Computercol/19″/dt1st/mark2nd
By T.R. REID and BRIT HUME
Here’s our favorite millennium bug joke: Microsoft plans to introduce the newest version of Windows, now called “Windows 2000,” near the end of this year. But there may be technical problems along the way, which would delay the launch into the first quarter of 1900.
Whenever it comes out, the new Windows should prove to be one of the most important product introductions of the coming year. But it doesn’t look as if the next version will make any earth-shaking changes to the world’s most widely used operating system. And that seems to be the pattern for new personal computer stuff scheduled to hit the market in 1999: for the most part, we’ll see a continuation of current trends.
The new version of Microsoft’s flagship program is supposed to be a merger of the familiar Windows 95-Windows 98 software now in use around the world and Windows NT, the somewhat more powerful version of the program for large-scale office environments. It will run faster than current Windows versions and take up more memory and disk space, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any crucial new feature that will require making the upgrade.
To go along with Windows 2000, Microsoft this year is also expected to introduce a new version of its integrated office suite, to be known, not surprisingly, as “Office 2000.” As with previous versions of Microsoft Office, the 1999 edition will combine word processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software, together with the Outlook personal information manager and various Internet tools.
Responding to complaints about behemoth programs like “Office,” which take up vast quantities of hard disk space, Microsoft is reportedly giving users greater leeway with this new edition to pick and choose exactly which features they want to install the first time they load the program.
The big software product of the year, however, is likely to be neither of these Microsoft offerings but rather an entertainment product such as the new CD-ROM version of the huge movie hit “Titanic.” This three-CD offering is not just a computer version of the movie in fact, Leonardo di Caprio isn’t even in the new program, which will definitely reduce its appeal among the teen-age female population in our household.
Instead, the program uses the digital and scale models of the Titanic that were made for the movie to let users relive the construction, launch, and eventual sinking of that famous liner. You can take a 3-D walking tour through the ship, or you can read the full text of both the British and American official investigations of the wreck. The CD was supervised by James Cameron, director of the movie. With his characteristic modesty, he has titled the program “James Cameron’s Titanic Explorer.”
On the Internet, 1999 will see further expansion of sound and music archives. There will also be increased competition in the world of “portals,” those welcome-to-the-Web sites that offer net searches, news bulletins, weather, financial data, and the like.
This year, Walt Disney Co. is going to compete fiercely with Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN, and other portals to get your business first on its Go Network home page (www.go.com) and later on a new site called Disney’s Internet Guide or “DIG.”
In hardware, it presumably won’t disappoint anybody (except the U.S. Justice Department, which has actually argued in court that price cutting is an anti-consumer exercise) to learn that the familiar trend toward faster computers at lower prices will continue into 1999.
Intel’s new low-cost line of Pentium II compatible microprocessors, with the model name “Celeron,” should lead to a whole family of sub-$1,000 personal computers running at speeds of 366 MHz and faster. In turn, the lower prices for PCs that can claim “Intel Inside” will mean even further reductions for PCs running AMD or Cyriz microprocessors.
The hottest hardware item of 1999, though, is likely to be a DVD drive. DVD is the new CD-ROM technology under which a full-length movie can be stored on a single CD-ROM and viewed on a computer. More and more movies are going to come out in this format, as well as complete libraries of information. One of the more impressive software offerings of 1998, for example, was “The Complete National Geographic,” which included every article, picture, and map published in National Geographic magazine from 1888 through 1997. All this takes just four disks in the DVD format.
The only thing you need to enjoy such things is a DVD drive. So if you happen to be buying a PC in 1999, check to make sure that the DVD drive is included in the package.
T.R. Reid is London bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected] and Brit Hume at [email protected].
