As developers at Microsoft are busy readying Windows Vista for release in the second half of 2006, the company's top visionaries are already imagining how the operating system will evolve post-Vista. In early September, I met with several of Microsoft's top thinkers at the company's Redmond campus to see where Windows is headed over the next couple of decades. There is certainly no shortage of ideas, yet their overarching goal is to develop a stateless computing environment in which users can move freely among their home computer, work computer, smartphone, handheld, and other gadgets that will surely emerge. Their ideas may be dreams for now but offer a fascinating look into our digital future.

As Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates describes stateless computing, "In the future, things are going to be far more user-centric. You'll have a computer at work, a computer at home, a phone, and other devices. And instead of your state—your documents, your contacts, your schedule—being on a single computer, you'll really want everything to be available to you on every device." That's a tall order for an operating system created when our computing needs were much simpler. As Gates explains, "Windows was written to run on a single computer, and then networking was added to connect to other computers."

In theory, stateless computing will offer relief from many of today's frustrations. Says MSN chief Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president, MSN Information Services, "It kills me that today I can provide users access to more than 5 billion documents, but I can't get the pictures off my home computer to show them to you right now."

A stateless computing environment offers many other advantages, but it will take at least a decade to get there. "The whole notion of stateless computing, where laptops and desktops are cached, and your state is something that's easy to annotate, mail around, back up, retrieve—that's a ten-year proposition," says Chris Jones, corporate vice president of Windows Core Operating Systems Development. "That's when I can say, 'Back up all my stuff to there, shoot that laptop, plug in a new laptop' and get my state back."

Also driving the need for integration is the phenomenal surge in Internet usage. "We used to think about content and then about mobile desktop applications," says David Cole, senior vice president, MSN and Personal Services Group. "But take photos: Are they purely a desktop experience or are they a purely Internet experience? They're very much blended across the two." Yet the interfaces for working with images are different on a camera, phone, PC, and the Internet. One of Cole's objectives is a single "people-centric" user interface that's consistent across all these environments.

Effectively pulling together such an integrated system from a user-interface perspective is critical, says Joe Belifore, who heads Microsoft's eHome division. "I want consumers to see their PC as a device that really is the nerve center of their home and their digital existence." He imagines a scenario in which you're driving your car and you tell your hands-free cell phone to ask your PC to let you know the gate number of your arriving flight. "I think we will see that happen in the next ten years."

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Of course, Microsoft needs to do a lot of work between now and then so that Windows can deal effectively with the latest hardware advances, such as 64-bit-capable processors, multicore processors, and hardware-based virtualization. The big challenge with the transition to 64-bit computing is writing new drivers so existing hardware continues to work. Workstations will go 64-bit first, followed by consumer desktops. Eventually, video editing, photo editing, music, and games will get there. "But it's not going to be overnight," says Cole. "The day that the real end-user value exceeds the cost is the day that people will move."

An even more fundamental shift is to multicore processors. As Jim Allchin, copresident, Microsoft Platforms and Services Division, points out, "We're moving from dual-core to multi-core to many-core systems, meaning more cores than you know what to do with." Multicore processors let you run several different processes at once. "That gives us an opportunity to do some new algorithms that may let us start to emulate human processing in a better way, because humans obviously are operating in a concurrent, parallel way all the time," he says.

Another technology we can look forward to is virtualization, essentially multiple virtual machines (VMs) running independently and communicating with each other. "Why isn't my office PC also my phone?" asks Jones. With virtualization, one of the VMs in your PC is the phone software, and it's completely isolated from the rest of the system.—Continue reading...

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