Gates Talks Up Microsoft's .Net Platform

LAS VEGAS -- Microsoft (MSFT Quote) Chairman Bill Gates kicked off the fall Comdex trade show in Las Vegas Sunday evening with some big talk about his company's new .NET computing platform.

That's right. No reassurances in the wake of last week's revenue warning from Dell (DELL Quote). No information on the Justice Department's ongoing antitrust suit against the company. Vegas isn't the place to dwell on quotidian problems like that.

Instead, Gates used the occasion to talk broadly about the future of computing. He described a world in which clients are able to talk to servers and vice versa in more flexible ways than is possible in their present master/slave configurations. The key to that future, he argued, is XML, or extensible markup language. Like HTML, or hypertext markup language, XML uses tagging symbols to describe the content of files or Web pages. But unlike HTML, which is limited to a predefined lexicon, the tagging used in XML can be extended to fit the needs of its users. Hence the language's "extensibility."

XML is central to Microsoft's new strategy to capitalize on the boom in spending on Internet infrastructure -- a boom that has turned Unix server vendor and Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems (SUNW Quote) into perhaps the stock market's greatest darling. Last month, Microsoft unveiled eight new servers running Windows 2000 and supporting XML. The servers are the first in a series of hardware and software products that will have the .NET brand. (TheStreet.com's Jim Seymour discussed Microsoft's .NET initiative last week.)

"If there's one thing I thought was key in the last year, it was the rise of XML," Gates told the capacity crowd at the MGM Garden Arena, where, as it happens, Mike Tyson disfigured Evander Holyfield nearly three years ago. "Microsoft and the rest of the industry are betting the future on XML. It's equivalent to what TCP/IP or HTML were years ago."

"The .NET platform, that's what we bet the company on," he added.

Gates also used the occasion to give the first public glimpse of a prototype of the company's tablet computer. Around a half-inch thick and about the size of a standard notepad, the tablet allows users to write easily in script using a special pen. The product isn't of much immediate financial importance to anyone right now, as Microsoft doesn't expect to see it on the market until 2002.

The "beyond-the-PC" theme of this year's Comdex show makes it tempting to see the tablet as a sort of personal digital assistant or appliance. But it's far from a move away from the personal computer. Running the Whistler operating system -- next year's upgrade of Windows ME -- and using a USB keyboard and mouse, the prototype tablet was loaded with 10 gigabytes of hard disk space and 128 megabytes of RAM.

And so Comdex 2000 is starting. The trade show has brought about 225,000 techno geeks and information-technology professionals to the Vegas Strip this week. It's as seedy a crowd as you'll find these days in the theme park formerly known as Sin City.