Even after all his triumphs, Bill Gates is still a gambling man.
In some of the most difficult economic periods in high technology's history, the chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft appears undeterred in doing what he has done best: selling Windows.
This week, Microsoft launched a developer version of Longhorn, its next operating system. Gates says Longhorn, which is expected to be released in 2006, will spawn an array of new applications not possible with previous generations of Windows while making entire infrastructures work better.
However, Longhorn also offers a radically new programming and storage model along with the promise of extensive training for developers and managers. Will that message appeal to big companies that are struggling with security, tight budgets and minimisation of risk? And will its benefits outweigh the cost to changes in systems at a time when companies remain leery about spending more money on technology?
To address those questions and other difficult issues, ZDNet UK's sister site CNET News.com spoke to Gates on the first day of his company's software developers conference.
Q: Several years ago, many analysts believed that we had seen the last large monolithic operating system releases from Microsoft. Given Longhorn, did they just get it wrong, or has there been a change in thinking within Microsoft?
A: Well, this isn't monolithic. I mean, believe me, there is an architecture here that is extremely componentised and broken down into pieces.
But Longhorn is still a single, large operating system release, as were Windows 2000 and Windows XP?
That's right. It's integrated innovation. There's this constant trend that, as you are seeing things that many applications are needing to do and getting standards for how those things are done -- those things move into the platform.
Over the last 10 years, there have been a lot of middle-layer-type things -- queuing software, transaction software, etc. -- that was fairly expensive, had a different model and different way to debug.
Now that we are moving to this Web services world -- a loosely coupled, message-based breakthrough that computer scientists have dreamed of for decades -- all of the things that let that be possible need to be in the $50 operating system. And so here we have Indigo, which will be in Windows and let you do transactions and queuing.
The person getting the benefit of those won't know that that is going on. But you also get to use the great Avalon graphics and the ability to navigate information with WinFS. Application developers don't have to duplicate those things, and yet there's no cost to having those things be in the platform and one way of doing debugging and performance.
That's the miracle of software, in terms of how we can get better and better things. So here we have something that was done through middleware coming into the system. We've seen that with media playback capabilities, with the browser, and that will continue... There is sort of that crowd that thinks that when the valuations broke that somehow technology advances wouldn't come. There's a general attitude now to not see that we will be delivering more software advances and productivity in this decade than we did in the last.
