embrace our UI innovations .. From Eric Rudder Sent: Thursday, July 15, 1999 9:56 AM To: Bill Gates Subject: latest draft, just to have The Next Wave.doc The Next Wave We have many good new technologies being developed in our product pipeline. However, we seem to be lacking a strategy where we make the whole greated then the sub of its parts. At a time when our core franchises are under such strong attack from competitors, this situation is especially painful. .. 2. The user experience We must innovate in the user inteface, as well as continue to attack some of the complexity that we (and indeed, the entire industry) have created. 2.1 User Interface Windows has long presented a rich user interface that has been embraced and ado by both end users and application developers. With the rise in popularity of web-based paradigms, developers are now building applications that do not uniquely leverage our UI infrastructure. HTML delivery of UI is seen to be a universal panacea, because it theoretically allows for greater system independence in all ways - operating system, graphic capability, browser version, devce form factor, etc. The fact that this is an illusion does not make our task any simpler. We must compel ISV's, both "traditional" and "modern", to embrace our UI innovations. Our challenge is no less than the need to re-establish thought leadership in user interface design. We are currently investing in new UI design in a few different areas. We can deliver many aspects of these innovations in Millennium and refine them in Neptune, so long as our @high concepts@ are sucessfull. Amoung the user interface innitiaves in the company today are; * Neptune - Activity Centers, etc * ePad - New metaphor of links * Agent - Engaging the user in a dialogue. Our goal for the next generation of UI must take the best from all of these efforts, and deliver an incredibly compelling overall experience for both the novice and the experienced user. Some specific goals are outlined below. .. 2.2 Attacking Complexity In addition to defining some new areas of excitment, like Activity Centers there are some other areas where we need to continue to enhance the user experience. I will mention just a few. Our PC health initiative means cleaning up the 'error' experience, both preventing errors, and truly helping to fix problems when they occur. We need to continue to leverage Windows Update.. We need to once and for all eliminate the problem of 'DLL Hell' - this means delivering COM+ Deployment, a.k.a Fusion, in timely manner. 2.3 A Big Bet Talk about speech/hw/vision here? 3 Establishing the Windows Schema http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/px03073.pdf -- court documents in the case of Comes v Microsoft.