Microsoft's grand vision for the digital home puts the Windows Media Center PC at the hub. The challenge is proving to broadcasters that Windows can lock down the content once it's on the hard drive.
Today, broadcast content comes into the home through consumer electronics devices that are closed boxes, Jan Hofmeyr, Windows TV group product manager, told Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.
The company's goal is to sell more software by letting consumers move content to multiple devices around the home, including PCs, laptops and tablets, in different rooms of the house, high-definition digital television sets, premium television receivers and stationary and portable music/video players.
For some insight into how Microsoft plans to drive upgrades of its nearly ubiquitous Office desktop application suite, talk to Jean Paoli.
While he doesn't work in Microsoft's Information Worker group, which oversees Office, Paoli does influence the development of the product. He's a co-creator of the XML data formatting standard, and as the senior director of XML architecture at Microsoft, he's involved with a wide range of products, including the development of Office 12 and the upcoming Longhorn edition of Windows.
Microsoft plans to introduce the next version of its Windows Mobile software, code-named Magneto, with new productivity and multimedia features.
Industry speculation is that Microsoft has been fashioning the software as a "RIM-killer," a reference to Research In Motion, the Canadian company that dominates the corporate hand-held computing market with its BlackBerry.
That claim elicits a polite demurral from Zhang, a one-time math prodigy who entered college in China at 12 and graduated first in his class before coming to the United States to earn his doctorate.
One element of Microsoft's next OS will be Metro, a new document file-format that will support printing the fancy graphics effects in the client interface.
Metro is the code name for a new XML-based document technology framework, to appear in Longhorn, Microsoft's next generation of Windows. Metro is an open-format page description language that allows users to share, print, view and archive the layout versions of documents. It's designed to improve print fidelity while reducing file size to make printing more efficient.
SAP AG and Microsoft plan to deliver a jointly developed product later this year that links SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and Microsoft's Office products, the companies announced Tuesday.
The product, code-named Mendocino, is the first joint product from SAP and Microsoft and will be demonstrated at SAP's Sapphire customer event this week in Copenhagen.
"We're joining forces to bridge a gap with our first joint product, which we will develop, support and market together," said SAP Chief Executive Officer Henning Kagermann, in a keynote speech Tuesday at the start of Sapphire.
Microsoft yesterday assured computer hardware makers that the next version of Windows is on track for release by the 2006 holiday season, despite past delays.Apart from the Longhorn preview, Gates yesterday showed new hardware products and prototypes that expand the concept of the Tablet PC. He also announced the availability of long-awaited editions of Windows for advanced, 64-bit microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
But nearly half his 90-minute presentation was dedicated to Longhorn and related technologies. Windows remains Microsoft's most profitable product, and the company wants to rally hardware companies to make machines that take full advantage of the next version.
While this year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here this year will be heavily focused on 64-bit processing, it also will serve as a showcase for new kinds of smaller, portable laptop and Tablet PC devices.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who is slated to deliver the Monday morning kick-off keynote address for the show - which is expected to be attended by 2,800-plus hardware and software developers - will show off three new "inherently mobile and connected" small form-factor devices, company officials said.
Will Poole did the math for OEMs: Lowering the corporate refresh rate on PCs by two percent could add $1.7 billion to the PC market in 2007 alone.
Poole, a senior vice president at Microsoft, told hardware manufacturers at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that the rather ugly 4 percent growth expected in the desktop PC market could be offset by increases in sales of laptops and media-oriented devices.
While the average sale price of PCs also is declining, Poole said, both the unit sales and average sale price for digital televisions is on a strong upward trend. One key to increasing sales, Poole said, is therefore getting consumers to connect Media Center PCs to all those HDTVs.
The creator of the C++ programming language claims there has been a backlash against some of the newer programming languages such as Java and C#, with developers moving back to using C++.
Bjarne Stroustrup, who currently works as a professor at Texas A&M University and is creator of the C++ programming language, said Wednesday in an interview here at the ACCU Conference it is a misperception that C++ is being overtaken by newer languages such as Java and C#.
Microsoft finally told Web developers what they've wanted to hear for years, promising support for graphics and style sheet standards. In a blog entry posted Friday, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer development team said the company plans to support key elements of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations Portable Network Graphics (PNG), an image format, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), a Web page styling standard.