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To: Bob Strickland who wrote (39722)	4/8/1999 7:08:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

9 months. About the same time until Microsoft includes A/V in the OS............................. zdnet.com Microsoft outlines plans for digital content management By John G. Spooner, PC Week Online April 8, 1999 12:20 PM ET LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) is laboring to make it easier for PC users to share digital photos and video. With digital cameras, scanners and other image-creation tools becoming more popular, and desktop hard drives getting bigger, making digital content easier to manage will be key to driving broader adoption of PCs among consumers, said Carl Stork, Microsoft's general manager of Windows Hardware Strategy. Stork outlined Microsoft's digital content management strategy in a keynote address here Thursday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Yesterday the Redmond, Wash., company announced the Windows Image Acquisition Architecture, which will build digital imaging functionality -- including the ability to edit, print and publish images -- into future versions of Window 98 and Windows 2000. It will include an application programming interface and device driver interface that can be utilized by third parties. Although Stork spoke mostly about still images, he said that "if there was some easy way to take 3 minutes of a video of my ski trip . . . it might be fun to watch or send to my brother." This kind of functionality, which would allow users to easily view and edit a still image or video, is not yet widely available on PCs. "Today virtually nobody has the ability to edit this stuff," he said, although "getting still images into PCs has gotten easier." Not just for consumers Microsoft's digital content management strategy will enable users to view thumbnails of images on a PC and to tag images with keywords, the better to find them and similar images, Stork said. Such a content management strategy wouldn't just be for consumers. Insurance adjusters, real estate agents and Web developers are big users of digital cameras, scanners and other equipment, he said. During the keynote, Stork demonstrated how Microsoft's Universal Plug and Play, a technology now in development that will allow devices such as printers and scanners to communicate over a network without the intervention of a PC, can aid digital content management. The Windows Image Acquisition Architecture will show up first in Windows 2000, which is due by the end of the year. It will also be present in the new release of Windows 98 that is planned for next year. "One big focus for the year 2000 consumer Windows release is great support for digital media manipulation such as pictures and music," Stork said.