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Questions

  1. Chris, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do at Microsoft.
  2. And that is scheduled to ship as part of Longhorn right?
  3. So it is not something that would come as part of the OS?
  4. So tell me why do we need Avalon? What is the point of Avalon, why not just keep going with the whole Win32, GDI based, HWIN based?
  5. So like what kinds of things are you looking to get Avalon to do? I mean, you mentioned we wanted to be able to integrate text, graphic, all that stuff, but practically speaking to people who are out there writing business-type applications, what does that really mean? Does it just mean sharper fonts, I mean what is the point?
  6. You had mentioned new input devices, like are we talking new types of mice, are we talking stuff that we have never seen before?
  7. Interesting. As far as you have mentioned some of the new output styles, are we going to see a new crop of UI controls that are coming with Avalon or I mean what exactly are we looking at there?
  8. Do you think there is room, remember at the MVP summit a number of months ago, you and Don were giving some demos. We had one demo where you had Windows and then you sort of turned it on at the side and you got this look of these Windows from the side, so could see the Z ord to some degree. That sort of got me to thinking, we don't really make use of 3D at all in any of the, occasionally a game we will make use of it, but beyond that we don't really do any 3D stuff. Do you think that is something that Avalon will kick off and do you think that's a good thing?
  9. Why do you dislike the web applications so much besides the fact that you are trying to ship Avalon?
  10. Okay, what would you see I guess where would you draw the cut off point, like you mentioned Outlook versus Outlook web access, part of the reason we like Outlook web access is the fact that I can walk up to any internet cafe in the world and still be able to get that Outlook level of experience and clearly, correct me if I am wrong, there is still a place for the web, yes?
  11. Where do you think that line is, where do you think the line between rich and thin clients should be drawn?
  12. Do you really think that they don't value the customer experience or is it just that we have not solved these deployment issues yet?
  13. So let me go through a little FUD exercise with you, let us talk about some of the major online sites and say do you think that they want a web front end or a rich front end, for example Amazon. Is this something that should be a web app or is this something that should be an Avalon app?
  14. You had mentioned your 401K, is that you thought this should be a richer experience? Slicing and dicing data in what sense, I just want to be able to, you are talking about doing different kinds of visualizations or I just I want to be able to draw my own kinds of graphs or what kind of slicing and dicing do you think needs to be done that is not already being done?
  15. Let's assume last FUD experiment, the flight reservations for your favorite airline site where you are going up and seeing whether or not the flight is on time, you incline to Avalon app?
  16. One of the interesting things because it plays in iTunes as well is, the one of the principal criticisms of the iPod and iTunes has been that it locks you into the whole Apple scheme, it doesn't support WMA for example it only supports three of the major formats out there and so forth and I am sure there are people in the world who will look at Microsoft in your preference towards the rich client application, the smart client applications and say yeah this is basically more of the grand conspiracy theory to lock people into a Windows front-end, because of the whole notion of reach right. A large part of the reason people liked the web was because of reach, they could go out to any machine, any platform and still be able to consume these applications. Clearly you thought about that problem to at least some degree, how do you address those concerns about I want to be able to reach more than just the Windows platform?
  17. Okay, but wouldn't that necessarily mean that I am having to learn multiple different programming models, if I have to learn something that is optimized for this small device versus optimized for general PC browse or versus optimized for the phone?
  18. I know that, people have often spoken of Avalon and Indigo in the same breath, that they are both theoretically gonna ship roughly at the same time as part of Longhorn or on the same CD or what not. What do you see in many respects as the great pairing between these two? Is this just the fact that Indigo is going to expose all those services or is there more beyond that? You could do this with DCOM and it would be roughly the same experience as far as you are concerned as the Avalon. I mean where is the great pairing between these two?
  19. What do you see, lets fast forward to 2006, you've shipped V1 of Avalon, what next?
  20. What are you guys thinking about next?