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Windows Into the Future

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=1206570

Find out what's in store for the next decaddand beyondof Windows computing. The possibilities may surprise you.

Michael J. Miller - PC Magazine

Oct. 12 -

As developers at Microsoft are busy readying Windows Vista for release in the second half of 2006, the company's top visionaries are already imagining how the operating system will evolve post-Vista. In early September, I met with several of Microsoft's top thinkers at the company's Redmond campus to see where Windows is headed over the next couple of decades. There is certainly no shortage of ideas, yet their overarching goal is to develop a stateless computing environment in which users can move freely among their home computer, work computer, smartphone, handheld, and other gadgets that will surely emerge. Their ideas may be dreams for now but offer a fascinating look into our digital future.

As Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates describes stateless computing, "In the future, things are going to be far more user-centric. You'll have a computer at work, a computer at home, a phone, and other devices. And instead of your statdနyour documents, your contacts, your schedulebeing on a single computer, you'll really want everything to be available to you on every device." That's a tall order for an operating system created when our computing needs were much simpler. As Gates explains, "Windows was written to run on a single computer, and then networking was added to connect to other computers."

In theory, stateless computing will offer relief from many of today's frustrations. Says MSN chief Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president, MSN Information Services, "It kills me that today I can provide users access to more than 5 billion documents, but I can't get the pictures off my home computer to show them to you right now."

A stateless computing environment offers many other advantages, but it will take at least a decade to get there. "The whole notion of stateless computing, where laptops and desktops are cached, and your state is something that's easy to annotate, mail around, back up, retrievdနthat's a ten-year proposition," says Chris Jones, corporate vice president of Windows Core Operating Systems Development. "That's when I can say, 'Back up all my stuff to there, shoot that laptop, plug in a new laptop' and get my state back."

Also driving the need for integration is the phenomenal surge in Internet usage. "We used to think about content and then about mobile desktop applications," says David Cole, senior vice president, MSN and Personal Services Group. "But take photos: Are they purely a desktop experience or are they a purely Internet experience? They're very much blended across the two." Yet the interfaces for working with images are different on a camera, phone, PC, and the Internet. One of Cole's objectives is a single "people-centric" user interface that's consistent across all these environments.

Effectively pulling together such an integrated system from a user-interface perspective is critical, says Joe Belifore, who heads Microsoft's eHome division. "I want consumers to see their PC as a device that really is the nerve center of their home and their digital existence." He imagines a scenario in which you're driving your car and you tell your hands-free cell phone to ask your PC to let you know the gate number of your arriving flight. "I think we will see that happen in the next ten years."

Of course, Microsoft needs to do a lot of work between now and then so that Windows can deal effectively with the latest hardware advances, such as 64-bit-capable processors, multicore processors, and hardware-based virtualization. The big challenge with the transition to 64-bit computing is writing new drivers so existing hardware continues to work. Workstations will go 64-bit first, followed by consumer desktops. Eventually, video editing, photo editing, music, and games will get there. "But it's not going to be overnight," says Cole. "The day that the real end-user value exceeds the cost is the day that people will move."

An even more fundamental shift is to multicore processors. As Jim Allchin, copresident, Microsoft Platforms and Services Division, points out, "We're moving from dual-core to multi-core to many-core systems, meaning more cores than you know what to do with." Multicore processors let you run several different processes at once. "That gives us an opportunity to do some new algorithms that may let us start to emulate human processing in a better way, because humans obviously are operating in a concurrent, parallel way all the time," he says.

Another technology we can look forward to is virtualization, essentially multiple virtual machines (VMs) running independently and communicating with each other. "Why isn't my office PC also my phone?" asks Jones. With virtualization, one of the VMs in your PC is the phone software, and it's completely isolated from the rest of the system.

WinFS: A Multitalented File System

Another major transition under way is the move to WinFS, an object-oriented file system originally slated to be part of Vista. "The dream is to have a common schema so that the data is not trapped inside the applications," says Allchin. With WinFS, applications can take advantage of one common schema set that they can manipulate, and contents can be joined with other types of business informatiomနanything from personnel records to purchase orders.

For this to happen, Microsoft needs great underlying database technology, object-relational mapping, developer tools, the right security model, and the right understanding of how to deal with older dat`not to mention compatibility with existing applications. "It's a wicked hard problem," says Allchin.

Windows also needs to keep up with the increasing demands for server power and storage requirements. "We use the Windows server to power our Internet platform, so our search system runs on Windows 64-bit. We think it has a competitive advantage over Google. We like the way it scales; we like the way it's easily managed and low-cost."

As for the future, Allchin thinks big. "I'd like to offer infinite storage for every person on the planet. And I'd like to make it easily indexable and bindable. I'd like to have multiple copies of the entire Internet on the server so we can do testing and applications."

A Different Kind of Application

Microsoft is also concentrating its efforts on tying together different machines and different kinds of information, connecting back-end information and productivity applications. "Business intelligence, work-flow, and document management are all part of what we call the new world of work. People want to communicate and collaborate across boundaries. They want to have access to information anytime, anywhere," says Jeff Raikes, president, Microsoft Business Division.

That's why Microsoft has made huge investments in real-time communications and collaboration. Microsoft's applications business knows a thing or two about converting analog processes into digital processes. Just think word processing, databases, and spreadsheets. Now the company is gearing up to do the same with telephony. "Today the whole world of telephony infrastructure is very analog," says Raikes. "It's going to become digital and a part of the overall productivity framework.

Meanwhile, MSN's Mehdi wants to see better ways to navigate. "Like in Minority Report. I'd like to be able to move through the data on the Internet with that kind of visualization. Maybe I can talk to the thing; maybe I can project 3D views and touch the data."

Such advances in user interfaces could dramatically change how we interact with our computers. Allchin imagines that with some significant breakthroughs, we'll have user interfaces that we'll control by moving our eyes, gesturing, or pointing. "Being able to point at things without even touching them seems huge. It would be nice to have a wall that you can point to in your room. We have some prototypes of this stuff around here now in research. I think they're within reach," says Allchin.

Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid spends most of his time thinking about where technology is headed and has some pretty far-out ideas for future user interfaces. "Any surface that you might have been using for interaction, like a whiteboard, can suddenly become a way of accessing your computer. Let's say I put PC Magazine down on the table. The system will recognize what magazine it is and what issue it is, and bring up articles and things related to it."

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief technology officer, would like applications and machines to connect more easily and securely. In the early days of the Internet, "I could open a session from a program on my computer to a program on your computer. You can't do that anymore. There are firewalls and all sorts of roadblocks, for good reason," he says. "There would be more innovation, arguably, if it was easier to write software that let peopldin a trusted, safe waxနinteract with one another directly. Everybody who does this cross-firewall thing has to do an immense amount of work to make it happen."

Automating Software...And Your Life

With research under way on several fronts, from stateless computing to in- novative user interfaces, Microsoft is exploring another frontier: automated pro- gramming tools that can prove whether a program works correctly. Ozzie recounts that when Microsoft bought Groove, the collaboration software he developed at Groove Networks, Microsoft had to bring it into compliance from a security standpoint with analysis tools that helped identify bugs in the code. The tools dramatically increased both the quality of the code and programmer productivity.

"Holy cow, did they have tools," Ozzie recalls. "It blew me away. I had no idea these things could be so good." While the next release of VisualStudio.Net is slated to include versions of these tools, the hope is that they'll be everywhere. They're based on work begun at Microsoft Research. Rashid considers the group's progress on proving various capabilities of programs as one of its big successes in recent years. For instance, the Vista Device Driver Kit includes a module that helps device drivers prove that their driver meets certain criteria. Now the group is working to prove properties of larger scale systems.

"We're still a ways away from being able to state every property and being able to write every specification that we need for all aspects of the systems," Rashid says. He hopes that ten years from now programmers will be able to make very strong statements about what application features will and will not do and then to prove those statements mathematically, rather than having to test the features.

The work in computer-generated programming promises to improve application development over the next few years. Says Allchin, "It's not going to be some dramatic thing, but if I look out 10 or 20 years, it's going to play a factor in how programs are written. Machines are going to help you, just like we're using machines to help build software now."

Further out, Rashid imagines a future in which everything you've ever typed, every picture you've ever taken, every word you've ever spoken, and every conversation you've ever held becomes a part of the permanent record of your life. "You can keep about a year's worth of what you see through your eyes in a terabyte disk. It won't be long now before you start to think of that as an archaically small amount of storage," Rashid says.

In pursuit of this vision, Microsoft Research has developed the SenseCam, which snaps a picture every time something changes in your environment, even the temperature. "You could have a complete record from the time you were born. If you want it, we're not that far," Rashid adds.

Perhaps that time frame is too optimistic, but one thing is more certain: The ideas bubbling up at Microsoft today promise a radically improved user experience for the future. As Mehdi puts it: "People think there's not a lot left to be done. I think there's a massive amount to be done.