Posted: May 19, 2003

Windows Client Senior Vice President Will Poole, who is in charge of development and marketing of all Windows client operating systems, explained the Microsoft's of "immersive" PC technology in his keynote speech at WinHEC 2003 (his remaks have been edited):

The industry's biggest problem right now is not the bad economy, it's not anemic IT spending, it's not market saturation; it's none of those things. The problem we face in the industry is this feeling that I've got something that works right now. It's good enough. We haven't immersed the technology into [people's] lives as well as we could and we haven't asked them to immerse their lives into the technology as well as could be done either. We have to build those products and technologies that really pull out that emotional reaction in people and give them a reason to engage in a technology, engage in the new product and bring it into their lives in ways they've never done before. Now, to meet that goal, you have to make people's lives easier. It can't be that adopting a new technology is going to add complexity, it's going to add uncertainty to me. I've got to be able to trust it. I've got to be able to depend on it.