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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Kearney who wrote (5632)	3/30/1998 12:02:00 PM
From: Jim Lamb	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Microsoft Adds Voice Recognition To NT 5.0 (03/26/98; 7:40 p.m. EST) By Stuart J. Johnston, InformationWeek Early next century, the main user interface to Windows NT will be the human voice, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates told attendees Thursday in his keynote speech at the company's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Orlando, Fla. But before that, Microsoft plans to implement voice recognition in the operating system, first as an add-on to Windows NT 5.0 by as early as next year, and later built into the system itself. "In the next major release of Windows, it will be a system-level feature, and maybe the round after that it will become the primary user interface," Gates said. These are among several tidbits Gates revealed to the crowd in his speech. For the next major release after NT 5.0, "I've told [Microsoft developers], 'Lets take advantage of 3D [graphics],'" he said. Despite the attention that Microsoft's moves in integrating its browser into the Windows 98 user interface have garnered from the U.S. Department of Justice, that integration will become more seamless over time. "In the future, we'll go even further [to] get down to a single shell that can take you anywhere," Gates said. Conference attendees received an interim version of the NT 5.0 beta test code, as had attendees at a Rapid Deployment Program conference last week in Seattle for companies that plan to deploy the system soon after it ships in final form. The interim code is significantly more "feature-complete" than the first beta version that was delivered to developers last fall. However, it is still not in condition to be considered the beginning of the second beta, on track to begin during the second quarter, according to Carl Stork, general manager of Windows hardware platforms. Additionally, attendees at the seventh WinHEC received CD- ROMs containing early versions of tools for developing for the 64-bit version of NT slated to arrive simultaneously with Intel's IA-64 chip next year. The tools include header files that define many of the programming interfaces that developers will need to write, as well as a utility that searches through NT programs and helps identify which lines of code will need to be modified in order to run on the 64-bit version of NT. Gates and Stork both said the 64-bit version of NT will run both 32-bit and 64-bit NT applications at the same time, without modification. Gates also said Microsoft will release a new version of the BackOffice server suite after NT 5.0 ships, ostensibly to take advantage of many of the new features coming in NT 5.0. These include the common management console, which will allow an administrator do virtually all management tasks from a single user interface, as well as the distributed computing and security features in NT 5.0's ActiveDirectory. Search Archives All CMP Publications TechWeb News