By Joanna Pearlstein (joanna_pearlstein@macweek.com)
San Francisco -- Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates
promoted Windows strengths in both online and print
publishing in a keynote address today at Seybold San
Francisco. He also talked about Microsoft's work on the
Macintosh and spoke extensively about his vision of the
future of the World Wide Web.
Speaking to a crowd of about 3,000 at Moscone Center, the
Microsoft chief said of Web authoring on Windows: "There
are issues that simply come with the platform. Some of
these areas Microsoft is definitely playing catch-up, and
other ones I think we're moving up front."
Gates said Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0, both due in the
first half of 1998, "are a big step forward in our
authoring development." Two key publishing technologies
that will be incorporated in the operating systems,
Microsoft said, are color management and OpenType, the
company's font initiative co-developed with Adobe Systems
Inc.
Gates invited Kevin Connor, product marketing manager of
Adobe, to demonstrate the new publishing capabilities of
Windows NT 5. "Everybody who has ever doubted that
plug-and-play can be a reality on Windows, this demo is
for you," Connor said. He plugged a scanner into the USB
port of a Intel-standard PC, and the operating system
recognized the new hardware device and automatically
installed the device driver and color profile. Then, when
Connor hit the device's scan button, the system
automatically launched Adobe Photoshop and brought in the
image.
Despite the usefulness of Web sites, Gates said, they also
pose "a huge information management problem. It's no
longer good enough to just have a high-speed HTTP server"
-- noting that Microsoft's Internet Information Server is
integrated into NT. Users now want electronic commerce,
credit card transactions and security features for Web
sites, he said, and he commended those companies offering
database tools for those purposes. Yet content management
remains a critical issue, Gates said. "Although it's
improved a lot, there's still a lot to be done."
Gates said cross-platform issues remain important, and he
said the company continues to work to integrate Mac OS
systems into NT environments: "That's a piece of code
we're constantly getting input on." He said Microsoft
believes in supporting mixed environments, and "that's an
area where we'll continue to add features."
Microsoft is pleased to be working collaboratively with
Apple again, he said, and pointed out that in the early
1980s Microsoft had more people working on Mac
applications than Apple had people working on the
Macintosh.
"That was a very great collaboration," he said, "and it's
great to see -- with the new agreement and the investment
included as part of that -- some of that spirit and
collaboration coming back into the work between the two
companies."
Specifically, Gates cited the team of developers working
on Internet Explorer for the Macintosh as well as
Microsoft Office.
"With Microsoft Office, the last release there didn't do a
great job of taking advantage of the Macintosh," he said.
The next release, which Gates said will be available by
the end of the year, "will certainly reverse any notion
that we're not doing a really first-class job on the
Office environment on the Macintosh platform."
Microsoft Group Product Manager Tom Johnston demonstrated
dynamic HTML running on a beta version of Internet
Explorer 4.0 for the Macintosh, and he said the final
version will ship by the end of the year. Johnston also
showed a version of Internet Explorer 4 for Windows using
the emerging Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard,
which he said will provide "granular updates" without
requiring content providers to refresh an entire page when
data changes. "I think XML is really a breakthrough,"
Gates said.
In a question-and-answer session following the address,
Seybold Seminars founder Jonathan Seybold asked if the
absence of any discussion of Java during Gates' address
was an accident. "Well, I didn't mention C, VisualBasic,
Cobol or Pascal," Gates joked. "I'm a programmer; I love
programming languages."
He said Java is a great language, "but when you look at
serious applications, we think users want applications
that exploit their operating system. People care about
their platforms; they want the platforms exploited." Gates
said Java is nice for developers, "but how do users feel?
We doubt that successful applications will go down that
path."
--
The eyes are the whores of the senses,
they'll go to anything. Keith Richards
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