Microsoft Unveils Plans for Internet Platform

Microsoft Corp.’s new Internet strategy, which aims to make Windows the operating system for the Internet, is likely to intensify the fierce debate over the future of the personal computer, industry experts said Thursday.

Microsoft.Net, as the new strategy was dubbed at its unveiling here Thursday, will attempt to incorporate the PC into an Internet-based world that is moving away from PCs and embracing a host of new, smaller devices that rely on more powerful servers and less computing power.

“It’s an effort by Microsoft to attempt to redirect the industry away from the thin-client, server-centric world of Sun [Microsystems] and Oracle,” said Rick Sherlund, a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs. “This will be attacked by Microsoft’s competitors. It’s a question of whether the industry wants to go along.”

Indeed, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the company intends to establish an industry-wide standard for the Internet just as it did for personal computing. He said the emergence of a number of small-screen, Internet-based devices would not take off until Microsoft’s new “dot-com” services were available.

Speaking to more than 400 financial analysts and reporters from around the world, Gates said the new Internet-based platform is the company’s biggest strategic shift since it announced that it would move from the text-based DOS operating system to the graphical Windows more than 10 years ago.

“You could say it’s a ‘bet the company’ thing,” Gates said. “Our entire strategy is based around this platform.”

Microsoft.Net aims to deliver a new set of technologies over the next several years that would create a more natural user experience--one that would fuse information from the Internet and other networks on a variety of computing devices, Gates said.

A major release that would take advantage of Microsoft’s voice-recognition and handwriting-recognition technology would not be available for at least two years, Gates said. But by the end of 2001, the software company would deliver its initial version of a new browser-based user interface for its Windows operating system as well as new services on its Microsoft Network Web portal and software-development tools that would make it easier to program the Web.

Initially, Microsoft will take its popular software products, such as the Windows operating system, Microsoft Office and the MSN online service, and make their features available over the Internet.

Microsoft’s proposed online business software service, Office.Net, would allow a user to write Microsoft Word documents and integrate them with Excel spreadsheets or other Microsoft software, all through a Web browser on a hand-held organizer with a link to the Internet. The user later could access the same documents from a different computer because the material would be stored in a central computer and be accessible anywhere over the Web.

Microsoft’s new strategy faces many hurdles before consumers will see the kind of benefits in time and efficiency that Microsoft hopes to deliver--a strategy that Chief Executive Steve Ballmer admits is a “long-term road map.”

Analysts question whether third-party developers would gravitate to the new platform as the PC gives way to a constellation of new Internet-based devices, ranging from wireless phones to hand-held devices to Internet appliances used for such tasks as receiving e-mail and organizing schedules.

“It’s a great vision,” Sherlund said. But “it goes against the industry trend.”

The company got a big boost Thursday when Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, who led Microsoft in the storied browser war, announced plans to become an Internet software development partner with his former nemesis. Microsoft and Andreessen’s new company, Loudcloud Inc., announced a strategic alliance to provide software and services for companies setting up Internet businesses.

Others want to see how Microsoft would make money from the new Web services model, and some are concerned that the tighter integration between Windows and various applications with the Internet would create antitrust concerns.

“On the positive side, it breaks apart the data from the device,” said Mark Snowden, a Gartner Group technology analyst. “For users, it means you are not locked into one gadget such as a PC. But the degree of integration that it requires just raises all sorts of possible antitrust questions.”

Microsoft also is trailing rivals such as IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., which already are pushing similar Web services strategies. And America Online Inc. and computer maker Gateway Inc. plan to create Internet home appliances that use the rival Linux operating system.