New Orleans, May 7, 2003 – The day started of with a keynote presentation by Will Poole, Sr. Vice President, Windows Client Division. In his presentation, titled “Achieving life immersion”, Poole tried to suggest solutions to the PC industry’s biggest problems of today. It is not the bad economy, not that PC’s are replaced by other devices. However, people believe that their current devices are good enough, so why upgrade? The industry should give customers compelling and engaging reasons to buy new technology. Coole: “Where can we go with technologies? We as an industry should people give the idea that they want new products, even though that means suffering in other areas.” For an example, Coole looked to the world of computer games. Typically, gamers are high end users that want to buy the latest versions of both hardware and software. Last year alone over 764 new Windows game titles came to the market. Against each dedicated gaming device there are 4 PC’s that are used for gaming. A state of the art game as Unreal Tournament 2003 has one of the richest graphic environments that are available today. You can feel that you are actually in the game. Things are getting much better though. Where is the technology headed? This is something everybody should experience for themselves. A whole new generation of games, much richer and more realistic is coming up in 18 to 24 months. Games are often the driving factor of technology. After game content we start to see support for many other purposes as well. That means that high quality graphics will be suitable for all kinds of applications. Graphics functionality will move in the base level Operating System in the “Longhorn” timeframe. Gamers are the best group of customers for the industry, they buy the top end of the market and want to replace high end machines all the time.

According to Poole, over the last couple of years there has been a shift in the PC industry. “In 1998 only 15% of all systems sold for $1000 or less. Right now this has gone up to 76% of all systems. Margins for hardware vendors are really under pression. The $1000 PC’s are really good right now, so how can we invest more in experience based engineering to drive customers towards higher margin products?” Poole showed some area’s that are very successful right now, but mainly because new, innovative products came to market:

• PocketPC phone edition (in 6 months from 0% to 45% market share)
• Media centered PC (came out last holidays), combining the best of PC’s and other devices, right now in the top 10 of revenue generators in retail
• Tablet PC: production increased by as much as 35%

To become overall successful the industry should make it a big goal to connect products & content to people, wherever they are. To meet this goal, the product requirements are: 

• always on
• always up-to-date
• always work
• anywhere on any device

The industry needs wow factors (great industrial designs, high fidelity, and wide displays).

An example of a device with a great wow factor is the media centered PC with multi-channel sound. It is a totally irresistible piece of equipment, listening to it and watching it actually gave me goose bumps. This PC with the right software can give consumers a High Definition TV experience. In a couple of weeks a new version of the movie Terminator 2 will be released on DVD. Actually, the box contains two disks, 1 normal DVD and 1 DVD-ROM with the same movie in Windows Media 9 format with a resolution of about 3 times the DVD. This DVD-ROM can be watched on PC’s that are available right today. With Windows Media 9, the PC brings a better viewing experience than DVD. To let people judge this for themselves, Microsoft equipped a truck with high end audio and video equipment that is touring around the USA.

Poole concluded his presentation with a look to the future. He was saying that the next version of the Windows operating system, code named “Longhorn” is incredible and it is going to change everything we experience. It will be a while before “Longhorn” is actually available in the market. The first big milestone is the Professional Developer Conference (PDC) which is held later this year. At the PDC developers will be introduced to “Longhorn”.  According to Poole there is no intermediate release foreseen between now and the release of “Longhorn”, somewhere in 2005. There will be some updates in the Windows XP Tablet PC edition OS and in the Media Centered edition.

Totally different, but at least for professional users as important is Microsoft’s activity on the server market. David Thompson, Corporate Vice President of the Windows Server Group talked about Windows Server futures. This presentation was a little different that the one on Windows clients. No high volume multimedia demonstrations, but more a talk about silence and speed. According to Thompson, servers are the critical backbone. Recently Microsoft launched Windows Server 2003 with the following theme: “Do more with less”. The expectation is that companies can save around 30 % in IT maintenance costs when using Windows Server 2003. This is very imporant because IT budgets are under fire. The challenges to migrate to this new server operating system are smooth transition. Costs of hardware are mostly irrelevant as long as migration is easy and quick. The expectation is that many customer will migrate from existing Windows NT 4.0 servers to Windows Server 2003. All in all, Thompson summarized the benefits of Windows Server 2003: “A platform for productivity, developing, deploying and operating applications and services that federate seamlessly and scale without limits.” Thompson concluded that Windows Server 2003 saves money in a time when companies need to save money. Of course David Thompson looked ahead to the future as well. The next major release is going to be a product with code name “Blackcomb”. This will be an intelligent, self-managing Operating System, together with a collection of services. It is not to be released in 3 or 4 years as it looks right now. There will be lots of intermediate minor releases though. The message is that innovation does not have to wait on major releases.

Remarkable is that both the client and the server operating systems are moving towards less product releases. In the end the clients will most likely benefit from that. Nowadays too many releases came about and lots of clients were totally confused by all those different versions. It seems that there is only one product left inside Microsoft with very frequent releases. Yes, the product most covered on this website: Windows CE.NET.