Programming Windows: Freestyle and Mira (Premium)

With the weight of Microsoft’s security problems on his shoulders, Bill Gates delivered a Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2002 keynote in early January that focused on the future, not the past. And that future consisted of new types of PCs and other devices, all powered by Microsoft software.

This was a fundamental shift, he claimed. To that day, consumer electronics was “mostly about hardware.” But going forward, microprocessors would be everywhere, and those microprocessors would need software to realize their full potential.

“Things like speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and linguistic analysis become possible when they wouldn’t have been feasible before” on the PC, he said. “And we have multiple [non-PC] devices that are smart, and we have protocols, digital protocols, digital standards between those devices allowing them to work together.”

Microsoft’s key contributions to consumer electronics would come in the form of Windows XP, its platform for PCs and the devices with which it connected; Windows CE, a stripped-down version of Windows aimed at consumer electronics devices; and Xbox, its newly released video game console and its most overt push for the living room.

Each had obtained some measure of success. Gates noted that Microsoft had already sold 17 million copies of XP since its October 2001 launch, about double the sales rate of Windows ME, and triple the sales rate of Windows 98 SE, in similar launch timeframes. The new version of Windows CE, called Windows CE .NET, added real-time capabilities, 802.11 support, and other advancements, and hardware makers had sold “tens of millions” of CE devices over the past five years. Xbox, meanwhile, had done “incredibly well,” Gates said. “We’ve sold all that we can make … the sell-through is over a million and a half units.” And Xbox owners were buying three games per console on average, a great number.

After a demonstration of various Windows CE .NET advances, and a look at the new Pocket PC 2002 platform, a CE variant for pocket-sized PDAs (personal digital assistants) that was just starting to gain phone capabilities, Gates finally turned to how Windows XP would transform personal technology at home in the coming years. This promise was based on, of all things, the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technologies that had been exploited by hackers in XP, triggering Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing push. He had two key advances to discuss, both of which were “extensions” of XP.

The first was a technology then codenamed “Freestyle” that would let users access the power of a PC with a remote control instead of a keyboard and mouse. It would utilize “a user interface that’s appropriate for using it at a distance,” a phrase that would quickly be honed to “a 10-foot user interface,” as opposed to the more typical “2-foot user interface.” You would use “it”---the PC, presumably, or the Freestyle “feature...