Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for platforms, looked at my Apple PowerBook and smugly pointed out that the number of copies of Windows sold this year will be more than all the Macintosh computers used worldwide. By the end of 2005, he proudly noted, over 730 million people will be using Windows. "Business is good," he said, as he began to quickly page through his elaborate PowerPoint presentation.
For the next hour and a half, in a stuffy Manhattan hotel room last week, Allchin gave me a fast-paced, enthusiastic lecture on Windows' latest updates, which will be released later this month, and on its next major version—Longhorn, which won't be released until the end of 2006. Allchin, a wiry-built 54-year-old who has been in charge of Windows for almost a decade, is admirably blunt about his own frustrations using the current operating system. It annoys him, for example, that the adjustments necessary to move a laptop from a work to a home network aren't obvious.
News source: Fortune
