This week"s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles marks the debuts of early versions of the company"s next-generation operating system, relational database, and developer tools. It also highlights Microsoft"s realization that security should not be an afterthought in the development process. After his keynote, Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates, paused briefly to answer a couple of questions on the firm"s plans with ITBusiness.ca.
ITBusiness.ca: How do you see the next generation of hardware and software? Do you think that the Internet will be transparent and fully integrated in the operating environment?
Bill Gates: Well, certainly in the computing environment, we"ve integrated more and more capabilities. You don"t have to think, "Oh, I"m going to the Internet to get this," versus, "I"m going to the local disk, I"m going to the local network." That was our philosophy with the browser from the very beginning. We"re going to take that to a whole new level in terms of going out to get information, and yet be able to do it in such a way that you know you"re getting secure information, that the right things can happen even as you go out to the internet. For example, today you either end up with tons of different passwords, or you have to do things in a very insecure way. So this (Web services) is really the next level of Internet integration, and the thing that didn"t exist is the programming model to unify those things.