WinHEC 2007 Day 1: Gates: 'The Phone is Going to Be the PC...'

LOS ANGELES - The keynote sessions have begun at WinHEC 2007, with Chairman Bill Gates taking the podium at about 9:05 am this morning. Soon thereafter, he began a kind of retrospective, including a look not only at how the serial port looked in 1992, but how Gates himself looked (like many of us, he had more hair).

What's the theme? About five minutes into the speech, it looked like Gates was fishing for a theme. His retrospective is already treating Windows Vista as a milestone that has already passed. While developers here are looking for guidance in how to start developing hardware drivers and interoperability tools for Vista, some starting even now, at ten minutes into the speech, Microsoft began showing a quick-cut retrospective tape of last January's launch of Vista and Office 2007.

The tape was greeted by several seconds of dead silence. Gates waited...and waited for the thunderous applause that never came. From there, he stuttered into the next phase of his presentation.

9:20 am PT - Gates has started showing off some UMPCs, including one concept prototype from Intel that may have been a UMPC prototype from a previous year - it does not look like the MID prototype that Intel began showing in early April.

9:30 am PT - The first general applause since Gates took the stage came during a demonstration by Windows senior program managers Glenn Ward and Jim Barber, showing a type of wireless peripheral connection protocol called Windows Rally. Think of it as "Bluetooth by Microsoft." Digital cameras can pair with Windows-enabled PCs wirelessly. In a demo, Barber took a photo of Ward after having paired a camera with a Vista PC. With the wireless pairing having already taken place, the picture Barber took showed up in the open Windows directory.

Next, Ward and Barber showed a wireless media extender, designed to stream media between Windows Media Center enabled PCs and Xbox 360 consoles elsewhere in the household. The wireless stream takes place over an 802.11n connection, streaming at 5 GHz. In a few seconds after the PC started up "Top Gun," the stream showed up on the TV to which the Xbox 360 was connected. Again, "Windows Rally" connection technology was responsible.

As we were seeing this, the first press releases were going live regarding the new nomenclature for "Longhorn:" Windows Server 2008. This naming despite the fact that as recently as last Friday, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews that the release to manufacturing date for Longhorn was during the second half of 2007.

9:40 am PT - Windows senior product manager Steven Leonard showed new features of Windows Home Server. HP's new media home server unit is about the size of a medium stereo speaker, perhaps suitable for a coffee table.

Among the new features are policy-based home user management. Using a group policy management console like device, senior product manager Steven Leonard demonstrated "punishing his son" for turning off the system firewall, by shutting off his access to his media directory. Leonard did not demonstrate shutting off his son's access to the firewall.

Leonard also stated new purchases of Windows Home Server come complete with a free domain name, so that outside users can log onto home server via the Web, and see their own personal pages, along with new pictures and video streamed from the HP server box and freshly loaded from the digital camera.

10:00 am PT - Windows Server 2008 senior product manager Ian Hammeroff showed off a new feature of the replacement for Systems Management Server, which will disable small devices' access to PCs throughout the network based on very granular policies. For instance, certain unauthorized USB thumb drives may be disabled by policy, even on wireless mobile systems, though USB mouses can connect. This way, businesses can disable thumb drive use if they so choose, without having to use glue to gum up the USB port - a tactic which may have sounded like a joke, but which some businesses have actually done.

10:05 am PT - About the only prophetic declaration Bill Gates has made this morning concerns Unified Communications: "The phone is going to be the PC, the PC is going to be the phone," he professed, showing a slide revealing a conceptual form factor of a VoIP phone with what appeared to be a distinctive little Vista-like screen.

More from the keynote session appears here, including news from Microsoft's chief of research, Craig Mundie.