Gates introduced what the company calls the Microsoft .Net platform, the final name for Microsoft's Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) architecture.
Gates spared no hyperbole describing Microsoft's (msft) intentions to reinvent the company and reposition its products over the next several years.
Gates likened the introduction of its .Net foundation to a transition on the order of the one that occurred when the company moved from DOS to Windows. One slide Gates showed during his hour-long presentation read: "We are on the brink of a new computing revolution."
"You could say this is a bet-the-company thing. Our entire strategy revolves around this platform," Gates said.
Gates introduced the platform to a few hundred press and analysts attending the day-long Forum 2000 event on the Microsoft Redmond, Wash., campus. Top brass from a handful of the top divisions across the company are slated to outline how the .Net platform will change the home, developer and business user experience going forward.
Gates provided a few sneak peeks of the pending user interface and next-generation tablet PC that will be critical to Microsoft's strategy.
"I get to explain how we will shape a new direction and conquer some new horizons," Gates told attendees, in his role as chief software architect.
Examples of some of the .Net building blocks that will underlie Microsoft's next-generation platform are storage; identity (an outgrowth of Microsoft's existing Passport Internet authentication service); notification/messaging; and calendaring. These building blocks interface with a database-based, network-resident XML store, on top of which Microsoft is building a new user interface, dubbed "the new user experience."
Company (msft) Gates said he has taken an active role in developing the next-generation interface.
The vast majority of the technologies that Gates discussed and demonstrated are at least two years away from commercialization.
The Windows.Net 1.0 user interface won't launch until next year. XML-enabled Visual Studio 7.0 is now a 2001 product. While Passport is available today, the next three to four key .Net services aren't due out until next year. The full suite of services, as well next-generation releases of its desktop suite and programming environment -- products that Gates referred to as Office.Net and Visual Studio.Net -- aren't due until 2002 or later.
Gates showed attendees a sneak peek of Microsoft's forthcoming tablet PC, a magazine-size system running Windows 2000.
He also demonstrated an early preview of the in-development .Net interface, which integrates natural-language understanding, speech processing and handwriting recognition. Gates showed two of the user interface features. One is called "type in-line," a natural-language search facility; the other, "smart tags," automatically adds Web and data links to documents and e-mail messages.
