Gates Lets Loose More Details On Windows Vista, Next-Generation Office

Microsoft showed yet-unseen features of the next versions of Windows and Office, and chairman Bill Gates told software developers to get ready for a "wave" of new products that could lead to a swell in corporate computer and software purchases, at a technical conference in Los Angeles Tuesday.

Microsoft is counting on Windows Vista and a product code-named Office 12, both due late next year, to persuade companies and consumers to upgrade from older versions of Microsoft's products. "Software is redefining how people do things," said Gates. "We're not even halfway through."

During Gates' keynote address at the company's Professional Developers Conference here, Microsoft previewed new graphical elements in Vista that let PC users navigate thumbnail images of open windows--including live video--and a new user interface for Office that eliminates drop-down menus. Gates also said Microsoft is building a new "workflow layer" into Windows that can automate how documents and E-mail notifications move through a group of colleagues. "The dreams of the late '90s of the Internet really revolutionizing E-commerce--those are not realized," he said.

Together, Microsoft hopes its new products will push a wave of PC upgrades at companies, many of which did their last big round of PC buying several years ago. The last version of Windows came out four years ago, in October 2001, and it will be another year-plus before Vista arrives. To drum up interest in its new operating system, Microsoft Tuesday said it would make $100 million in marketing funds available to independent software vendors that write apps for Windows Vista, and released a new "community technology preview" of Vista--part of a schedule of more frequent test releases from the company. The marketing funds will be available next summer, Microsoft said.

Microsoft hopes its new releases will boost growth of its biggest products. Windows and Office accounted for more than $33 billion in annual revenue at Microsoft last year, out of $39.8 billion in total revenue. They also brought in more than $17 billion in operating profit.

Microsoft group VP Jim Allchin said in an interview that Windows Vista has the potential to be the fastest-adopted PC operating system in history. It contains features that Microsoft can market to all its customer constituencies--consumers, IT pros, PC makers, and software developers. "We haven't had a product that does this in 10 years," he said. Allchin and Gates in their keynote speeches placed more emphasis on features that will make its new products attractive to end-users than the company has in the past.

New features in a prototype version of Windows Vista, for example, let users see previews of windows as they hover the mouse over Windows' task bar, or tab through panes. Users can label documents with metadata elements that make them more readily searchable by dragging keywords onto their icons. And a Windows "sidebar" lets users place an RSS reader, a clock, a slideshow, or other elements on the right-hand said of their desktops.

Office 12 seeks to make its applications' thousands of commands more reachable by PC users by dispensing with the familiar system of drop-down menus. Instead, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint prototypes shown here use contextual strips of icons that appear as users toggle between top-level menu choices. An early version of Microsoft's new Excel spreadsheet software includes graphical commands that can create a bar chart right inside a table of numbers by shading their cells, or highlighting tables in multiple colors to show high, midrange, and low values. In Word, scrolling among fonts previews all a document's text in the new font.

In addition to desktop features, Gates said server-side software that can automate how documents flow among groups of users is the "next frontier" of development in the computer industry.