>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.
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