Vista done. What Next?
This is kind of a repost. If you read the Bill Gates Q and A article I posted yesterday, you must have read that Bill Gates mentioned what's next for Windows. For those who missed it here's the excerpt.
So can you give us an indication of what the next Windows will be like?
Well, it will be more user-centric.
What does that mean?
That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you've got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one. Moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services [a way to connect to Microsoft via the Internet] to know what you're interested in. So even if you drop by a [public] kiosk or somebody else's PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that's kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also,] in Vista things got a lot better with [digital] ink and speech but by the next release there will be a much bigger bet. Students won't need textbooks, they can just use these tablet devices. Parallel computing is pretty important for the next release. We'll make it so that a lot of the high-level graphics will be just built into the operating system. So we've got a pretty good outline.
WOW! that would be awesome if I could go to a friends place and get my desktop on his / her machine. You would never miss your PC when you are away. Although, we don't know to what extent they will go. All of this sounds like Hardisk on the Internet, so all your information will stay on the Internet, but we don't know if that's going to be true for applications installed on my machine as well. All this would need very high bandwidth, but 2011 is still far away which could make some of this a reality.
.