Remembering the Future

In a keynote speech that opened last week's company-sponsored developer conference, Gates said Longhorn will make it easy to create applications that require more sophisticated graphics rendering, greater processing power and huge hard drives in future PCs. Windows is being overhauled to process data in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and to use HTML to publish information, he said. "The personal computer in less than three years will be a pretty phenomenal device," Gates said. "Exploiting the client, delivering data in the form of XML to the client and then having local rich rendering while still being able to have mapping to HTML for reach--that's something we're making very simple."