Microsoft

LOS ANGELES--When Ray Ozzie penned his Internet Services Disruption memo back in 2005, he had a pretty good idea where the computing world was going. He just didn't know how Microsoft was going to get there.

While many are ready to write off Microsoft as an declining icon of computing's last generation, Ozzie sees Microsoft positioned to leapfrog some of the companies that tend to be thought of as the leaders of the cloud computing world--names like Amazon, Salesforce and Google.

Ray Ozzie on stage at PDC '09.

(Credit: Microsoft)

"I will never, ever, utter the words 'mission accomplished' for obvious reasons," Ozzie said in an interview after his speech at the Professional Developers Conference. "But I'm really pleased with where things are."

It's been a tough journey, to be sure. But Ozzie says Microsoft has changed in ways he could not have imagined. In particular, Ozzie points to Windows Azure--Microsoft's operating system in the clouds. Rather than just offer a set of services to move today's computing programs to remote servers, Ozzie says Azure is designed to handle the applications of tomorrow.

"When we began developing Azure, we developed it more or less with a clean sheet of paper saying, 'What will the operating environment look like for the next 30 years?' Ozzie said. "If you look at VMware or (Amazon's) EC2, what it really is--and I mean to be saying this respectfully--but it's more or less a (virtual machine) hosting environment. It's not a transformational computing environment."

In a lengthy interview with CNET, Ozzie also talked about lessons Microsoft learned from the recent Sidekick outage as well as why people are wrong to count Microsoft out of the smartphone race.

Here is an edited transcript:

Question: From your perspective, where would you say Microsoft is in terms of making the kinds of shifts you talked about in 2005? What is different than you thought it might be?
Ozzie: You know, when I wrote the memo, I really didn't have a crisp plan in terms of how we're going to accomplish it. And I will never, ever, utter the words "mission accomplished" for obvious reasons. But I'm really pleased with where things are. I mean, I think we have a lot of software yet to deliver, but out at the end user perspective, the notion of Office being across phone, Web, and PC, kind of re-pivoting the experience around productivity as opposed to the device, I'm really happy about [that].

I thought users would be more ready for it by this point in time than I think people really are. I don't think in our minds yet we've yet found, quote unquote, the desktop for the Web in terms of our own personal stuff. It's kind of still scattered out there on the Web.

I didn't think that the cloud computing thing--the back-end side--would take off as much as it has. There wasn't as much about that in the memo, but at that same time, you'd probably be amused to see some of the PowerPoint decks that I was shopping around internally at the time with these big pictures of hydroelectric dams and all these things saying there's going to be this recentralization that happens at the back end of computing, but I didn't know how it was going to pan out.

You announced that Azure is going into production January 1. Is the code changing significantly between now and then, or is that just when the billing mechanisms kick in?
Ozzie: What happens is--and this is all just really difficult to explain to people--but we've rolled out big, new data centers. The community technology preview is on a certain sets of servers. Some of those people may or may not opt to become production customers. Getting their things migrated from one set of systems to the other, it's just internal logistics. So, no, the code doesn't change a whole lot, it's more operational processes. And we really don't want to start charging people until we at least have one billing cycle of knowing that everything is right.

You mentioned moving people from one set of servers to another and immediately I hear in the back of my head "Sidekick." Obviously, the architecture is totally different. But can you talk about what you took away from that [outage for the Sidekick device in October]? In one sense, it was a totally other part of the business, at the same time, it was sort of this early cloud service, and a pretty spectacular outage.
Ozzie: There are a lot of lessons to be learned. Let me just preface this by saying it's inappropriate for me to go deeply into it not just for legal aspects and things like that, but because they're T-Mobile's customers, not ours. T-Mobile is our customer. But let me just speak at the abstract level.

There are lessons to be learned in terms of how acquisitions are dealt with. I know that's a non-obvious conclusion, but basically when you're building your own services and when you're building services from scratch, you have a certain understanding because of the people who were involved in that or whatever--of how this thing relates to that thing. When you bring in a company, you tend to think of things differently. And so there were some lessons to be learned there. There were lessons that we didn't learn, (areas where) we know better and I'll just say we weren't using best practices in certain areas.

The biggest lesson is something that I shouldn't have had to learn, and I'll tell you why. In Groove, I took, for the time, a very contrarian view of, no, it's got to be all at the edge. Nothing at the center, it's all peer-to-peer distributed. Then we--and I mean including me--have kind of swung the pendulum to appliance-based computing that's Web-centric, where the truth is in the cloud, so to speak.

One of the fascinating things about the Sidekick recovery process was how wonderful it was that data is also on the devices, because when your confidence level drops in one copy of the data and you have another one, it's really handy. So knowing to treat peer computing and centralized computing are both good, they're both very, very good.

You talked about the cloud as being early days. And I'm curious, there are some folks that have been playing in the space for a while, you know, SalesForce and Amazon and even Google to an extent. What do you feel Microsoft is offering in the cloud that competitors aren't?
Ozzie: When we began developing Azure, we developed it more or less with a clean sheet of paper saying, "What will the operating environment look like for the next 30 years?" If the servers like Linux and Windows NT-based systems and Mac OS, if these are all based on things that were built when I was in school, what's the next one going to look like? That's the most significant advantage.

If you look at VMware or [Amazon's] EC2, what it really is--and I mean to be saying this respectfully--but it's more or less a [virtual machine] hosting environment. It's not a transformational computing environment. All programs in the future will be written in a way that there is no single point of failure. There's no one server that can die and take down the service. And unless you write your applications for a programming model that's inherently parallel, you don't get to that point. And so, yes, we support the same kind of mode that the EC2 or VMware will do where you can take a VM and put it up there, but the reality is you don't get the benefit of cloud unless you use this other thing.

You actually had to go back and add that in. One of the things you talked about today was to take a virtual machine and put it up on Azure.
Ozzie: That's a very good observation. Last year, we introduced, I guess I'll say [something that was] a little too far ahead and we had to back into the present. But I'm extremely pleased about [adding the virtual machine ability] because anytime someone starts playing with [Azure] and they start to get a taste for what it's really like, then you really say, oh, I get it. Now I know how to design the software for that next generation.

You talked about "three screens and a cloud" as a pretty consistent refrain for Microsoft. But we're still not hearing as much about some of those screens, particularly on the mobile side. You mentioned in the spring we're going to hear sort of about the next-generation platform?
Ozzie: Yeah.

A lot of people are saying, you know, Microsoft and the phone--it's been way too long, game over. Why is that not the case?
Ozzie: I think it makes for good copy to take an extreme position that someone is dead or alive or this or that. Yes, iPhone has a lot of momentum, unquestionably. But I think the phenomenon we're in right now is the app phone. And if you look at the depth of apps that are on these phones, they're not very deep. It's not like Office or AutoCAD, where there are just thousands of man years that have gone into developing these apps. They're relatively thin apps that are companions to some service.

And I think if you look at anyone who's building an app phone--whether it's Palm, Google with Android, RIM--ultimately, all the apps that people want will be on all the phones. They're relatively straight porting efforts. I think people are imagining some kind of a barrier to entry, at least from an app perspective that I don't believe is there.

The biggest barrier to entry is: is it a phone that people want to use? And is it a phone that carriers want to sell and people have to measure us based on what we produce. But I don't believe that there's an app barrier.

This year, it seems like you guys have made a conscious choice to focus on Azure and not on some of the more finished services that live one or two layers up. Are you still pursuing the sort of Live Mesh and the Live Platform layers?
Ozzie: Absolutely.

Live Mesh, as a specific case in point, after we got to a certain point in the beta, we said, okay, how are we going to get this to scale from instead of a million or two million people to hundreds of millions of people? So the team and the technology was put into Windows Live and so even though I'm not making a product announcement, when you look at the next version of the Live services that are downloaded to your desktop, I think you'll see the contribution that the Mesh technologies and the Live platform had to that.

In terms of high-level services, no, we're still concentrating [on them]. You know, we still have a very big focus on the Web apps. I think you probably won't hear a lot about that at PDC, but you'll hear some more about that as Office comes more into a broader beta.

Between Pinpoint and Windows Marketplace, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Zune Marketplace--you guys have a lot of marketplaces.
Ozzie: It'll be converging down to two, one for consumers and one for IT and developers. Yes, it's a big company, yes, we have many ways to sell, but ultimately, there should be one place for consumers to buy things online, you should have one shopping cart across this and that. That doesn't necessarily mean one [user interface] to the marketplace because when you're in Xbox, you want to see it through Xbox. When you're on a phone, you want to see it through the phone.

On the PC, I'm still not actually convinced what the right thing is. When you're on a PC, do you want to see the marketplace through the Web or through a client? You know, I can kind of see both. I mean, look at the Zune marketplace, people like being able to buy it through a media-oriented marketplace, but if you were buying apps, it's not really clear. But in any case, there's one marketplace back end that is syndicatable into multiple front ends for the consumer and for the enterprise/IT, and what we were talking about today was really the enterprise/IT one.

It struck me that today, a lot of the story about the cloud has been that it's great for load balancing, it's great for sort of having predictable investment in IT, but there hasn't been as much about what are the benefits when your app is running in the cloud. It sounds like the new project code-named Dallas could be an example of one of those things where you can build a type of application that you couldn't build on premise because you're using someone else's data.
Ozzie: It is the right way of thinking about it. What we're basically trying to say is by agreeing to get together in a certain way, by agreeing on certain guardrails on the road that we'll all drive on, there can be benefits. Right now, there are many pieces of public data, there are lots of commercial data providers and each one has a different kind of a licensing mechanism. Some license by developer, some license by customer, some license by individual user. There are just lots of different terms. And a lot of the big benefits in the data that's out there are what happens when you join them, when you bring them together. And I believe that there's going to be a lot of potential in this.

Will we see Microsoft be kind of one of those first and best customers, bringing a lot of its data and making it available ?
Ozzie: I think the biggest set of data that you'll see us take in many directions is maps. It's the most obvious from a consumer's perspective. You can layer upon it quite nicely. You can layer both apps and other forms of data on it quite nicely.

What are some of the things that people have developed on Azure? Are there any areas of types of applications that have particularly surprised you?
Ozzie: I'm not sure if you noticed some weeks ago, Qi Lu was at Web 2.0 and he announced this Twitter on Bing feature? That is on Azure. And it's one of the most fascinating stories in terms of agility.

A number of people from across the company looked at this thing and said, "Wow, if we had the Twitter fire hose, what could we do with it? Let's start experimenting." And this other lab said, "Oh, well I already know what to do, you actually have access to the fire hose? How could we ever get enough machines put together in time?"

And just in a matter of weeks, you know, this app just came together, people came together, and we had this thing live. And the number from the virtual machines that are processing the incoming feeds, it's fairly astounding. Since that time, other experiments involving 2,000 machines here, 3,000 machines there, are just popping up because people haven't conceptualized what would it be like to have that kind of resources at your disposal.

Are these the kinds of data feeds we're going to have in the future? I mean, Twitter, you have this tremendous data feed, but you can't take in everything, at least not over an extended period of time right now.
Ozzie: In late '05, I guess it was, when I wrote that last memo, I had a theme that I was kind of talking about internally about moving to the cloud experiences and the back end. These days, I'm basically asking people the question: What if everything was recorded, everything? You are recording in your pen there. Some phones have the capability now--or maybe they're just prototypes that we've got--but measure barometric pressure, measure temperature.

Obviously, there are accelerometers. If you can measure everything and you have this aggregated data, what can you then do with it? And I think just getting people to experiment with it will bring us to places that we haven't known before. People concentrate so much on the scary aspect of privacy related to advertising base uses of it, but there are other uses.

From a health perspective, there are many things that I could measure about myself that would be of value to me and no one else, but we still aren't building those apps. It's just too hard to gather all these things.

When you kind of look at where you are, what are the gates to getting where you want as fast as possible? Is it still a matter of evangelizing inside the company? How much is it still a challenge that Microsoft is such a big company that is divided into product teams responsible for the here and now? What are the things that are sort of the biggest gates?
Ozzie: I would say the biggest gate is the same gate it's been for several years, but it's trending in distinctly the right direction, which is prioritization. It's just simply there are a lot of opportunities, there are a lot of different directions that we could go. And left unchecked, every time you do something new, it causes more complexity.

One of the positive side effects, if you will, of the economic downturn is the fact that we've all been forced to make the hard choices.

Microsoft said on Monday that it will open up the data format behind its Outlook program.

In a blog posting, Microsoft group manager Paul Lorimer said the company is working to publish the specifications behind Outlook's .pst files.

"Data portability has become an increasing need for our customers and partners as more information is stored and shared in digital formats," Lorimer wrote. "One scenario that has come up recently is how to further improve platform-independent access to e-mail, calendar, contacts, and other data generated by Microsoft Outlook."

The move, he said, will "allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice."

Lorimer said the documentation effort is still in its early stages. "We are engaging directly with industry experts and interested customers to gather feedback on the quality of the technical documentation to ensure that it is clear and useful."

Once released, Lorimer said Microsoft will offer it "under our Open Specification Promise, which will allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way."

It's a question we all face: with chips getting more processing cores instead of more gigahertz, is your next computer going to actually run your software faster?

Microsoft is one of the companies that feels the pressure to most acutely when it comes to putting those cores to work. Though it doesn't pretend to have the problem licked, Microsoft does believe Windows 7 provides a better foundation for using multicore systems than earlier versions of the operating system.

Jon DeVaan, head of Windows Core Operating System Division

(Credit: Microsoft)

One key part of solving the PC's multicore problems draws from the world of big iron, and Windows 7 can support much bigger iron--servers with as many as 256 processor cores compared with 64 for its predecessor. Now a few years into the multicore era, even today's laptops are able to juggle as many tasks as reasonably powerful servers from just a few years ago. Intel's new Core i7 "Clarksfield" processor for mobile computers has four cores that manage a total of eight separate "threads" of work.

"One dimension is support for a much larger number of processors and getting good linear scaling on that change from 64 to 256 processors," said Jon DeVaan, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division. "There's all kinds of depth in that change."

Linear scaling means that doubling the number of processors means a doubling in performance--something rarely achieved in real-world computing. But what does 256 or even 64 processors have to do with a PC with four or eight cores? In short, updating the Windows plumbing to support bigger servers also helps work run more smoothly on smaller multicore machines, for example by ensuring data cached in memory is close on hand to the processor core that needs it, DeVaan said.

It's crucial that Microsoft help solve multicore issues. The company is responsible not just for the most widely used personal-computer operating system but also for the programming tools many use to create the software that runs on it. That's why another broad attempt to ease multicore pains takes place within Visual Studio 2010, the upcoming version of Microsoft's programming tools.

"People have been working on this for a long time. So far there haven't been any magic bullets," Devaan said. "The commercial reality is creating a lot more urgency now, so I think we'll see a lot more approaches taken."

Unlocking multicore power is a point of competition, too: Apple's newest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, adds a facility called Grand Central Dispatch to centralize management of all the various threads of programs as they run on a system.

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices bear responsibility, too, since they embraced multicore designs once heat problems put an end to the clock-frequency race, but Microsoft has much more clout in developer relations.

Windows 7 is due to ship October 22.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Multicore designs can help easily when people are running many separate programs or when running programs that are "embarrassingly parallel"--in other words, when a task has many naturally independent subtasks, such as rendering each of a video's many frames. But many programs won't easily make the jump to a parallel design when they're set up as a single sequence of steps today.

"An operating system is never going to be able to take an application that isn't already parallel and make it so. Developers still need to multi-thread their apps," said Evans Data analyst Janel Garvin.

Visual Studio 2010
So it's good Microsoft is working on parallel programming aids within Visual Studio.

"Microsoft has done surprisingly little until recently to help developers write parallel applications, except for their alliance with Intel to promote Parallel Studio," an Intel collection of programming tools for parallel programming, Garvin said. "However, in the last year they've made some announcements and promises for Visual Studio 2010 about enhanced tools for parallel programming. It's likely that the success of Parallel Studio has impressed upon them the importance of providing Windows developers with the tools they need to remain competitive going into the future when manycore will be the standard."

Eventually, programmers will have to embrace parallel programming to be competitive, Garvin said. Parallel Studio helped bring the concepts to a much more mainstream audience, she said, and Evans Data's spring 2009 global developer survey found 40 percent of programmers are working on multithreaded applications today and another 15 percent plan to in the next year.

"Parallel programming is complex, difficult and labor-intensive, for even the most skilled developers, which has led developers to avoid writing parallel programs, leaving many CPU cycles unused," according to Steve Teixeira, Microsoft's principal product unit manager of parallel computing. The company's attempt to improve the situation comes not just in Visual Studio 2010 but also in another future product, version 4 of the company's .Net Development Framework.

Parallel programming tools
Among those features:

• The Task Parallel Library, which lets .Net programmers write more parallel code in familiar terms. For example, programmers are used to "for loops" that repeat a particular task a specific number of times; library lets each step of the loop happen simultaneously instead of sequentially.

The new Intel Core i7 processor for mobile computers has four cores and can run eight threads.

(Credit: Intel)

• The Microsoft Concurrency Runtime can provides a shared resource for scheduling tasks and allocating resources--and which works better on Windows 7.

• The Asynchronous Agents Library can permit separate threads of execution to pass messages among each other. That's useful in cases where separate threads need to head off no-no conditions such as when

• Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ) technology lets programmers perform some operations with data in parallel rather than sequentially.

• The Parallel Pattern Library is designed to make parallel programming easier for those using the C++ language.

Microsoft knows none of this is truly easy, though. DeVaan wonders about cases when existing software is being parallelized--is each step in a parallel for loop really independent of the others? He sees "a lot of hand-waving" around the computing industry that glosses over the true difficulties.

"As an industry, we're going to be working hard to make it work better and working with broad set of developers to target (multicore programming) without undue work," DeVaan said. "Will these approaches really accomplish it? That's an open question."

A security hole in Internet Explorer that opened the browser to hackers since early July was caused by a single typo in Microsoft's code.

An errant ampersand ("&") took the blame for the exploit, admitted Microsoft in a blog published Tuesday at its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Web site.

Michael Howard, a security program manager at Microsoft, explained in his blog that the typo corrupted the code of an ActiveX control used by the browser. The control was created by Microsoft using an older library of code, which Howard admitted has flaws. Because of those flaws, the typo caused the code to write untrusted data, exposing the browser to the bad guys.

Outside of its regular Patch Tuesday routine, Microsoft issued an emergency fix for IE, which it said would block attempts to exploit the flaw in ActiveX controls.

Development tools like Microsoft's own Visual Studio use the same library of code, known as Active Template Library (ATL). On the same day it released the emergency patch for IE, the company also released a Visual Studio fix.

Howard said the typo would have been difficult to spot in a review of the code, and that none of Microsoft's code analysis methods would have uncovered it either.

In his blog, Howard played a high-tech version of "Where's Waldo?" by challenging readers to find the typo amid a few short lines of code, even hinting that it was a single character.

The code lines he listed were:
__int64 cbSize;
hr = pStream->Read((void*) &cbSize, sizeof(cbSize), NULL);
BYTE *pbArray;
HRESULT hr = SafeArrayAccessData(psa, reinterpret_cast(&pbArray));
hr = pStream->Read((void*)&pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL);

And his riddle for readers:
"I'll give you one more clue - it's a one character typo. Give up? Look at the last line. The first argument is incorrect. It should be: hr = pStream->Read((void*)pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL);"

The hole was originally uncovered earlier this month by a pair of German researchers. Thomas Dullien (also known as Halvar Flake), CEO of Zynamics GmbH, and his friend Dennis Elser detailed their discovery in a blog. After the exploit became known, the two did some digging into the code and found the unwanted "&" character.

So what will Microsoft do to guard against future typos?

In his blog, Howard acknowledged the need to clean up the company's coding process. He said that Microsoft will update the tools it uses to find these types of errors. The company will also require its programmers to use the newer ATL code. In the past, Microsoft never told its programmers what to use. But says Howard in his blog, "We're going to change that!"

The E-mail Standards Project is urging Twitter users to pressure Microsoft to support better HTML formatting in Outlook.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Dave Greiner was distressed in 2007 when Microsoft decided to use Microsoft Word's relatively rudimentary technology to display HTML-encoded e-mail in Outlook. Now, facing the extension of that choice into the forthcoming Office 2010, he's agitating more loudly for change.

Greiner, a member of the informal E-mail Standards Project group, set up a Web site called FixOutlook.org and urged everybody who agrees with his position to publicize their dismay on Twitter; more than 19,000 did so by Wednesday afternoon.

Microsoft, while encouraging feedback on the matter, stood by its decision in a response published on the Microsoft Office Team blog.

In a move to tie their collaboration tighter, Microsoft and Lexmark on Tuesday announced that they have entered into a broad patent cross-licensing agreement.

Under the arrangement, Lexmark will license its patents for its printers and multifunction devices, as well as its other products, to Microsoft. And the Redmond, Wash., based company, in return, will offer access to a wide range of its software.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

"We believe this agreement will improve the productivity of both our companies and result in enhanced product offerings and increased satisfaction for all our customers," Marty Canning, Lexmark's printing solutions and services division president, said in a statement.

Sample JavaScript using JQuery.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft said Sunday that it plans to ship the JQuery JavaScript library with its Visual Studio developer tool suite.

The software powerhouse said that jQuery would be one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.net Ajax Control Toolkit, and would also have a role in new Ajax server-side helper methods. The 15KB JQuery JavaScript library will be distributed as is, with no forking, and files will continue to adhere to the JQuery MIT license.

In addition, Microsoft said that it would contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches to the JQuery open-source project and that later this year it would extend product support to JQuery.

The announcement came in a blog post by Scott Guthrie, a vice president in Microsoft's developer division, who described the library's attraction:

A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

Guthrie also pointed to a newly posted tutorial on Scott Hanselman's Computerzen blog about integrating JQuery with ASP.net Ajax.

Writing on the JQuery blog, John Resig said that mobile phone heavyweight Nokia also is adopting JQuery as part of its application development platform. As is the case with Microsoft, he said, Nokia isn't looking to make any changes to the library, and its developers will contribute to the JQuery project.

Resig, a lead developer of JQuery, wrote:

Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web Run-Time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the web run-time...

...The jQuery test suite is already integrated into the test suites of Mozilla and Opera and this move will see a significant level of extra testing being done on Internet Explorer and WebKit - above-and-beyond what is already done by the jQuery team.

There's no shortage of people talking about cloud computing these days. But are they all talking about the same thing?

Speaking with venture capitalist Ann Winblad at the Churchill Club onThursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer addressed those differences of opinion:

"I would have thought I knew what the word 'cloud computing' meant," he said, "until I sat with Anne and a bunch of venture capitalists this morning who used the word completely differently than I would have used it."

Ballmer declined to get into the specifics of Microsoft's vision, or to offer any details on its "Red Dog" project. That topic, he said, is something the company will open up about at its Professional Developer Conference in late October.

But he did offer this stab at a definition: "I think when people talk about cloud computing they're talking about taking some stuff, putting it outside the firewall, and perhaps putting it on servers that are also shared--or storage systems--that are also shared, perhaps with other companies that they know nothing about."

See also:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Like others in the industry, Craig Mundie sees computing moving increasingly to the cloud. The big question is: what will be the "killer" applications driving demand?

Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, offered up the company's vision for the next phase of computing at the EmTech conference here on Thursday. That vision includes an increasing reliance on cloud-based computing, robotics, and far-flung sensors. And, Mundie says, client-based operating systems.

"Whether it's Windows or something else, something has to make all of this iron work. People say OS is irrelevant, (but) demands on the operating system are actually getting higher and higher," Mundie said.

Microsoft's Craig Mundie explains the company's client/cloud vision.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET Networks)

Still, Mundie acknowledged that most people "don't choose Windows...they choose applications. It's the killer apps people are choosing and that will be true in the next generation" of computing.

"I think that will be true as we go forward with this new composite platform. People won't really care what the iron is, or the underlying OS."

Mundie's comments underscore a primary concern for Microsoft, as cloud computing becomes more widespread: How does the company keep Windows relevant?

That's a larger concern that Mundie, along with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, will need to tackle with Microsoft's evolving "client/cloud" strategy that posits operating systems will perform a vital role in local processing. Adobe Systems--which only recently launched a Web-based services--agrees. But Google and other competitors clearly see Web-based applications as driving future development.

Despite the far-reaching vision that Mundie discussed here, it's the little things that still matter most to many Windows users.

One conference attendee asked Mundie how Microsoft can bring broad technological advances, such as Mundie's vision for what he calls "spatial computing," down to a more human level and allow computing technology to better recognize human error and misunderstanding.

The attendee, a recent convert to Vista, said that his wife could not find a way to shut down the PC and had reverted to unplugging it from the wall. Couldn't Vista have helped her?

In response, Mundie said that there has "always been a tension between advancing and maintaining capability with the past. Your wife should have easily been able to discover how to turn Vista off. But we are not there yet."

Mundie referenced the "ribbon" feature of Office 2007, which was intended to make it easier to find the hundreds of features within Office. He also mentioned a product called Bob, "a more derided product" that Microsoft marketed in the 1990s as a way to help new users navigate Windows. It flopped, though the company did keep at least one Bob innovation--and much-despised feature--called "Clippy" as part of Word for some years later.

"With Bob," he said, "we tried to create this product that would have a sidebar conversation with users to teach them how to do things. Clippy really wasn't enough help. If we want to make things simple, the software is a lot harder.

"As we get this change in computational capability, we need to include these technologies to let the machine help you better," he said.