to more users.
Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates kicked off Comdex 2002 Sunday night here with a Dickensian look back at the year that was.
And while 2002, as Gates said, "had its share of ups and downs," there were many positives to take away. Running through a short list, Gates highlighted advances in wireless technology, namely Wi-Fi; advances in the price/performance ratio; readability in LCDs; progress in digital camera technology; and low-cost storage.
Gates also praised the industry for its collective work around Web services, efforts he said that are key to driving things like e-commerce far forward. "A year ago there was no industry organization around Web services," Gates said. Today, he added, with the creation of the Web Service Interoperability Group, protocols are being developed that "are some of the best. We need Web services to enable e-commerce. Internet connectivity is not enough."
Microsoft's .NET application model arrives on skeptical it managers' desks in the form of the company's Project Server 2002. Redesigning its category-defining Project application around an XML messaging model, the company has turned its stand-alone personal productivity tool into a data repository and analysis engine for diverse Web services clients.
In Project Server 2002, released in the summer, Microsoft is confronting the problem of project management tools being perceived by all but full-time project managers as redundant wastes of time. By centralizing project data stores and enabling XML-based communication among distributed planning systems, Project Server 2002 holds out the prospect of being able to comprehensively account for and balance the demands on key people across multiple projects. The application can even identify the training and other peripheral tasks that will be needed by project participants and incorporate them automatically into project management scenarios.