Microsoft showed off planned innovations ranging from phones to home servers as Bill Gates made his last keynote speech for Microsoft at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles.
In familiar mode, Gates put a relentlessly positive spin on Microsoft’s future, talking up projects and markets that have so far failed to attract large audiences such as home servers, Windows Rally for wireless connection of content such as video, and ultra-mobile PCs.
Although consumer brands Gateway and Medion are now signed up to produce home servers that act as storage intersections for content, demand has yet to be proven and the same applies to Rally and the UMPC, despite attractive UMPC designs Gates displayed by Samsung, Fujitsu, HTC and Acer.
Typically, Gates touched on convergence, one of his favourite themes, noting on the HTC device that “as the PC is moving down and phones moving up, we're actually having some of the innovation in both spaces come together. The richness of the radio stack and some of the design capabilities of phones will be very important in these lower-end models.”
He also anticipated the advent of UWB and faster Wi-Fi, suggesting that content could instantly be dragged and dropped between video cameras and PCs.
Also at the event, Microsoft confirmed that Longhorn would be formally named Windows Server 2008 and showed off features such as the ability to block specific USB devices and define different policies for groups of users.
Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer, showed off projects such as Fone+, allowing phones to link to auxiliary devices such as TVs, keyboards and mice so that “the phone itself can become an entry-level computer”.
He also demonstrated a concept whereby a user could interact with a program projected onto a table, using optical sensors to detect commands.
However, Mundie warned that “the free lunch to some extent is over” when it comes to processor improvements. As clock speeds flatten out, software development will have to change in line, he argued.
“Applications of the future are going to have to be loosely coupled in their construction, intrinsically asynchronous in operation. They'll be highly concurrent in execution, both within each component itself and across the distributed system.”
Also at WinHEC, Microsoft partners such as LG-Nortel, NEC and Samsung showed off devices that let standard connect office phones connect to email, instant messaging, real-time presence information, conferencing, VoIP and mobile communications. The devices will work with Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007.
