It's just another Matrix war

Microsoft's Bill Gates aims to standardize its development environments

Twenty years may have passed since a young Bill Gates first addressed the audience at Las Vegas' Comdex, but if it hadn't been for the video clip, shown when Gates was wrapping up his keynote speech, we'd hardly remembered his appearance on stage.
Reliability, ease of use, and consistency of the user interface were mentioned in the speech as the challenges of the coming digital decade. These words sound quite repetitive, offering almost nothing original.
The new buzzword from Microsoft's boss is 'seamless computing', a vision posing software at the core of a great integrated platform able to elevate itself above the complexity and diversity of hardware, and offering a 'seamless' link among different applications and different devices. The fact that someone else already called this 'Java' seems irrelevant.
Anyway, this is the vision from Redmond, which already generated some early results with integrated suites such as Office System and Windows Server System. It also pushed the extension of Windows technology towards all the main sectors of computing: from servers to desktop PCs, from notebooks to PDAs, from cell phones to multimedia players, from game consoles to industrial controls. Like Java.
Microsoft currently aims to standardizing development environments, basic interfaces, programme behaviour, file formats and applications running on each smart device. This strategy was also underscored by the recent rebranding of its Operation System for the mobile segment to 'Windows Mobile', a decision with the only purpose of highlighting the 'common root' of all products, i.e. Windows.
The devices running the Windows OS include also the Tablet PCs, not a smashing success to date. However, despite the rather unimpressive sales of Tablet PCs, Microsoft hopes that the future Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2004, codenamed Lonestar, will expand the user base, thanks also to lower hardware prices.
Lonestar will be released in mid-2004 as a free software update, and it should sport improved handwriting recognition - a technology that Microsoft is refining in order to simplify support for third-party applications - and input panel.
The current hot topics could not but include the war on spam, the veritable scourge of adults and minors alike.
In order to contain the onslaught of unwanted email, the software giant proposes a technology it calls SmartScreen, a combination of 'intelligent' filters that can learn what is spam and what is not: this technology is already packaged in Outlook 2003, MSN, and Hotmail, but Microsoft intends to integrate it in the near future in many more programs and platforms, including Exchange Server.
Gates remarked that the main problem with spam is of an economic nature: cutting it upstream, he said, is very difficult, because spam is profitable, and those who generate it won't simply give it up. "For spammers," he insisted, "the game is worth the candle even if only one addressee out of every 10,000 replies." Technology and rules, he explained, must work concurrently for the devastation to be stemmed. At last, one thing we can agree with.
Closing the lecture, Microsoft screened a parody of The Matrix: the main actors, Gates and his right-hand man Steve Ballmer, starred as Morpheus and Neo respectively.
In the Microsoft version, the 'Matrix' was populated with IBM consultants selling Linux, while the 'real' world was Windows, an entity that - in the words of Gates in the parody - "gives liberty to the people of IT".
Don't look now, or this movie could turn out to be a real fake...

Publication Date: 2003-11-30
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3401