Although Excel 2000's new data manipulation features are primarily of
interest to the number-crunching crowd, Access 2000 is a natural for anyone
doing database development on SQL Server 7.0. For the first time, Access will
let developers bypass the local Jet database engine and make Open Database
Connectivity (ODBC) calls directly to SQL Server. The result will be a cleaner
data access model and improved transaction performance.
Microsoft plans to release a technical beta of Office 2000 in the second
quarter or third quarter of 1998. Microsoft then plans to refresh the beta code
base several times throughout the summer and early fall, culminating in a
broader marketing beta in the third quarter or fourth quarter.
Is Microsoft finally discovering the value of end-to-end data management?
With SQL Server 7.0 and Office 2000 still on the beta drawing boards, it's too
early to tell. However, if the features Microsoft is touting for Office 2000
work as advertised, Microsoft will establish itself as the premiere database
player in the Windows client/server computing space.
—Craig Barth
IE 5.0 Gets Slim, Integrates Better
As Microsoft ramps up its beta program for Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0,
details are emerging about the browser's revised architecture. In addition to
being leaner, IE 5.0 will, for the first time, let customers choose whether they
want to install the company's controversial Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Microsoft got into hot water earlier this year with J/Direct, a technology in
JVM that lets Java applications directly access Windows API functions. Sun
Microsystems filed suit against Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft violated its
licensing agreement for Java.
Customers who prefer to choose their Internet components are viewing
Microsoft's decision to unbundle JVM from the browser-only version of IE 5.0 as
a victory. However, Microsoft officials deny that Sun's lawsuit was the primary
motive for unbundling, and point instead to the larger trend toward
component-based software. According to sources close to the company, Microsoft
hopes to expand the reach of its Internet and Web technologies by further
streamlining them and making them suitable for embedding within other
applications. A good example is Outlook 98, which uses the IE 5.0 rendering
engine to display the Outlook Today screen, a Dynamic HTML-based summary screen.
Microsoft's ultimate goal is to foster similar integration efforts from
third parties. This goal is a driving force behind the company's decision to
break much of the IE 5.0 suite into components. The goal is also behind
Microsoft's decision to focus on tightly integrating Office 2000 and IE 5.0 over
the next 6 months to 12 months. Only time will tell if Microsoft's strategy will
translate into a tangible win for the software giant or prompt the US Department
of Justice (DOJ) to call Microsoft to the carpet for continuing to bundle IE
technology in increasingly intractable ways.
—Craig Barth
New 350MHz and 400MHz Pentium II Processors Might Not Be What You Expected
Intel's new 350MHz and 400MHz Pentium II processors have set new PC
price-performance standards. Both processors provide new high-end speed limits
for Intel CPUs and support for the new 440BX chipset, which raises the bus speed
from 66MHz to 100MHz. However, these new members of the Pentium II chip family
are not the Deschutes chips that you might have been expecting. Instead, the
350MHz and 400MHz Pentium II processors use Slot 1 technology and incorporate a
512KB Level 2 cache, in which the cache bus runs at half the CPU speed.
Intel plans to release the Deschutes chips--known as the Pentium II Xeon
chips--in the second half of 1998. The Pentium II Xeon chips use Slot 2
technology and have a much larger 2MB Level 2 cache running at full processor
speed. The Pentium II Xeon chips will run at 400Hz and 450MHz. These features
make the upcoming Xeon chips much better suited to high-end server and
workstation implementations than the current Pentium II CPUs. (For more
information about the Xeon chips, see Craig Barth, "Xeon, Warrior CPU,"
NT News Analysis, July 1998.)
—Michael Otey
Chrome: Microsoft's Heavy Metal
As Microsoft's forthcoming Chrome multimedia architecture begins to take
shape, developers are facing up to the platform's hefty resource requirements.
According to Brad Chase, vice president of Windows marketing and developer
relations at Microsoft, Chrome will require serious hardware to perform well. "The
initial PCs that will run the Chrome feature of Windows 98 are going to be
350MHz Pentium boxes," Chase said at the PC Futures '98 show in St. Louis,
Missouri. "You're not going to be able to have this [architecture] on a
standard Pentium today." A typical Chrome-capable configuration will
feature a 300MHz (or higher) Pentium II processor, 100MHz system bus, 4MB of
video memory, 64MB of RAM, and Digital Video Disc (DVD) capability.
Chrome works by exposing the Windows DirectX multimedia architecture to Web
developers. Through standard programming interfaces such as Extensible Markup
Language (XML), C++, Visual Basic Script (VBScript), and JScript, developers can
build complex presentations that require a fraction of the bandwidth needed
compared with more traditional approaches, such as animated Graphics Interchange
Format (GIF) images. The result will be a content-rich Web experience that melds
streaming media, high-fidelity graphics, and interactive capabilities,
all accelerated by the underlying DirectX infrastructure.
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