Bill Gates kicks off TechEd with the "Future of COM"

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates kicked off TechEd this morning in Orlando, Floridawith a keynote address that positions Windows and its Component ObjectModel (COM) as the cornerstone of distributed computing. Over 15,000 peoplelistened as Gates described a future where a new breed of component-basedapplications works seemlessly with different kinds of data over corporateintranets and over the global Internet.

"We're taking leadership in distributed computing," Gates said. "By taking COM to a whole new level, we let you leverage the infrastructure like neverbefore."

To demonstrate support of Microsoft's new commitment to "openness," Digitaland Hewlett Packard today announced that they will include COM in theirnext operating system releases: that is, Digital UNIX, Digital OpenVMS,and HP/UX will all support COM natively by next year. Versions of COM forSun Solaris and MVS will be commercially available this year as well.

"COM is much bigger than Windows...COM can run on the Macintosh and Unix," Gates said. "We're porting COM to non-Windows platforms to provide a commonbackbone to make it easier for systems to co-exist."

A future release of COM will add debugging, automatic garbage collection(thereby removing a major complaint from Java advocates), native codesupport, persistence, and improved run-time services.

"In '96 our theme was the Internet...in '97 the theme is manageability," Gates said.

Gates described Zero Administration for Windows (ZAW) and the WindowsTerminal as well:

"It's the only truly thin client," Gates said. "We've got proposals for new paradigms--people who want to push what they call network computers--and of course it's not a continuity step from any paradigm, it's an attemptto build a new interface and ask people to rewrite all of their applications,"

In addition to sketching out the future of Windows and COM, Gates discussedsome current Windows trends. For instance, the number of Windows NT Serverinstallations now surpasses the entire installed base of all UNIX flavorsand NetWare 4.0 installations. As Gates mentioned, "This is the first TechEd I can safely say...that Windows NT is mainstream," Gates said.

Sales of Windows NT 4.0 have topped 900,000 since it shipped last July and will hit the one million mark later this month, Microsoft officials said