Snippets



PC price crash

Microsoftís founder and CEO Bill Gates has predicted that the PC could cost as little as $500 in the future.

The forecast was made during a speech at Americaís prestigious Harvard University.

Skyís the limit

Microsoft has been working with United Airlines to develop a new World Wide Web site which will enable United Airlines customers to reserve airline tickets, hotel rooms and rent cars over the Internet. Internet users will be able to order special meals, choose seats and, whatís more, theyíll gain $25 worth of drinks and food vouchers when using the service.

Windows NT

in 64-bits

Windows NT™ is about to gain

64-bits, literally. Microsoft announced its plans to build a full 64-bit version of the business operating system at the Comdex Spring trade show in Chicago, America this June.

Microsoft sets off to eShop

Microsoft took more than a virtual step forward in the world of electronic commerce last month when it announced its plans to acquire eShop, a leading company in Internet commerce software. EShopís technology will be incorporated into the Microsoft Merchant product, which provides the retailing component of the Microsoftís Normandy platform and the tools for building online shops and malls.

Future reflected in Windows NT

Microsoft has been demonstrating its next generation Directory Server, a combination of DNS and X.500 which will form a core part of the future version of Microsoft® Windows NT™.

Europe is all for open Windows

Information systems managers in Europe believe Microsoft® Windows NT™ Server is more open than leading versions of the UNIX operating system according to an independent survey published

by Inter/View.

East meets Web

Microsoft and Metrowerks have joined forces to bring the Java programming language and its own ActiveX Internet technology to the Mac. This means that Mac users will soon be able to view interactive Internet World Wide Web pages with animation, video clips and sound.

Sales soar for Windows 95

If youíre a Windows® 95 user then youíre in good company. Over 62.7 million copies of Windows 95 will be sold this year alone according to an independent report published by international market research agency Dataquest ñ thatís over three times more than Microsoft shipped in 1995.







Microsoft looks ahead with Office 97


The latest version of Microsoft® Office was recently demon-strated by Microsoft. To be launched at the end of this year, Microsoft Office 97 is designed to work closely with the Internet and company Intranets and has many enhanced features and ease-of-use capabilities, including an improved IntelliSense engine.

Microsoft Office 97 contains upgraded versions of Microsoft® Word, Microsoft® Excel, Microsoft® Schedule+, Microsoft® PowerPoint® and a new category of application, Microsoft® Outlook.

Microsoft Outlook is a desktop information manager designed to cope with ëinformation overloadí. Outlook intelligently and automatically manages all information received from internal and external sources, and centrally manages emails, schedules, journals and a contacts database. It is intended to be the future Office client for Microsoft® Exchange and Schedule+.

Outlook also provides an autopreview of all emails so that you can read the first three lines of any email without opening it. It also enables you to prioritise, dump or assign due-dates to tasks using natural language. For instance, if you typed ënext Fridayí, it would automatically understand that date. A journal facility gathers all information from emails and Schedule+ to track your time, making client billing much simpler and more efficient. The contacts database can store three email addresses per person and can also store Web pages.

All applications in Office 97 will include Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications, while PowerPoint has an animation player. Word users will also be able to simply draw tables with a pencil, while the word processor will intelligently understand when a World Wide Web address is typed and will create a ëliveí link to that page. Users then simply double-click on the link to connect to the Internet.

All applications can also have Web toolbars and include enhanced Internet Assistants for creating

Web pages. There will also be a document map for arranging documents. Office 97 will run on Windows® 95 and Windows NT™.




Fonts all the same



Microsoft is working with one of the worldís most influential software companies to ensure that all fonts on computers are compatible in the future.

Microsoft and Adobe have agreed to develop a universal font technology that will encompass both Microsoftís TrueType fonts and Adobeís Type 1 fonts. The result, OpenType, will be backwardly-compatible with both font technologies and will form part of future versions of Microsoft® Windows® 95 and Windows NT™ as well as graphics, Internet and publishing applications from Adobe. The partnership is great news for consumers who will no longer need

to worry about incompatibilities.

Microsoft and Adobe intend to license OpenType to third parties to ensure its widespread acceptance as an open industry standard and are co-developing software to upgrade systems to OpenType.

They also plan to present the technology to the Internet standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), later in the year.




The Net generation


Microsoftís next generation Internet browser software is now in worldwide beta testing and, unlike many of its competitors, can be downloaded at no charge from Microsoftís home page on the Internet.

Internet Explorer 3.0 (IE3) will, for the first time, include a revolutionary application called NetMeeting, a software program designed to allow meetings and conversations to take place over the Internet in real time.

In a recent demonstration, Microsoft showed how, using NetMeeting, two users on opposite sides of the world can work together on the same document while communicating with each other over the Internet. NetMeeting also allows users to share a Windows application even if the other person doesnít have that program installed on his or her computer. Users can talk, type and annotate documents with drawing tools all at the same time.

The NetMeeting whiteboarding and Internet telephony product is based on open standards such as the T.120 standard and is built on Microsoftís ActiveX technology. Up to six people can work on the same document in different locations at any one time.

IE3 will also be the first version to include Sunís Java programming language, as well as ActiveX, to provide the next generation in interactive Web pages with movies, audio and animation. It will also support frames technology so that users can see more than one Web page on screen at one time. IE3 will become the default World Wide Web browser in the AOL and CompuServe services. The product will also support in place editing so if users click on a table of financial data for example, Microsoft® Excel toolbars pop up to manipulate that data, regardless of whether Excel is installed on the Net userís PC. Microsoft has also included support for the PICS Internet rating scheme in IE3 so that parents can regulate what their children access on the Internet

IE3 will also form the basis of Nashville, an add-on for Windows® 95 and Windows NT™ due out this year, and reviewed in our feature on page 12.




Microsoft online with CompuServe


Microsoft has signed a far-reaching agreement with CompuServe, the online service provider with nearly five million members in 185 countries.

CompuServe will become the first licensee of Microsoftís recently-announced Normandy suite of Internet products and will use Microsoftís Internet Explorer as its standard Web browser. CompuServeís flagship online service, the CompuServe Information Service, and the more consumer-oriented WOW! Service will also be bundled with Windows® 95 as a standard feature

in the future.

Normandy is the codename for the suite of software tools which Microsoft used to create

its own online service, MSN™, The Microsoft Network. The tools are now being made available to Internet service providers, online service providers such as CompuServe, cable companies and commercial Web sites to help provide more graphical and interactive online pages. CompuServe will use Normandy to move away from its current proprietary software to more open, future

Internet standards.

Normandy includes an Internet Mail component, a news component, a chat portion, white pages section and a personalisation area that uses Microsoftís ActiveX technology. Normandy will be available to other third parties at the end of the year. Microsoft will also provide access to the CompuServe online service through future versions of Windows 95.

Similar to the arrangement with AOL, CompuServe online services will be available to all Windows users through a folder found on the desktop, along with the MSN icon.