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Nov 12,2006 - Nov 19,2006 |
It's just another Matrix war
Microsoft's Bill Gates aims to standardize its development environments
By Alessandro Cancian
Originally Published: 2003-11-30
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.
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