How many search commands do you have in your PC?

How many search commands do you have in your PC? asked Bill Gates during his keynote introduction at Forum 2000, where he unveiled a set of next generation Windows services (NGWS) Microsoft calls "Microsoft-dot-NET." Gates, in his capacity as chief software architect for the company, says he personally led the team responsible for redefining the user interface and it was here that some of the greatest strides forward were revealed. But, before you get too excited: be warned.

How many search commands do you have in your PC? asked Bill Gates during his keynote introduction at Forum 2000, where he unveiled a set of next generation Windows services (NGWS) Microsoft calls "Microsoft-dot-NET." Gates, in his capacity as chief software architect for the company, says he personally led the team responsible for redefining the user interface and it was here that some of the greatest strides forward were revealed. But, before you get too excited: be warned. NGWS and the ".NET" platform is not a package that's being delivered immediately, or even in one piece next year. It is, maintains Gates, a multi-year initiative that represents the culmination of a lot of projects the company has been working on for a long time and even the 1.0 release, originally planned for release in 2001, but still in beta for much of 2002, won't be a full user experience. Some of its more advanced aspects, says Gates, are at least two years off.

Still, there were some demos of technologies and user interface refinements we hadn't seen before. Gates' team has been working on natural language interfaces, based on plain-English commands from keyboard, voice or handwritten input.

Into a futuristic-looking browser (the first sneak peek at the browser that eventually became MSN Explorer), Gates typed questions and statements in plain English and the computer, speaking in a fairly realistic synthesized voice (or responding silently, as text, of course), asked for clarification as necessary, and set up contacts, database entries and other functions as necessary to complete the requested tasks. In other words, the computer, not the user, was running the programs and deciding how and where to enter the data. This technology, which is undoubtedly based on the English Query facility in the company's forthcoming SQL Server 2000 database, was referred to as "Type Inline," by Gates.

Later, Bert Keeley, from a division of the company working on "Tablet PCs," (see "Mira," below) showed a prototype tablet PC running Windows 2000 that allows a user to annotate text by circling words, drawing arrows, scribbling text notes and so on. Then, if the user invokes a "find" command, the handwriting behaves like text -- there has been handwriting recognition going on automatically in the background, transparent to the user. Bookmarks can be added and, if desired, individual words of handwritten text can later be selected and made bold, italicized, resized or otherwise manipulated. Even more intriguingly, the handwriting can be converted to text -- displayed, of course, using the Clear Type technology that, Microsoft boasts, delivers triple the resolution of a normal screen display, using a fancy font-rendering technology called Subpixel Font Rendering.

A simpler version of this "rich ink" capability also exists in Microsoft's latest Pocket PC operating system (AKA Windows CE 3.0), but here, unified with a search function and able to automatically move diagrams, hand-drawn arrows and annotations to allow for inserted spaces or text, the functionality is considerably greater than we've seen before.

Not Just Windows

Gates emphasized that these next generation Windows services are not for the PC only, nor are they limited to platforms running Microsoft software only (although, so far, they are - Ed.). Citing the need for a simple, open, broadly adopted standard, Gates sees XML as the base protocol that makes this vision possible and foresees a future where every one of Microsoft's products is XML enabled, to deliver a user experience that is more collaborative and personalized than is possible using today's tools.

Reiterating themes he's touched on many times before (and, in some cases, going back to his 1990 mission statement of "information at your fingertips"), Gates says a platform independent architecture is necessary to enable the emerging categories of non-PC-oriented platforms in our increasingly digital world, delivering:

• Photos, videos, music
• Business services
  • customer service
  • unexpected events
  • knowledge workers
• Note taking

Gates explained that this last item is one of those seemingly simple tasks that computers up until now have made unnecessarily complex. We have to manage the programs, save the documents, file them, correlate the information with other applications and manually cut-and-paste data between them if necessary.

He then showed -- again, in the all-pervasive browser -- an agent-based inference engine feature of NGWS he called Smart Tags. When you type a date, time or company name (etc.), the system automatically tags the text and then tries to match it up with matching data and applications on your system. Thus, if you type "AdventureWorks Ltd.," the system automatically recognizes this as a database entry it knows and makes a link to the information. Or, if you type a person's name, it might make a link to that person's entry in your contact manager application or address book. Gates says third parties will be able to decide how their applications link to data thus categorized. When links are made to the data, the links can be revealed by clicking a small box that appears when the user's mouse pauses near a "smart tagged" word or phrase. In a sense, it's a little like the as-you-type spelling checker in Microsoft Office, and it strikes us as a "why hasn't anyone thought of that before" feature that makes a lot of sense.

Recurring Themes

Throughout the demo, Gates focused on a few common themes: the need for the next phase of the Web to deliver:

• Personalized information
• Natural Interfaces
• No barriers between users and devices

He foresees Microsoft.Net as being delivered in several layers: as services running across the Internet, in corporate, end-user and Application Service Provider (ASP) facilities. It must be, he asserts, communications centric, universally accessible and deliver a completely consistent user experience -- not one that has a different search function in each program and a myriad of different, incompatible file formats.

Gates also perceives the need for privacy and security models that are better integrated than those on today's systems and holds out hope that smart cards and biometrics may succeed where passwords have largely failed. Among the issues facing content providers are those related to digital rights management (DRM) and Internet security. Although Gates spent little time rehashing the announcements made earlier in the month at Tech-Ed in Orlando Florida, these issues, too, are ones that Microsoft is well-equipped to deliver a systemic solution to, with its various server efforts.

Microsoft did, however, demonstrate several other products that exemplify the company's "dot net" strategy. One was a forthcoming wireless phone ("Stinger"), developed in partnership with Samsung that, when first used, allows the user to log in, with a password, to a Web-based XML data store and downloads the contacts, appointments and phone numbers that make it an all-in-one personal digital assistant (PDA), wirelessly connected to the Internet and one's databases "out there in the cloud." With it, one can access voice mail, email, task lists, notes, or Web sites and, when a change is made, the data is automatically synchronized with that on the server. This XML-enabled "smart phone," said company spokesperson Brian Schafer, will be available in 2001. (March 2002: we're still waiting.)

"Betting the Company"

It's perhaps a little overused around the executive offices in Redmond, having been used to describe both the company's 1995 "catch up quick" Web strategy and the Windows 2000 development effort, but Bill Gates maintains that they're "betting the company" on this new XML-centric strategy. Calling it "as big a transition as going from DOS to Windows," he says that the XML store of NGWS will transparently replicate remote storage on local devices and will be the underpinning for system-wide indexing and searching facilities. The new paradigm, of course, brings forward most of the technologies we've come to expect from computers: a system-wide clipboard, the ability to have compound documents (currently delivered on Windows systems via Object Linking and Embedding) and so on. The main difference, says Gates, is that in NGWS, you're always in the browser. Here, you'll access services from Microsoft and third parties, with agent-driven background processes of NGWS delivering the user experience on an XML-based "universal canvas." Part of this functionality comes as a result of a long-standing project at Microsoft, currently code-named "Yukon," that aims to base this universal file system on a SQL Server engine.

There is also a third level to these next-generation services that Gates and Bob Muglia, Microsoft Group VP, only briefly touched upon, in which the company's full intent -- a symmetry between client/server and services -- becomes more obvious. Apparently, we'll see personal subscription services and new extensions of Microsoft's efforts with MSN.net and bCentral, and a new generation of the company's Visual Studio tools, starting in 2001 (with some in beta this year), that will reveal more of this services-oriented layer, with what Gates calls dynamic deployment and "business orchestration" facilities. Following that will come a version of Microsoft Office called -- you guessed it -- Office.net, incorporating the new interface elements and underlying NGWS components.

Gates says he's bullish on wireless technologies and noted that, already at Microsoft's Redmond offices, employees can use their computers virtually anywhere while maintaining 11Mbps wireless connections -- connections, he noted, do not require any pay-per-minute charges. These wireless wide area networks (WANs), along with inexpensive home wireless networks (also without per-minute charges), will allow users to distribute out resources -- keeping, for example, their files on a remote, Net-based storage system, and sharing data transparently across the network. "Real-time collaboration," Gates asserts, "will be commonplace." Of course, Gates is presuming certain advances, such as the likelihood that broadband Internet access will become more pervasive in the years ahead, and assuming that third parties embrace XML as wholeheartedly as Microsoft apparently has, and write apps that conform to this "dot net" paradigm.

Next-gen Explorer

Although unannounced and unheralded during the demo, all of the NGWS demos took place inside a browser unlike any seen before. It featured what appeared to be a built-in Windows Media Player at the bottom of a panel on the left side of the screen, with colourful, photo-realistic icons (shades of Aqua!) an attractive dark gray/light gray/white colour scheme, rounded corners and metallic-look round buttons. This browser turned out to be MSN Explorer, which eventually shipped with Windows XP.

What's Ahead

Beyond Windows XP and Windows.NET server, Microsoft is working on a pair of projects it hopes will integrate XP technologies into more consumer-friendly home entertainment systems. Freestyle is designed as a user interface to a new generation of stereo component-like PCs; Mira is intended for a mObile, home-oriented "tablet" PC. Both Freestyle and Mira are slated to ship by the end of 2002, as part of Windows XP Service Pack 1. See Paul Thurrot's Freestyle & Mira technology showcase for details.