Vista's secret sauce

Curse us, beat us, make us write bad checks….we’re suckers for a good headline. And when the article has some valuable insights about Gates the Great, Steve “Micro-Cojones” Ballmer and their band of merry men, all the better.

It's easy to forget what a big deal this is for Microsoft. Deep in the guts of Vista are some pieces of the technology that will play a key part in its longer-term battle against Google et al. They include the drably-named Windows Presentation Foundation (once known by the codename Avalon, and the first overhaul of the Windows graphics technology in 15 years) and Windows Communication Foundation (the subsystem formerly known as Indigo, which lets applications "talk" to each other when they are running on different machines.)

Why does this matter? Well, through the new APIs (application programming interfaces) to these technologies, Microsoft is giving developers the chance to build applications that run smoothly, and look great, even when they are running over a network and working on many different kinds of devices. Remember, Microsoft is first and foremost a platform company, and these are important building-blocks of a Web-based computing platform that extends well beyond the PC. They are showing up first in Vista, but the same building blocks will be embedded in the Windows Longhorn server software when it comes out later this year, and in future Microsoft services over the internet.

Microsoft's bet is that the sort of "computing in the cloud" represented by Google will always be an incomplete picture. Only the company that spans PCs and other "client" devices, servers and services (ie, Microsoft) can stitch it all together. When it comes to the best way to meet a particular need through software, or the best way to charge for it, there will be "many ways to mix and match," Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategies, tells me: it will depend on the task at hand and how the user wants to pay for it.

"The world will be a giant mash-up of software and services," says Fitzgerald.

We'll see. By finally launching Vista, though, Microsoft has at least been able to make what it considers an important move in the longer-term chess game against Google.

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/