Microsoft's Bill Gates took centre stage at yesterday's
software developer day in London to convince UK software developers
to stick with Microsoft, even though Longhorn, its next-generation
operating system platform, is two to three years away.
Putting his trust in Moore's Law, Gates planned to exploit the
full potential of future generations of PC processing power in
Longhorn to support technologies such as instant messaging and
speech synthesis and recognition.
He said, "Longhorn is a significant step forward for us." One of
the key concepts in Longhorn is the stateless PC, a form of
computing designed to combine the benefits of thin client computing
with rich clients, where software can take advantage of
functionality on the PC.
Gates added, "We are fudging the line between the client and the
server." Given the speed of the network he said, "It will be
possible to run the client PC in a stateless way," where user data
and applications could move back and forth between a network server
and desktop PC running Longhorn.
Turning his attention to the two-year-old Trustworthy Computing
initiative for secure computing, Gates said hackers were no longer
looking for holes in systems, but instead were waiting for a patch
to be released.
Users then faced a race against time to install the patch before
the hacker could generate an exploit, he warned, and he admitted
that Microsoft patches were still too big. "Clearly we have work to
do," he said, "When only 20% of our customers are up to date [with
the latest patches]."
Longhorn aims to change the way users access data and
applications on a PC. A new file system called WinFS, based on
Microsoft's SQL Server, will allow users to organise documents
based on author, project, keyword or user-defined criteria.
Programs that support this feature could offer application specific
searching.
Tom Ilube, the chief information officer of online bank Egg,
gave a presentation of a proof of concept application based on
Longhorn and WinFS, to illustrate how Egg's online banking platform
would be evolving.
One of the key changes he expected in online banking was a shift
from web-based banking to smart client -based online banking where
the customer's PC was continually running the banking application
and communicating with the Egg back end.
Using WinFS, Ilube demonstrated how a customer would be able to
organise their bank account on the Longhorn desktop. He also showed
a way customer service could operate in the future by taking
advantage of a permanent internet connection between the customer's
PC and the Egg back end.
In the demo, a customer service representative was able to talk
to the customer via a video popup window on the Longhorn
desktop.