Microsoft offers future vision amid current security problems

Wednesday, May 5th 2004, 11:36 am

By: News On 6

SEATTLE (AP) _ Microsoft executives touted a touchy-feely future world of computerized ``experiences'' _ high-tech homes, offices and automobiles filled with digitalized music, movies and communications to open their annual hardware developers convention.

Meanwhile, in the real world, computer users grappled with an all-too-familiar experience, ridding their workaday personal computers of yet another malicious worm.

The computer worm dubbed ``Sasser'' has infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, causing the systems to continually crash and reboot. Microsoft released a fix for the flaw that the worm exploits several weeks ago, but many computer owners had yet to apply it.

On Tuesday, Microsoft executives conceded that the software giant needs to deal with fundamental issues _ including security _ before it can convince people to invest in all sorts of futuristic technology.

``If you do all the fundamentals, you don't get a lot of credit,'' Jim Allchin, who heads of Microsoft's Windows division, told the audience of hardware engineers and developers. ``If you mess up the fundamentals, you get all the abuse.''

Tom Button, a Microsoft corporate vice president, took it one step further, arguing that better security and reliability are absolute necessities.

``In order to really grow the industry, we have to conquer many of these areas of classic failure,'' he said.

But although Microsoft has made security a top priority for the past couple years, its top executives didn't devote much time to the topic at the annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Instead, they focused on the whiz-bang gadgets of the future.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates offered a brief glimpse of a major Windows security update, called Service Pack 2, that is due out sometime this year. But he said that while security ``is a required thing, we feel very optimistic that will be in place.''

The company urged hardware makers to devote resources toward supporting Microsoft's vision of a future rife with multiple electronic gadgets. That includes everything from a cell phone that can record video to a remote control with a biometric sensor that could one day double as a telephone. Such gadgets would be used for everything from planning family dinners to showing vacation pictures.

Allchin called it part of the ``experience economy,'' in which people will pay for things like being entertained.

Still, Microsoft executives said such devices won't succeed unless they are easy to use, both on their own and in combination with each other. The new devices also have to be as convenient as a television, turning on and off instantly and operating quietly, they said.

A big challenge today, Gates said, is ``making sure software connections are there to make things simple.''

Button, however, argued that security is the biggest challenge for Microsoft and others.

``There's nothing we can do that's more important,'' he said.