IT TRENDS
Are you Vista-ready?
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Microsoft showcased the ecosystem building up around its new Windows operating system
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GOOD SHOW!: Delegates at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas preview features of the upcoming Windows Vista system for PCs.
`HASTA LA VISTA, BABY!' Arnold Schwarzenegger's catch phrase as he blasted the baddies into oblivion in the `Terminator' movies, was being bandied about freely, at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, last week.
Few realised that in Spanish, the tag line meant `goodbye' — an unfortunate sentiment when they were trying to say `hello' to the new Windows operating system for personal computers that is due for release at month end.
Illuminated signs
"The Wow is Now!" read huge street corner hoardings put up by Microsoft. And so did the illuminated signs on the rooftops of hundreds of taxi cabs that plied The Strip, the famous three-kilometre stretch of Las Vegas, which houses a dozen garishly lit casino-hotels and (somewhat incongruously), all the conference facilities.
Stall after stall, featuring futuristically-shaped desktop and portable PCs, handheld `digital assistants,' Internet access devices, even `smart' television sets, flaunted signs that read "We are Vista-ready. Are You?"
Coming almost six years after Windows-XP, the new PC computing environment promises a whole new level of user ease — and almost water-tight security.
Unveiling every advance
"Vista is the flavour of CES 07," one seasoned analyst told me. "This is the place where the electronics industry has been unveiling every new technology advance for forty years.
They launched the video cassette recorder here in 1970, the CD player in 1981, the DVD in 1996 and Plasma TV in 2001.In 2005, Internet TV was born here in Vegas."
Like satellites around the sun, dozens of device makers showcased their own products — all promising a seamless integration with the new Windows version. It was canny business, because 9 out of 10 personal computing devices continue to embrace this system.
Big products
For Americans who wanted to view their TV `anytime, anywhere', this year's big products have been the Slingbox — and Pinnnacle's `PC-TV To Go,' which attracted big crowds with a sign promising full compatibility with Windows Media Center and Vista.
Indian brains
A sticker on the box said "Powered by Monsoon Media"... acknowledgement that India-based brains crafted the technology within, just as they had the Slingbox, a year ago.
Microsoft has been careful to stress the family-friendly features of Vista: the ability it gives parents to decide which parts of the Internet each child can access, when and with whom he or she can chat or exchange mails.
It also allows them to review every site visited, instant conversation and mail initiated by their kids so ensure that they are not prey to the Net's predators. If security loomed big in Window's new vista (pun intended!), its jazzy visual features — pages standing up in a 3-dimensional see-through stack across the screen — were found to be blase by visitors who had experienced similar `eye candy' for years, on Apple computers.
Search tool
But the one-click combined online and desktop search tool, where one could trawl the Web, as well as one's own desktop, drew applause in every single session.
Only metres away, semiconductor leader, Intel had corralled off a large section to highlight why Vista and its own new generation dual-core and quad-core chip sets were `made for each other', a software-hardware combo that promised to deliver the ultimate computing experience in 2007.
Touch smart
Hewlett Packard joined hands with Microsoft to extend the PC experience even further, with a Touch Smart machine, which could be controlled by touching the display screen in a manner familiar to users of many bank automatic teller machines.
In his traditional Show-eve keynote, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates gave a broad hint of another sharp change in the offing for lay compute users:
Home server
With broadband `pipes' bringing rich video and audio content to customers' PC and TV screens, you are soon going to need a `home server' to manage all the content and the collateral: much as corporates now have a central computer to `serve' them.
And to drive home the point, Microsoft unveiled its Home Server software and invited the hardware-wallahs and the storage-sultans to come up with their own solutions for an integrated home infotainment system with terabytes (that is a trillion bytes) rather than gigabytes (a billion bytes) of data.
Vista will be available in India, simultaneous with its global release on January 30.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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