After spending months in Europe in antitrust negotiations that ultimately proved unsuccessful, the last thing Brad Smith might want to do is give a speech about opportunities on that continent.
But Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, took on the challenge yesterday, gamely recounting his company's adventures there at a breakfast sponsored by the Seattle-based Council of European Chambers of Commerce.
Microsoft opened offices in Europe early in the company's history, although at the time software piracy was rampant in many countries there, he said. The company worked with governments to pass anti-piracy laws, and it expanded as the software industry grew on the continent.
Various Microsoft representatives verified this week that "XP Reloaded" will be a marketing campaign aimed at rejuvenating consumer excitement in Windows XP, a product that has evolved dramatically since its initial release in October 2001. Set to run from October to December 2004, XP Reloaded will focus on new XP versions such as Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, as well as various product updates that will ship in late summer/early fall, including XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and the next major version of Windows Media Center, and add-on products like Portable Media Centers and Media Center Extenders. What's changed is that Microsoft originally planned to have separate marketing campaigns for XP SP2 and XP Reloaded; now SP2 will be marketed as part of the XP Reloaded campaign.
Say what you will about the Tablet PC, but Microsoft isn't giving up, and upcoming versions of this often-misunderstood technology will meld with other mobile computing devices and, ultimately, become a mainstream product. That's the new plan at Microsoft, anyway: Once seen as a laptop alternative, Tablet PCs will soon give way to a range of mobile PCs that meet all customers needs, a sharp departure from the niche products PC makers released until recently.
Not content with telling hardware manufacturers what they must do, now Microsoft is informing disk makers that they have to make read and write speeds faster. It even tells them how to do it -- add flash memory cache.
The problem is processors wait for disk data reading/writing to end before embarking on their next task. The main delay is waiting for the disk head to be moved to the right part of the disk. By trying to anticipate which data is going to be needed next and pre-fetching that into cache memory in the drive unit the disk wait can be radically reduced.
Microprocessors use the same technique to pre-fetch instructions likely to be needed next; it makes them run applications faster.
At this year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft released another sneak peek at its next generation operating system, code-named Longhorn. PC Magazine, along with the rest of the WinHEC attendees, received a DVD with the 4072 build. This preview is based on that build.
The slick, 3D-accelerated features come at a cost, too. Even on our testbed, a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 running a high-end ATI Radeon 9800XT graphics card, the Avalon DWM seemed just a tad sluggish. Additional cool features, like the compositing manager, weren't available yet.
Microsoft gave a behind-the-scenes peek Wednesday at technologies the software company is looking to include in future versions of Windows designed for mobile PCs. Fish hinted, however, that the capabilities of the tablet and notebook PC would converge, however. In 2004 and 2005, for example, so-called "pen and ink" (also called "electronic ink") technologies would become prevalent in both notebook and tablet PCs.
"Do they buy a Tablet PC or this other notebook PC?" Fish asked. "You don't make that tradeoff. You buy this great notebook PC with pen and ink," using it as a notebook PC with a keyboard where appropriate, then swiveling the display and writing on it with a stylus in other situations, he said. The Acer C100 family, for example, can be used as a "convertible" Tablet PC.
Microsoft is working on a plan to include worm removal tools in a new feature called Microsoft Update that's on schedule for release by this year's end. With the proliferation of destructive worms like Blaster, NetSky and Sasser escalating daily to pose an ever-greater threat to home users, Microsoft plans to release the new Microsoft Update as part of the larger Windows Update patch management platform.
Depending on the threat level of malicious worms, the software giant will automate the worm removal process. This goes beyond Microsoft's latest moves to create disinfection tools to deal with major virus outbreaks.
While Microsoft didn't announce general hardware requirements for Longhorn at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2004 this week as expected, representatives from the company did reveal that the graphics card requirements for the upcoming system have changed since they were first revealed at WinHEC 2003 last year. Furthermore, Microsoft revealed details of Longhorn's so-called tiered user experience, dubbed Aero.
"The Aero user experience is a generational leap over what's available today in Windows XP," Kerry Hammil, a Program Manager on the Avalon team said during a graphics session at the show Monday afternoon. "There will be two discrete levels of user experience in Longhorn. As the graphics hardware becomes more powerful, the user experience becomes richer in discrete steps."
With the next version of Windows, Microsoft is looking to add a number of laptop-specific features designed to make portable machines both more powerful and at the same time as easy to use as consumer devices such as portable DVD players.
To accomplish this feat, Microsoft is looking at the possibility of a separate user interface that could be instantly accessed for playing back movies, music and other media files. The company is even exploring ways that media files could be accessed without logging into Windows as a way to make the experience more comparable to consumer electronic devices.
Microsoft is now developing the Windows "Longhorn" server and Windows "Longhorn" client in lockstep, a change from the staggered development the company was previously pursuing for its next generation version of Windows, a senior Microsoft executive said Tuesday.
"Today, 'Longhorn' client, 'Longhorn' server are generally connected together. We're building it in synch. That was a change. Perhaps a year ago that wasn't our plan, but it is our plan today," Jim Allchin, Microsoft group vice president for platforms, said during his keynote address at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle.