Inside Microsoft’s Windows CE strategy

.KEYWORD interview
.FLYINGHEAD EXCLUSIVE INSIDER INTERVIEW
.TITLE Inside Microsoft’s Windows CE strategy
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT interview-cover.gif
.SUMMARY It seems fitting to kick off our Premiere Issue by having a candid conversation with Microsoft’s Jonathan Roberts, General Manager of Market Development for Windows CE. In this fascinating, exclusive interview conducted by Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz, Roberts shares the inside scoop on Microsoft’s Windows CE strategy. Whether you’re new to Windows CE or an old hand, this is the must-read interview you can’t miss.
.BEGIN_TABLE 2

.Q DG
I always like to start off interviews getting to know the person being interviewed. Can you tell me your role at Microsoft?

.A JR
I’m responsible for business development, marketing, user interface, and prototyping design for Windows CE. I also have a group that does long-term planning on where we’re going with product, and future directions, and things of that nature. So I have kind of a grab-bag of responsibilities that span across the division.

.Q DG
Were you involved with Windows CE when it got started?

.A JR
No, although I’ve been with the company for about 12 years. I’ve sort of done the tour de force of the operating system business. I’ve been the Director of Marketing for Windows NT, Back Office, then back to Windows, and now Windows CE. I came to Windows CE almost exactly one year ago after running the marketing function for Windows 95/98 and NT Workstation. So I’ve been in the operating system business for awhile. But only on Windows CE for about a year.

.CALLOUT We have somewhere over 500 people working on Windows CE dedicated development. But that really understates the sort of investment we’re making on Windows CE. Because we pick up and re-purpose a lot of the code that’s developed in other parts of the company.

.Q DG
The operating system business has certainly changed a lot in the past 12 years!

.A JR
It does make you feel really old. I have to admit I am somewhat of a geek. I think of my life in terms of product launches. It’s embarrassing that I know that the product launch of Windows 3.0 (I think) was April 9th, 1990. The product launch of Windows 3.1 was May 22, 1992. I can kind of gauge key milestones in my life. Fortunately, the birth of my first child is now somewhat dominant in my thinking as well.

.Q DG
I’d like to try to understand a little bit about Windows CE and Microsoft’s view of it. I’ve got questions that aren’t in any particular order. Let’s start off with an exciting one. What do you think the future of Windows CE will be?

.A JR
Windows CE is part of our overall appliance strategy. So I think Windows CE is going to find itself into an ever increasing range of devices. Already it’s in almost a half dozen defined platforms that Microsoft has worked on directly — ranging from Palm-sized units to Sega game consoles. It’s in about 150 other projects in the embedded space that go from milk analyzers to navigation systems. So, you know, I think Windows CE is going to find itself in an ever increasing range of devices. I think what’s exciting is — because Windows CE will be common across those devices — there’s an opportunity for them to work together in some sort of logical and connected way. And so over time, Windows CE is going to stand for "connected" and make all these appliances work together more intelligently.

.Q DG
We’ve seen some of the lines blurring between Windows CE devices and Windows 98 devices in things like the Vadem Clio and the various new HP devices, where basically Windows CE is becoming an inexpensive, light laptop OS. Where is the line between the definition of what sort of a device Windows is supposed to be on and what a Windows CE device is supposed to be?

.A JR
Admittedly those larger form factor, Jupiter-class devices, the H/PC Pros, definitely are on the blurry part of the line. The way that I think about it is that Windows CE is for appliances. An appliance, in my definition, is something that has a specific or primary function. It can have additional functions, but it’s really there to do one or maybe two things really, really well. So in the case of the Jupiter-class device, it really is a great email and browsing device, so that when you’re a road warrior, and you’re on the road, and that’s what you want to do, it’s ideal for that. It is convenient. It turns on instantly, it has an 18 hour battery life. It has a lot of flexibility on how it can be opened and used. That’s what it’s designed for.

A PC on the other hand, is a general purpose device. So the difference is really between specific function and a general function. In this instance (the Windows 98 laptop) we’ve taken your whole desktop on the road. And so that’s where it boots longer and has a shorter battery life, but it also has the capability of running all of Access or all of Excel or whatever it is that you may need. Between appliances and general purpose systems, those are the sort of two ends of the spectrum. The Jupiter is a little bit closer to the center of that spectrum, but I still think it’s very much on the appliance side.

.CALLOUT About seven billion processors will be sold this year according to Frost & Sullivan. In three years, there are going to be fourteen billion processors sold.

.Q DG
It also seems to me that the desktop Windows machines are generally Wintel-based [meaning Microsoft Windows running on an Intel processor] environment whereas the Windows CE devices seem to be running on a wide variety of processors.

.A JR
The fact of the matter is that Windows CE runs on top of five different chip architectures, including X86. So we also run on the Intel chip architecture and all of the folks that do X86. But we run on the Hitachi architecture and we run on SH4s and all these different things. So we are hosted on top of different architectures. And the reason is that these chips offer some very nice characteristics. Right? Lower power consumption so you can have longer batter life. Smaller footprints, etc., that are very appropriate for the appliance space.

.Q DG
I understand that Windows CE is used very much in embedded devices and I’ve also heard of something called embedded NT. Some of our readers might be a little confused how those two compare in the embedded space.

.A JR
One [Windows CE] goes as small as 350 to 500K, depending on whether you want a networking stack. The other [NT] starts at 12 megabytes of ROM and then another 12 to 24 megabytes of sort of hard-disk space. So essentially there are huge differences in their memory characteristics. And so, obviously, NT is not going to find itself being built into this huge range of appliance devices that Windows CE is really, really targeted for. NT is finding itself more appropriately in the networking space where people want all of the services that it has. For instance, its proxy services. You’d put it in a headless networking situation where you don’t need to monitor anything but you just want to have it embedded there. It can be a great, dedicated proxy server or a switch or something like that. So, it’s moving more towards the industrial back-end functionality. It’s also conceivable that it’d find its way into very high-end copiers, things of that nature. But there are size characteristics and there are memory characteristics. I’m really pushing them to two different ends of the embedded market.

.Q DG
Is there a classic "this is exactly where embedded NT would be used" example? A handheld PC seems to be what many people think of when they think of Windows CE.

.A JR
First, I think that the handheld PC is a very limited view of what Windows CE is good for. First, I’d want to say that the way to think about Windows CE is that it’s a modular operating system that essentially is broken into 120 different modules. Developers can take whichever of those modules that they want for whatever class of device that they want. And so, the device can reach the size, as I mentioned before, between about 500K if you have a networking stack, up to about 1.2 megabytes if you want to use the UI and some basic browser capabilities, and up to two megabytes if you want to use the pocket apps. So it can really be optimized for this huge range of devices, not just the H/PC. In terms of NT, the embedded NT I kind of highlighted earlier is ideally used for industrial networking type products.

.Q DG
Like routers and things like that.

.A JR
You know, PBXs, routers, But the other point, not to make these answers incredibly long, is Windows CE