Scoble posted his new video interview with Jim Allchin, Group VP of Platforms (tip: he runs Windows and reports to Steve Ballmer). Jim has been running Longhorn on his primary work machine for three months now and I can attest to it- I was in a review w/him as it was installing in his office next-door.
Jim talks about Longhorn, about his days as a professional musician (he’s an accomplished guitar player), scenarios that will be enabled with Longhorn, what’s worked and what hasn’t in the past.
The video is conversational and raw- two guys and a handheld-camera. He’s also very frank about where we are in the development process. The goal at WinHEC wasn’t to thrill- it was about hardware fundamentals- drivers and connectivity models to enable the “thrilling” features that are being being built on-top.
One response to “Jim Allchin Longhorn interview on Channel9”
I was pretty thrilled by the way that you can enlarge or shrink thumbnail representations of files and see what they are without actually launching any application very quickly. This is a HUGE thrilling feature and will be really helpful for me in working with digital photos, pdf documents, etc. I’m not sure if they showed this at WinHec or not but it is really pretty amazing.
I was also thrilled at the speed at which searches are conducted. I’m not sure how much of the Lookout technology made it into file searches but I know right now with as many emails as I have archived it can take 10 minutes for me to do a complete search. I believe from what I saw of Longhorn combined with 64-bit computing that this is going to improve drastically.
The searches that I saw Jim do personally were so amazingly fast and he was dissatisfied with them at that!
I was also thrilled with the prospect of using meta data in search. At our blogger dinner in San Francisco Jim told us that all of the various meta data fields in applications like WMP would be searchable. I cannot overstate how thrilled I am about having the ability to do a search in Explorer easily for all of my five star rated songs and then copy them over to my laptop for remote listening.
Some of what I was thrilled by by way of performance increases very may be more attributable to 64-bit computing than Longhorn per se but WOW!
Perhaps the folks at WinHec didn’t see the same things I saw.
Sean, when you mentioned the other day that more memory would be available with 64-bit computing and that would be good for my large WMP library, I’m assuming that WMP will be able to take advantage of this extra memory as an app and that my library will be sped up significantly. Is this the case?
So if Paul Thurrott and Chris Pirillo are not thrilled, Thomas Hawk sure is. I actually thought the graphics were pretty cool, the translucent windows and all but it was the power of the system that impressed me the most.