Microsoft"s Bill Gates took centre stage at yesterday"s software developer day in London to convince UK software developers to stick with Microsoft, even though Longhorn, its next-generation operating system platform, is two to three years away.
Putting his trust in Moore"s Law, Gates planned to exploit the full potential of future generations of PC processing power in Longhorn to support technologies such as instant messaging and speech synthesis and recognition.
He said, "Longhorn is a significant step forward for us." One of the key concepts in Longhorn is the stateless PC, a form of computing designed to combine the benefits of thin client computing with rich clients, where software can take advantage of functionality on the PC.
Gates added, "We are fudging the line between the client and the server." Given the speed of the network he said, "It will be possible to run the client PC in a stateless way," where user data and applications could move back and forth between a network server and desktop PC running Longhorn.