Gates says Vista key to multimedia computing era
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Like Windows 95 more than a decade ago, Windows Vista will usher in a new era of computing, Bill Gates said at a New York launch event for his company's long-awaited operating system.
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Microsoft announces steps it says will help business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualization, including a change in policy to allow all versions of Windows Vista to be virtualized.
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(InfoWorld) - Thursday was finally windows Vista launch day. But though banners were flying in downtown Manhattan on the big day, celebrating the launch of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear that the company is anxious to move on, while business customers pegged for Vista adoption wondered whether there was really much to celebrate. âThereâs a bunch of work we still need to do,â Ballmer said of the next Windows client OS. Supporting the shift from single-core to multicore chips and improvements in network infrastructure are priorities. Microsoft also wants to add more features to meet the needs of IT administrators, software developers and end-users. âHow we do software plus service within Windows is going to continue to be a big theme,â Ballmer said. Enterprise customers were wary. âSure itâs a big day for Microsoft, but what are we really getting?â asks Paul Lindo, an independent New York IT consultant. âWith all the delays and features being dropped, this looks to me like it might just be Windows XP with a prettier face.â Vista suffered several features âadjustmentsâ as well as a lengthier-than-expected road to shrink, including the infamous 2004 dumping of WinFS and a ground-up re-programming effort. But now that the day is finally here, Microsoft is well pleased with its new OS offering. âIt may have been a long road, but watching how our early adopters are responding to the platform, we know weâve got a winner,â said Brad Goldberg, Microsoftâs general manager of client product management. Responding to views such as Lindoâs, Goldberg said he remained assured. âVista was designed specifically to give business users recognizable benefits over the last generation platform,â he said. âThat includes productivity, security, networking and noticeably less reliance on IT.â Those last two items especially represent significant development efforts, covering the new UAC authentication model, updated internal diagnostics (including error messages that actually speak English), a completely revamped networking client and new IT tools such as the Reliability Monitor -- a quick dashboard of system reliability. These features were built specifically so users would spend less time talking to the help desk, thus decreasing overall IT spending. Windows is far better prepared for initial deployment than its predecessors, Goldberg said, citing more than a year of overall QA effort, by far the longest QA period in Microsoftâs history. Despite the enterprise focus of some features, it will still be consumers who lead the charge on Vista adoption. According to a report released by IDC last week, Vista will account for 90 percent of new Windows client deployments in 2007 by home users, compared with just 35 percent of new Windows client deployments by businesses.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O will most   likely ship its upcoming Windows Vista operating system on time   and meet its deadline for both corporate and retail consumers,   a Wall Street analyst said on Wednesday.
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Ahead of Bill Gates' keynote Sunday night, Microsoft said that 100 million copies of Vista have been sold, but the new OS has little presence here at CES.
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The way people interact with PCs will change dramatically in the next five years, Microsoft chief Bill Gates says.
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(InfoWorld) - While it's taken Microsoft Corp. half a decade to bring out a new version of its client operating system, the real development work on Windows Vista only took around two years, according to the head of the company. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, reflected on what Microsoft had learned from the process and delays inÂ bringing Vista to marketÂ during a question-and-answer session followingÂ the business launch of the OSÂ Thursday in New York. "Time is sort of a funny thing," Ballmer said. "You need to give new technologies time to incubate before you try to bring them together," he added. "Let each [technology] come to market individually and then do the integration." Microsoft spent the first two years of its Vista development process building a variety of new technologies and then struggled to integrate them, according to Ballmer. The third year went smoothly as Microsoft's developers focused their efforts on the Windows XP Service Pack 2, with some of that technology ultimately winding up in Vista, not XP. The bulk of what has now been released as Vista Microsoft developed in the last two to two and half years, Ballmer said. With his habitual flair for superlatives, Ballmer described Vista as."the highest quality, most secure Windows operating system ever." However, he was quick to add that Microsoft won't rest on its laurels. In its next Windows client OS release, the vendor will look to do more to support the major changes already under way in computer hardware, notably the shift from single-core to multicore processors and improvements in network infrastructure, he said. Microsoft also wants to offer more functionality in its OS for IT administrators so that the software is simpler to manage and for software developers in relation to storage management and other features that didn't make it into Vista, according to Ballmer. A future operating system also needs to take into account the move from software to software-as-a-service or as Ballmer said, "software plus service." Users can expect to see "a lot more service enablement" in the Windows OS, he said. Ballmer estimated that by the time Microsoft launches the consumer versions of Vista and Office 2007 scheduled for Jan. 30, 2007 worldwide, the company will have spent "hundreds of millions of dollars" on marketing the new software. Â
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Microsoft's long, strange trip with Windows Vista came closer to an end Friday as the company released the first release candidate of its next-generation operating system. Jim Allchin made the announcement in an e-mail to TechNet subscribers.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --Â  Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, during an appearance here Friday at the Computer History Museum, expressed no fear of Linux usurping Windows in the software industry.
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Windows Vista boasts no earth-shattering improvements for mobile users but it does simplify matters by consolidating a lot of functions into a few well-designed interface elements.
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Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates took the stage of the IT Forum in Copenhagen Tuesday to introduce a handful of tools and a hatful of promises designed to offer relief from managing complex, distributed systems.
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BERKELEY, Calif. (CBS.MW) -- The computing problems to be solved in the next two decades will be more exciting than those that already have been solved, according to Microsoft&#39;s Bill Gates.
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Microsoft Corp's  upcoming  Windows Vista computer operating system will include technology  that is designed to prevent pirated copies from fully  functioning, the software giant said.
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NEW YORK/LONDON  - Microsoft Corp. rolled out  Windows Vista in 70 countries on Tuesday, delivering a PC  operating system able to better manage the explosion of digital  media and enhance Internet security.
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LAS VEGAS --In his seventh keynote speech at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates promoted what he called the "digital lifestyle."
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Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates took center stage at the world's largest technology show for the last time on Sunday and predicted that his industry was on the cusp of the next "digital decade."
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Microsoft Corp.  said on Thursday that more than 200 million users will be using one of its new products -- including its highly-anticipated Windows Vista operating system, Office 2007 software suite and Exchange server -- by the end of 2007.