In his keynote address on the last day of the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft CEO Bill Gates shared his vision for the future of Windows. According to Gates, that future is Windows NT, with natural language, speech, and visual recognition features thrown in over time.
"Bet the future on Windows NT," Gate said. "We're driving the business market to use that product as rapidly as possible, and it'll be a variation using the same technology that we use to drive NT into the consumer market. New personal computers will come with the refinement of NT 5.0 the same way they come with Windows 95 today."
Windows 98 will be phased out in a couple of years for NT, Gates said. Windows NT 6.0 will include a consumer version, expected to be called Windows NT Personal Edition, that will provide an upgrade path for Windows 9x users.
Gates also pushed Microsoft's new Distributed interNet Applications (DNA), an architecture for merging client/server, Internet, and PC technologies. Though DNA was never mentioned before the PDC, it was a major theme this week.
"\[DNA\] can be built around things we have today," Gates said. "It is not revolutionary, but there are some big advances."
Gates also took time to criticize Sun's handling of Java standardization, saying that the company wants to "have its cake and eat it too" by offering the language as a standard while still exerting control over it.
"It is tough to go to a CEO and say, 'It's your lucky day. Rewrite all your applications, and they'll only run a little slower,'" Gates remarked, jokingly, about Java
