COMDEX: Gates: Computers still transforming home, office

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates Sunday unveiled night a new application that aims to replace the paper note pad, and demonstrated a slew of digital devices creeping into the home and office that are powered by versions of the company's Windows operating system.

Speaking before an estimated crowd of 12,000 during his opening keynote at Comdex, Gates used new products as diverse as wireless computer displays, entertainment driven PCs and Internet-enabled common home appliances such as an alarm clock, to drive home his vision of the so-called "digital decade."

He introduced a new application here called OneNote, which will be the latest product to come from Microsoft's Information Worker group, which is responsible for its flagship Office suite of products, such as Word and Excel. Now 18 months in the making, OneNote mimics note-taking with a paper and pen, but improves it with the ability to save and search those notes in digital form.

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Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates Sunday unveiled night a new application that aims to replace the paper note pad, and demonstrated a slew of digital devices creeping into the home and office that are powered by versions of the company's Windows operating system.

Speaking before an estimated crowd of 12,000 during his opening keynote at Comdex, Gates used new products as diverse as wireless computer displays, entertainment driven PCs and Internet-enabled common home appliances such as an alarm clock, to drive home his vision of the so-called "digital decade."

He introduced a new application here called OneNote, which will be the latest product to come from Microsoft's Information Worker group, which is responsible for its flagship Office suite of products, such as Word and Excel. Now 18 months in the making, OneNote mimics note-taking with a paper and pen, but improves it with the ability to save and search those notes in digital form.

"It hasn't been that easy in the past to ... really organize your thoughts in a free-form way," Gates said. "There's been no member in the Office family that aims in that direction."

With OneNote, Gates said Microsoft is solving the problem. User can jot down notes with a stylus pen or with a keyboard, as well as drag an image or data from a Web page onto a OneNote document. The application also can record audio while taking notes and have that audio linked to the notes as a user writes. By clicking on a typed or handwritten word in a OneNote file, a user would hear the portion of the audio that was uttered when that note was written.

Gates also trumpeted his company's efforts around building an deploying Web services based on its .Net platform and the industry standard format XML. He demonstrated a Web service that will be available in the middle of 2003 from Kinko's. The service adds an option to a user's print menu from within a document that allows a file to be delivered over the Internet to Kinko's and printed at one of its facilities.

"They're moving along the path that they've talked a lot about (with Web services)," said Jean Bozman, an analyst with research company IDC, who attended Gates' keynote. "With the Kinko's example, they've provided a concrete example of what Web services can be."

One audience member who attended the keynote said he was cautious about the Kinko's example, though he didn't discard the technology. "It's the human side of Kinko's that I have a problem with. I've never had a print job there go right, and that's not something computers can fix," said Dave Bushnell, president of Digital Marketing Associates in New York.

The Windows server operating system that will be the foundation that powers new .Net Web services is Windows .Net Server 2003. Gates said the long-awaited server operating system will be released in April 2003. A second release candidate is expected to ship to testers by the end of the year. Microsoft's software development tool, Visual Studio .Net, will also be upgraded and released in final beta version in April, he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.