Thanks Charles, that's an encouraging article. MSFT has quite a bit coming to market in the near future.
Gates said the biggest milestone for the entire .Net plan so far has been the release of Visual Studio.Net, the company's development tool bundle, in February.
Bringing the .Net plan, and the promise of Web services together, is "100 percent a software challenge, whether security, automatic data exchanging, designing of schemas, the end-user tools involved. This is one of the toughest software problems (ever) tackled," said Gates.
Gates said that Microsoft is doing "a bit of a reset" and over next 12 months or so will be moving .Net forward on several fronts. A major update to Office, as previously reported, will make better use of Web services and will include new communication and collaboration features.
Microsoft also reiterated security and privacy initiatives underway as part of the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative to improve the security of its software. The initiative will cost at least $100 million this year, Gates has said.
One key part of that plan is Palladium, a plan unveiled last month to ensure PC security through extensive changes to the Windows operating system.
Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin on Wednesday demonstrated new privacy tools planned for Microsoft's Passport authentication software that will allow users to control the amount of information shared with Web sites on a site-by-site basis.
"We are in a crisis at a confidence level. The confidence is not in the stock market, but whether people can trust their computers," said Allchin.
The company also demonstrated new real-time communications server software code-named Greenwich, due in the first half of next year, that will use Web services technology to link people over the Internet.
Microsoft plans to release a new version of its SQL Server database, code-named Yukon, that will introduce a new data storage architecture intended to make it easier to find and use corporate data.
And further out, said Gates, is a new version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, that will use Yukon's data storage capability, as previously reported.
This fall the company will deliver a minor update to its Visual Studio.Net suite of software development tools, featuring better security and performance, Microsoft executives said. That version will be followed in 2003 by a more comprehensive update to Visual Studio.Net that will also take advantage of Yukon.
In addition, Microsoft released a near-final test version of Windows.Net Server Wednesday. It also delivered a new version of its Office XP Web Services toolkit, which allows businesses to link Web services with Office. |
