By Matt Rosoff [bio]
Posted: May 19, 2003

• Sidebar: Will Poole on Immersion
• Illustration: Xeel Navigation Interface

The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.

In an effort to drive PC sales, Microsoft is concentrating on adding consumer-oriented features to Windows, such as improved support for digital media, advanced graphics, built-in communications capabilities, and ease-of-use improvements. The company urged hardware manufacturers to take advantage of these features because it believes they will shorten the upgrade cycle and convince consumers to buy more expensive machines.

Microsoft also announced plans to create a single source of information for hardware and driver developers, clarified the release cycle for the next version of its desktop OS (code-named Longhorn), and provided new details about the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly code-named Palladium), a planned OS that will offer added security.

Getting Past "Good Enough"

Speaking at the 2003 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in May, Microsoft executives acknowledged that the PC hardware industry is troubled by low margins and lengthening upgrade cycles. According to Will Poole, senior vice president of the Windows Client business, more than 75% of PCs sold today cost less than US$1,000, cutting into OEMs' margins, and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates noted that "the refresh cycles for lots of different systems are longer today than they've ever been."

The reason, according to Microsoft, is that today's low-end PCs are good enough for most common tasks, such as sending e-mail, surfing the Web, and working with productivity applications. To change this, the company hopes to expand the role of the PC to new areas. (See the sidebar "Will Poole on Immersion".) Specifically, Microsoft will build technologies into Windows to better support digital media, advanced graphics, and real-time communications in hopes that average consumers—as well as tech-savvy early adopters—will upgrade their PCs more frequently and choose higher-end models. At the same time, Microsoft will concentrate on ease-of-use advances to ensure that consumers are attracted, rather than intimidated, by all this new functionality.

Digital Media

Microsoft has tried before to position the PC as a digital media device by building media-related programs, such as the Windows Media Player and Movie Maker, into Windows and encouraging consumer electronics manufacturers to support the Windows Media Format.

At WinHEC, Microsoft announced that it would continue this drive with new products and support for new technologies.

Enabling digital media over home networks. Microsoft is creating a new reference platform for a simple hardware device that would plug into consumers' TV sets and allow them to connect their TVs to Media Center PCs on a home network. Built around the Xilleon graphics and video processing chip from ATI, the devices will automatically detect any Media Center PC on a network and establish a connection with it. Consumers will then use a remote control to record and play back programs while sitting in front of their TV.

Separately, Microsoft is improving support for consumer electronics devices to connect to PCs and play PC-based digital media over home networks. Based on specifications developed by the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Forum A/V Working Group, the new technology (code-named Iceberg) will enable consumers to send audio and video to networked devices from within Windows.

Agnostic stance on writable DVD formats. Trying to bypass a format war between three incompatible writable DVD formats—DVD-RW/R, DVD+RW/R, and DVD-RAM—that could stall consumer adoption, Microsoft has announced it will support all three formats in future versions of Windows. Previously, Microsoft had not announced plans to natively support DVD-RW/R, which has been promoted by the DVD Forum, an industry group that includes Apple, Hitachi, NEC, Pioneer, Samsung, and Sharp.

Universal Audio Architecture (UAA). To improve the PC audio experience, Microsoft will deliver new audio drivers in Longhorn intended to eliminate audio glitches (such as drop-outs and delays) and reduce the performance hit sometimes caused by streaming audio. The new drivers are also meant to allow PCs to recognize advanced audio devices when they are plugged in, just as they recognize advanced graphics cards when they're plugged into an accelerated graphics port (AGP) today. The new drivers will support Universal Serial Bus (USB), IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and Intel's next-generation audio platform (code-named Azalia).

Media Transport Protocol (MTP). This new protocol will enable any portable device with digital media capabilities—including handheld PCs and phones—to connect to a PC and download digital media without additional software. Among other benefits, MTP can be used to transfer any type of digital media (audio, video, or photos) and will allow metadata properties (such as an artist's name or album title) to be attached to media objects to help portable devices display consistent playlists and other information.

HighMAT. Previously announced, this digital media publishing format created by Microsoft and Matsushita (Panasonic) helps consumer electronics makers create devices that can quickly read digital media files and metadata from writable CDs. At WinHEC, the companies announced that they would extend HighMAT to writable DVDs by the end of 2003.

Advanced Graphics

In his WinHEC keynote speech, Poole noted that gamers are willing to spend more money to buy the latest hardware in order to get advanced graphics capabilities necessary to play the latest games.

Microsoft hopes to extend this graphics-driven sales strategy beyond gamers by building a new graphics subsystem into Longhorn, offering new effects such as window translucency (the ability to see behind a window, offered by Apple in OS X) and animation. Microsoft revealed plans to implement a new driver model (in addition to the existing Windows XP model) to allow hardware manufacturers to take advantage of these new capabilities.

To help illustrate the importance of graphics in creating a more engaging PC experience, Gates demonstrated a Hewlett-Packard prototype, code-named Athens, that included a wide, high-resolution, flat-panel display.

Real-Time Communications

Bill Gates noted real-time communications as another area of concentration for Microsoft. In particular, Gates predicted big changes in PC telephony and painted a scenario in which calls coming over a public switched telephone network (PSTN), PBX exchange, or mobile phone could automatically be routed to a user's PC, which would be able to display information such as caller ID. The Athens PC demonstrated by Gates showed how OEMs can drive this vision by including hardware used in real-time communications, such as a microphone, speakerphone-quality speakers, and a video camera.

Although not mentioned specifically by Gates, the likely enabling technology for this scenario would be Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which lets users locate one another over a network and establish various types of real-time communications with them, including voice, video, and instant messaging. SIP is the core technology in Microsoft's Windows Messenger client and forthcoming Real-Time Communications Server 2003 (formerly code-named Greenwich).

Ease of Use

Striking a theme common in past WinHEC shows, Microsoft also explained how it is creating technologies to make PCs easier to use and urged hardware manufacturers to contribute to this goal.

Microsoft demonstrated a hardware-based navigation interface consisting of color-coded buttons, code-named Xeel, which it hopes hardware manufacturers will use on all Windows-based devices, including the many different flavors of PCs (e.g., desktop, notebook, Tablet, Media Center) and portable devices (e.g., Pocket PC, Smartphone, Smart Personal Objects Technology watches), as well as consumer electronics remote controls. This could encourage users to buy multiple devices by providing a common and intuitive way to find information on each device. (See the illustration "Xeel Navigation Interface".)

Gates used the Athens prototype PC to show other areas where Microsoft wants hardware manufacturers to improve the user experience, such as reducing cable clutter by including Bluetooth-enabled peripherals and building in uninterruptible power supplies that can be used to transition a PC to standby mode in case of a power outage, thereby preventing data loss.

For its part, Microsoft expressed its commitment to create and support technologies, such as UPnP and the UAA, that would make it easier for consumers to set up and install new hardware and peripherals and pledged to improve the reliability of Windows and applications through automatic error reporting and by building software based on .NET Framework–managed code.

Other WinHEC News

Although the bulk of the news coming out of WinHEC related to how Microsoft wants to work with hardware manufacturers to improve the consumer experience, the company also revealed some information that could be useful to developers and corporate IT planners.

Single source for hardware and driver developers. To make it easier for developers to write hardware drivers, Microsoft has consolidated information from six previous sites into a single portal: Windows Hardware and Driver Central (www.microsoft.com/whdc). The new portal will contain technical and logo program information, toolkits, and an online support service; it replaces sites for the Windows Platform Development, Driver Development Kits, Windows Hardware Quality Labs, Designed for Windows Logo Program, WinHEC, and Hardware Driver Quality sites.

Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). Microsoft began to reveal more detailed technical information about NGSCB, first announced in July 2002. NGSCB will use a combination of new OS components, new security chip sets, and changes to the CPU and peripherals to ensure that only authorized programs have access to certain data and can take certain actions.

In particular, Microsoft explained the four key attributes that NGSCB will deliver:

• Attestation, or the ability for one computer to prove its identity to another computer
• Sealed storage, which allows information to be encrypted so that only authorized applications can access it
• Strong process isolation, in which certain computing operations do not interact in any way with operations in the rest of the system
• Secure input and output, in which keystrokes (for example) are encrypted until they are needed by operations.

Longhorn in 2005. Longhorn is slated for delivery in 2005, and contrary to prior speculation and hints, Microsoft does not intend to release an interim version of the desktop OS before that time. The company also promised that more information about Longhorn would be forthcoming at the 2003 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October.

Resources

Technical information about networked audio/visual device support in Longhorn is available at www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/stream/AVnet.mspx.

Information about the UAA can be found at www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/audio/UAA.mspx.

For information about the MTP and other support for portable media players in Longhorn, see www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/DMD/MediaPort.mspx.

More information about the new graphics capabilities in Longhorn is available at www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/display/graphics-reqs.mspx.

An overview of the Athens PC is at www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/platform/pcdesign/athPC.mspx.

For more background on NGSCB, see "'Palladium' Plan for Trustworthy OS Revealed" on page 10 of the Aug. 2002 Update; Microsoft has posted new information at www.microsoft.com/resources/ngscb/productinfo.mspx.

Other technical information from WinHEC 2003 presentations is available at www.microsoft.com/winhec/papers03.mspx.

For general information on NGSCB, see www.microsoft.com/resources/ngscb/. Some technical information on NGSCB is available at www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/news/NGSCB.asp