Gates to unveil user-friendly PC
SeattlePI | at | by Mike
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hopes to wow a technical conference today by showing off a prototype of a new personal computer, but he won't spend much time detailing its processor speed, memory or other hardware and software minutiae.
Instead, he'll point out simple features like how the PC stops playing music when an attached telephone is picked up or how lights built into the monitor frame alert users to an urgent e-mail or voice mail even with the display dark.
The demonstration will focus on usability and user-friendliness -- something that has often escaped the computer industry as hardware companies build machines and separate programmers come up with the software to run them.