Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation, WINHEC Apr 26, 2005 ... continued
Gates WINHEC continued.
The next thing I remember is that Brutus and I are working on an advertising project together, and so I'm guessing that it probably has something to do with that. So, I'll just type in advertising, and I don't even have to type in the whole word. And it just filters down to six documents that I was interested in finding, and I can see that these are, indeed, the ones that I was interested in, because I can look at the thumbnails and know that, hey, these are the five documents and the one PowerPoint that I need to collaborate with Brutus on.
Okay, the thing about it is that how I think about my information is probably not going to be the same way that you think about your information. In fact, you guys are probably all more organized than me. But the thing is, we built flexibility into the system, so there is a myriad of ways that you can get to these same six documents.
Let me show you another way. This time I'll start by going to the authors virtual folder. I'll just select it, and again it's all 400 documents on my hard drive neatly stacked by author, and I'll select the Brutus stack, and I'll drill into it. And you can see here that these are the 42 items that are authored by Brutus. Now, this is kind of an unwieldy view. I can't really see these or easily pick out the six documents that I'm interested in seeing. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to show you a new view, and we'll call this the Brut 5 view, and it allows me to very simply group my content by a specific property.
So, I'll go to the keyword column header control, and I'll just say, group by keyword. And there you go, those are the same six advertising documents that we just found. It's just that easy. I found them in basically the way that I tend to think about them at the time.
Okay, so here's the thing, in some cases, you're going to have a document that maybe has multiple content. For example, this one document right here is currently an advertising document, but maybe there is something about it that has something to do with finance. And so, sometimes in my head, I'm going to think about it in the context of finance. How can we see this in the context of finance? Well, for starters, I can just select the file, and I can go down into the keywords in the preview pane here, and I can just type in "finance," hit enter, and there you go. That file is now showing up in both places.
I'll take a step back. What did I just do? Did I copy the files? No. Did I put it in two different places? No. What I simply did was just add an additional file property, an additional meta data file. Here's another way that I can add properties to my file. In the case of the navigation pane, our virtual folders show up here, and I can expand the keyword virtual folder. You can see these are all, indeed, the keywords across all of my documents on my hard drive. And very simply just add this PowerPoint, if it will let me, I'll try this document right here, and I'm going to make this a finance document. I'll just drag it over here and drop it, and there you go. It is now a finance document as well. Just dragging and dropping, it's just that easy to add additional properties to your file.
We're going to make it very natural for you to add properties as well, because another natural place would be when you're creating and saving your files. And so we have a new common file dialog, or a common dialog box when you open and you save your files, where you can also add properties at the time when you're saving your content.
So, the next thing I want to talk about is a brand new concept, and it's going to be very powerful for information workers to be able to collaborate with. The idea is that very frequently, we're on a project team, and the trouble is that when we're on this project team, we probably have s a set of documents that are important to the team, and they're just added across the stored universe. They're on your PC, they're on servers, they're on SharePoints, they're on other people's PCs, and there's no easy way for you to get a comprehensive view of every document that is important to your team. With this new concept that we like to call very simply, a list, I can package up a collection of shortcuts into one file and use that to give me that comprehensive view.
Let me show you how it works. I'll bring up what we call the list pane, and it allows me just to grab files and drop them in here. I can navigate around the system. I can go up to different servers and what-not. Let's see, I'll take some Gladiator recruiting documents here, and I'll just drop another document over here. And pretty soon what you end up having is a list that ends up looking like this. And you can see here that there's a bunch of different items in here, they all have explicit order. I can even put instructions on every individual item. But the thing is, if I blow these icons up, you can see that these aren't the actual items, they are just shortcuts or links. And now, all I have to do to give my team the view of all the documents that are important to us, is just drop this thing into an e-mail and send it to everybody, and provided they have access to these files, all they have to do is click on the link, and they're immediately taken to these resources.
The thing is, it's actually going to get better, because in the beta 2 timeframe we're going to be building these things on top of RSS 2.0, which means that you can publish these things to a server, or to a SharePoint, and then your participants could basically just use their RSS readers, and subscribe to these, and have them automatically show up on their PC.
So that in a nutshell is our story of how we're going beyond search, and we're taking visualization and organization to the next level. After you find your information, typically you want to do something with it. You want to take all this graphically rich information that I've been showing you, and that Shannon has been showing you, and you want to be able to share it. And when I say share it, I mean being able to view it in an application independent way, or being able to print it, because as you all probably know, when you print graphically rich things what you see on screen is very frequently not what you end up getting out of your printer.
So I'd like to tell you about a capability of our Longhorn graphics platform and it's all about a new fixed document format that we've codenamed Metro. Metro is built on top of XML, and indeed we're giving out the draft spec today, and I'd like to tell you that we're making this fixed format Metro available to the world royalty free. You can create these documents on any platform and consume them on any device of your choosing.
So let me show you how this works. I have a PowerPoint document, of course, the marketing guy has a PowerPoint document, and I'm basically ready to send this out into the field. The trouble is, I don't want the field to be able to edit this document, and I also want them to be able to view this in an application-independent way. So maybe they don't have PowerPoint or something. So I go ahead and I create one of these Metro documents out of my PowerPoint, and you can see here that I'm just viewing this very naturally in Internet Explorer. I've got two slides in here. It's a very graphically rich document.
The thing about this Metro document is that it's retained all the fidelity of my original piece of content. For example, if I do something crazy, like I blow this thing all the way up to 400 percent, you can see that the text looks as good as it would on a piece of paper. Actually, no, it looks even better, because I've got vector graphics here, and all the text is not getting jagged, it's not getting pixelated, it just looks totally natural.
So let me show you let me actually print this, because that's where the real magic happens. And it's printing.
Okay. So what I've got over here is a printer, it's the first of its kind, a one-of-a-kind printer right now. It's brought to us by the fine folks from Xerox Engineering, working for the Xerox Group, and this printer has a built in Metro interpreter already on it, meaning when I hit print over here, it passed my document all the way over here, it didn't need to convert the document, and it processed it natively. Not only that, it's able to print at 40 to 70 percent faster than a normal, conventional printer, and on top of that it's going to retain all the fidelity of my original copy.
The thing I want to tell you is that in Longhorn the new native spool file format happens to be Metro, so any time you create, any time you print something, whether it's a photo or a document, we will automatically generate one of these Metro documents. And if you happen to have on the other end a Metro-enabled printer, either has an interpreter on it, or it has a Metro printer driver, your customers are going to see phenomenal print out. Let me show you what I mean.
Okay. If I could bring up you'll see up there I've got the digital copy alongside what came out of this Metro printer. And you can see here that it's retaining all of the graphical fidelity, you've got transparency, specular highlighting, and all the gradients. And we did a little experiment, we printed this on a normal, enterprise-class color printer, the ones that you probably have in your offices today, and this is what happened. It got butchered, all the transparency, all the gradients are just gone. This is the bad copy, this is the good copy, bad good.
The thing is, I spend a lot of time making marketing materials, a lot of us do if we're in marketing, and at the end of the day I'm going to want my content to look like this instead of this. If I'm printing my photos at home, my one-of-a-kind photos, I'm going to want them to come out of a printer like this, not like this.
So I've thrown a lot at you today, and I would encourage you to go to the Metro sessions, because they're going to give you a lot more information about this. But, you've seen how Longhorn can go beyond search, to help you visualize and organization your information, and frankly the way that you think about it in your head. And you've also seen how Longhorn can print and let you view graphically rich copy. I know it's a lot of stuff, but there's even more in the product spec that you're not even seeing today.
On behalf of the product teams, I just want to say, thank you so much fro listening to me. You guys have been a great audience.
Thank you. (Applause.)
BILL GATES: Let me wrap up by giving you a sense of the Longhorn timeframe, and some of the opportunities for us to work together around Longhorn. One opportunity is for PCs to be clearly labeled as Longhorn ready. Going into late this year and next year I think a lot of customers will be interested to know, will their machine upgrade and be able to run Longhorn, not just in the minimal mode, but running it so that the great, say, graphics display capabilities are enabled there.
Our criteria here are reasonably straightforward. We're asking for a modern CPU, 512 megs, and that it's got a display capability that can be run with a Longhorn display driver. In fact, most hardware will meet these requirements today, but it's something that we can talk through, make sure we get this logo out there, so that we're not having anyone hesitating to buy because they're worried if they buy hardware now it won't be ready for the new operating system there. So a good opportunity to work together.
Second is that as we're putting together Longhorn we're going to give more opportunities for PCs to be labeled as enabling rich experience in areas like media capability, tablet capability, performance, things like that. And so we're coming up with the Longhorn logo program that will let PCs with unique capabilities to unlock Longhorn's capabilities to be highlighted in a special way.
We don't have the plan fully put together, but it's a good time for dialogue now, so that we can start our planning and make sure that we get the right things to come together there. Overall, in terms of marketing, we're going to put more marketing behind Longhorn than we have behind anything we've had in the past, and we're seeing with a number of partners a great opportunity to do more coordination on that than we've done in the past.
The timeline, first of all let me caveat the timeline by saying that our key goals in terms of Longhorn is that it be by far the highest quality release we've ever done. We're going to at every stage listen to feedback, and so it's possible some of these milestones will change, and we'll choose to put more time to things. The schedule we'd like to achieve is here, and certainly the progression we're going to go through is exactly as shown here.
The next milestone is the developer's conference, we're looking at that in the September timeframe. Then of course a year from now we'll have another WINHEC, and things will be even further along. We had the PDC, that was the original kickoff, then we have this WINHEC, we have the beta one coming out this summer, then we have the PDC for developers later this year, targeted for September, and then after that we'll get up to beta two. Beta two is where you'll see all those end-user features, and you'll really see, okay, this is what's the final product is going to look like.
This is the client timeframe, that's separate from the server timeframe. I want to emphasize again that today we have locked down the key hardware related things, the graphics display driver, the Metro format, the WS Discovery, all those things that enable you to go out and do your piece, both for Longhorn and of course, for 64-bit independent of Longhorn running with the release that we've got out there today.
The server roadmap is very similar. There's a couple of releases here in-between now and then that it's key to understand. Today's releases, the 64-bit releases, then we add a number of features where we don't change the bottom levels of the system, but up on top in terms of departmental server capability, and networking capability, the R2 release brings in some very neat things. For example, that branch office server, we can make it so much easier to administer, so much less traffic having to go out to that. A lot of things in the Active Directory area, a lot of things in the storage area, but not going back into the core of things that we've updated here with the 64 bit release.
We have a very focused release that's around compute clusters that comes out a little bit after the R2 Edition. This is to make sure that at that very high-end space we've got some very innovative scheduling things that really advance the state of the art in cluster computing, then finally the Longhorn server itself. All we about that schedule-wise is that's likely to be in calendar 2007. So it's not the same time as the Longhorn client will take, at least some additional months for the kind of testing we do, and the unique server pieces that are there, where the great foundational stuff I talked about come into play, but also new server-type features. So that gives you a sense of where all of those releases are coming into play.
So it's a very exciting set of opportunities for all of us. PC growth is stronger than ever, good growth, good innovation, very competitive framework, end users are getting a good deal, a lot more variety out there, things like tablets and Media Center, the ultra-mobile come in. If you take from that device there that we talked about all the way up to the very highest end server the fact that we can share so much work across those, and yet target into that area, and expose the innovative work you do at the hardware and software level, that's the beauty of the Windows ecosystem. It's never been done before.
We're getting better and better about making sure that the kind of quality, the compatibility is super-strong in this ecosystem, even monitoring what's going on with system through things like the Watson capability, so that we directly understand what's going on there, and are always driving towards relevant quality.
The new form factors will make a big difference. The new experiences that Longhorn is bringing in will start to make these different activities far more mainstream than they've ever been. So it's really in the spirit of partnership that we're sitting here looking at what can we do together, and I'm excited to have a chance to see what comes of it.
Thank you for coming to WINHEC. Thank you.
April 30, 2005 at 11:05 AM in Microsoft | Permalink
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