RSSGates to Unveil Producer in COMDEX Opening
By David Worthington | Published November 11, 2001, 7:03 PM
Bill Gates will draw on the spotlight of tonight's opening keynote address at COMDEX FALL 2001 to illuminate a new digital media authoring tool for PowerPoint 2002, dubbed Microsoft Producer. Aimed at the everyday user without proficient authoring skills, Producer unifies and synchronizes audio, video, slides, and images into rich media content through a wizard based tool. Presentations can be viewed across the Internet through a Web browser, over networks, or on CDs.
BetaNews was given an early look at Producer in June when it was first demoed at Streaming Media West and subsequently made publicly available on the Web as a technology preview for Office XP users. Since its introduction, corporate customers such as Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Marathon Oil, Mellon Financial Corporation, PPG Industries, RadioShack Canada and Unisys have adopted the solution. Gates is expected to showcase these companies during tonight's address.
Microsoft's corporate clientele and end-users are not the only groups that will be targeted with this release. Producer includes an SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows developers, independent software developers, network administrators, and systems integrators to create custom solutions.
"Businesses around the world are looking for new, more effective ways to communicate both internally and externally," said Jeff Raikes, group vice president of the Business Productivity Group at Microsoft. "Microsoft Producer will do the same thing for digital media that FrontPage did for Web authoring: - Make it easier and more ubiquitous in companywide communication."
Weber Shandwick Worldwide -- one of Microsoft's PR agencies -- informed the press of independent analysis by Lawrence Orans, senior analyst at Gartner Inc. Orans has predicted that by 2006, 85 percent of enterprises using video-over-IP for corporate training will realize a positive return on investment in less than one year."
A free download for Office XP users will begin tonight. Producer will not function with any previous version of Office. The initial release will be exclusively in English with French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish language versions set for a December release.
Let see, agreement says MS will release same number of major releases of Office for Mac and PC.
Producer is nice new product, but instead of releaseing in a major version, we will just slip it in under the radar.
Of course, Office XP sales suck, probably becasue MS hasn't changed the file format in several versions. So let's tyr and include this, and in a bit, we will change our default file format to be buzword compatilble(cough, XML) and to drave upgrade purchases.
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|Maybe the reason people (and companies which drive most of the sales) haven't upgraded to XP is because 2000 is entirely satisfactory. I know we have hundreds still on 97 here. You can put down Microsoft for everything else but Office is one of the best software packages available.
As for screwing Mac users - Microsoft is second only to Adobe in producing software for the 5% who still use macs.
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|As much as many people will dislike MS for whatever reasons (Linux, Mac, BSODs, etc.), they have one thing which makes them stand above most other software companies. This one thing is the ability to know what the everyday person wants/needs of a software package or operating system. Now I am not a fervent MS supporter, having had my share of BSODs and other annoying things dumped on me by them, but I can appreciate the fact that they win over the masses by appealing to them with the level of competency required to use their software. To the Linux fans out there, I too wish to have the vaunted stability of Linux but I don't want to have to do kernel recompiles to apply a security patch. And to the Mac fans out there, MS is just better overall at marketing their software than Apple, and you don't have to buy the hardware from MS just to run their software. The world currently belongs to MS because they can market their products better than anyone else, and whoever thinks that technology alone will win out the day is very naive indeed... just look at Betamax vs VHS, and OS/2 vs Windows as the two most common examples. Congratulations to MS for seeing another opportunity to win marketshare. However, I just hope that at some stage in the future (if ever), they'll come out with software that isn't so riddled with bugs that it puts sieves to shame...
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|They certainly don't take any responsibility for fixing bugs though. Very bad at that.
For the main part though, I quite like MS's products.
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|Now what in God's name makes you say that?
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|Maybe he reads the EULA before installing MS products?
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|What does the EULA have to do with Software bugs fixing ?........
If they plan to introduce Producer in it's current stage....i have not been able to fin an updated beta whatsoever or any info on it on the MS site, even the llink from within the Help menu isn;t right, than that will be a major imberrasment.
MS Producer is way not ready unless i have missed the boat here.
I truly wished that smeone would overlook beta releases and upkeep us with news and such.
MS is the worst than it comes to that. I do beta testing for other companies and they are eager to have your inout, you know where the info is and how to update.
Yes, i realize with OS it's different, they are on the ball but in smaller apps, it just isn't there.
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|"I truly wished that smeone would overlook beta releases and upkeep us with news and such."
What part of the word BetaNews don't you understand...?
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|I wasn';t talking about BetaNews .
I am talking about the MS Producer dfor example or the Win video utility for encoding.
You get a beta and that's all there is, no further moderated Ng or something.
I did take a look at the official released producer now and it lacks serious implementation, filters were removed, effects cannot be specified, cliup is very difficult to manipulate, no timeframe or keyframe abiltiy.
I don't know what the sense id of this proggie, we did this in Powerpoint already, i see no benefit here.
Alone the import video file takes too long.
Ok that's it, i guess for new people this will do :-)
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|What?? If there's one thing MS is good at, it's turning out patches!
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