WinHEC 2007: Time for Vista to Deliver the Goods

WinHEC Big WhiteLOS ANGELES - The reason Microsoft puts on a PC hardware-specific hardware conference every year, even though it's technically not a PC hardware manufacturer, is to appeal to its single most important and influential class of customers: system builders. An unavoidable truth in the personal computer industry is that consumer PCs are designed to run Windows. The way they handle the PCI Express bus, the way they manage graphics drivers, the way they connect to peripherals are all directly connected to how Windows works.

This is where Microsoft capitalizes on its inherent advantage as a commercial producer of operating systems. Windows is the principal driver of the personal computer economy. If Linux had more than half the PC users in the world, this would still be the case: Windows is built to sell. For this reason mainly, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD, nVidia and ATI, and Asus and MSI take Windows more seriously than anything else.

In an earlier era, the choices Microsoft made dictated the course of computer manufacturing worldwide. This is not exactly the case today. Microsoft cooperates to a much higher degree than ever in its history, in order to move the state of the art forward. As Microsoft discovered -- some say, the hard way -- it had to start cooperating in this way.

If the future of computing hinges on the whims of a software manufacturer, hardware designs cease to be innovative -- as we saw in the early 1990s -- and consumer interest drags to a screeching halt. It can drag to a screeching halt today anyway, thanks to a lackluster economy, a reduction in expendable income, and other factors completely out of Microsoft's control.

With Windows Vista no longer a promise in the works, now is the time for Microsoft to deliver. Manufacturers worldwide are coming to the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles, looking to see what Vista is capable of doing for them today and what Windows Server will be capable of doing for them by the end of this year. In prior conferences, Vista was hailed as either the deliverer of grand tidings or a pipe dream. But now Microsoft has run out of pipe, and it's time to wake up.

BetaNews will be covering WinHEC in depth all day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. To launch our coverage, here are the five flashpoints we'll be looking at in-depth:

5. The introduction of flash memory as a PC component. Last week, with the announcement of its new Centrino Duo and Centrino Pro portable platforms, Intel put forth the notion that flash memory could serve a useful purpose as a kind of cache that faces the front-side bus. This is the Turbo Memory concept, and no, it's not an outgrowth of Intel's coalition with Micron - that's another project. Intel hasn't fabricated DRAM in decades, but it does make NAND flash...and AMD doesn't. If Turbo Memory becomes a desirable option, Intel may be able to leverage one of its admittedly waning talents to put forth the next advance in system design. But again, this will take some cooperation with Microsoft, which is why this is a big WinHEC topic. That's not the only entry point for flash on the motherboard, however, as Microsoft and Samsung are just now displaying the culmination of their joint project using NAND flash as backup memory and also as a hard drive cache.

4. Microsoft, the telephone company. This morning, Microsoft added to its Unified Communications push by inviting nine of its VoIP phone manufacturing partners to participate in a beta program for Office Communications Server and Office Communicator. What this means is, companies like NEC, Plantronics, and Samsung will start making real phones that connect via USB to PCs, and that users can actually beta test while they're testing OCS. This is somewhat new: you don't often get the chance to beta test hardware. But Microsoft sees this as a necessity, otherwise it'll have a much tougher time getting its foot in the door in its push to make land line phones obsolete.

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