from The Executive Software Team Jump Executive Software>@@@
On the first evening of COMDEX Fall '98, I attended Bill Gates'
keynote
address, at which several new technological developments were announced and demonstrated.
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One of these was a most impressive and very new high-end graphics
workstation. Called Visual Workstation, it was built by Silicon Graphics
(SGI) on Windows NT and demonstrated by SGI's Senior Vice President Tom
Furlong, and it garnered many gasps and rounds of applause. The
demonstration showed the workstation to be able to take a real-time video
feed (from the stage, showing Gates and Furlong as they spoke), incorporate
it into several complex 3D graphic renderings and video feeds, and have the
whole thing performing without any hitches whatsoever. Formerly, this kind
of technology was only available at over $100,000, but this machine will
sell for under four thousand dollars and will be available in January of
next year. (Both figures in $US).
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A new font-display technology was then demonstrated, being developed for
electronic books. Without hardware modifications, this new technology can
triple the font resolution of current LCD displays.
A stunning demonstration was then done of Office 2000 in combination with
SQL Server 7.0, showing SQL's plain-English query capability, Office 2000's
simplified menu system, and its new HTML features. The demonstration
consisted of creating an invitation from Gates to a number of his partners
for a day in Las Vegas, utilizing Office 2000's new, simplified contact and
scheduling features. A likely list of casinos was obtained through three
very simple SQL 7.0 queries, along with pictures displayed from a Web-site
database, the entire message converted to HTML using FrontPage forms, and sent to
the partners. As part of the demonstration, the winword.exe file
(the MS Word application) was deleted "by accident". When the Word icon
was clicked on, the application was re-loaded in the background and brought up without
any attention from the user, utilizing a new Office feature called
"self-repairing applications". Another very cool feature demonstrated
was
Office's new clipboard feature, with which up to twelve different items can
be cut-and-pasted.
Office 2000 Beta was released later at the show, and the final version is
expected to ship in the first part of 1999.
The official release of SQL 7.0 occurred on the second day of the show, and
the new version takes a big leap into the arena of high-end database
processing. New features include automatic database tuning,
greatly-improved scalability, flexible English-query ability (as shown
above), widely-flexible data transformation services, complete integration
with Office 2000 (especially notable is the integration with Excel), and
full interoperability with different database platforms. If you are
involved with database management at all, it is well-worth a look at this
product. Follow the links below.
All-in-all, these new products, along with Windows 2000, promise a very
exciting year ahead for Windows NT users!
To learn the details on SQL Server 7.0, visit Microsoft's SQL Server page
at:
For me, the best introduction to SQL Server 7.0 was Microsoft President
Steve Ballmer's presentation at the official release of the product at
COMDEX. You can find a transcript at: