With exquisite timing a very naughty mole leaks us an email from top Microsoft spinmeister Mark Murray. Not any old email, either - it details events for the week leading up to Der Tag, today, the XP launch in NYC.

There's lots of good stuff in the email, which seems to be Murray's regular bulletin to get the spinmeisters und madels singing off the same liedersheet. Its basic role is: to drive home the various messages (not all of them concerning XP) Microsoft will be pushing this week; to keep everybody abreast of who's where, pushing what; to provide a heads-up regarding events to be covered in the next few weeks, and to akeep them abreast of what's going to be in tomorrow's newspapers.

Least interesting from the tomorrow's newspapers point of view is this: "This week, another in a series of Microsoft essays on technology and society will run in the New York Times, Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News, Seattle Times/PI and other major U.S. newspapers. Titled 'Creating Tools for the Digital Decade,' the essay focuses on the tremendous customer and partner effort behind Windows XP, with the overall theme that broad partnership and collaboration is how great software is made. The essay will be available at http://www.microsoft.com/issues/ starting Wednesday."

And there indeed it is. Dull, trite, vacuous are not the words. Also due on presspass on Wednesday is something weirdly called "Windows XP Partner Love." Surely not, but we haven't checked... Apart from the paid-for advertorial stuff, the week's expected non-XP coverage is as follows:

News source: The Register


Enough of the freebee’s the Windows XP launch, didn’t start on time, was around 9:15 that it started, we saw the Windows XP “yes you can” Madonna video, then heard from Bill Gates, (obviously taped!) in New York, and then Steve Ballmer later in the event.

Showed off some history of computing, even a donkey.bas, one of the first programs that was written for GW-BASIC, running on an XP box in compatability mode, proving that you can run old dos programs, then they showed off the donkey.net “.NET” enabled version, you now have to kill the donkeys by driving into them! (We’ve got to find this donkey.net version, looks rather neat in a twisted sort of way!) And all of this was done on a P4 system with a GF3 graphics card, which was rather quick.

The actual Windows XP demo showed nothing new or exciting to most of our readers to NeoWin. A shootout was produced to show off the many benefits of Windows XP vrs Windows 95 OSR2. Rather lame if you ask me, This went on for like 25-30 minutes, I actually felt bad for the Windows 95 guy trying to do some of the features that were being showcased for Windows XP. Wish they could have showed IM in Windows 95, so not to alienate the whole Windows9x public, some of which cannot upgrade from their current systems to systems capable of running Windows XP.

Some good points were using the new Instant Messaging 4.5 client (showing off a Compaq iPAQ with Poctet PC 2002 and IM over 802.11b networking, rather neat!) which they said was available now. (no mention of PowerToys though!). They showed off IM and a web cam demo (touting no drivers config's to do!), White boarding (as per usual this didn’t go as planned, way to go Microsoft, every event I have attended has had something go wrong!) with Microsoft Word 2002, and then demonstrated the Remote assistance feature, which was good.

They touched on some other features, digital camera plug and play with a Canon FireWire enabled camera, downloading movies, adding wallpaper and a Madonna music track. They also showed off the new main logon screen, the new start bar, my documents and the taskbar grouping etc..

Towards the end they showed off the Plus Pack, showing one or two of the new screen savers, everyone went ooh at the aquarium one (big improvement from the Windows 95 one!). No new themes :( but we have tgtsoft's contribution to thank for now having the proper ability to have new themes by end users!

At the end, they had a rather nice lady on the stage (very tall, slim blonde, short skirt, you can guess why she was picked to be the contestant for this segment of the event!). She was there to play one of the games in the Plus Pack, bowling, she walked away (after playing not so bad, got a total of 7 pins down) with 500 dollars, with Microsoft donating equal amount to a charity of her choice. A very nice gesture on Microsoft’s part, still though, would have been fair if they had have given the audience an equal change to participate, but obviously they wanted someone the majority of the audience would like on stage…. :)

Overall I was not impressed, I would have liked a live feed from NYC for the real Windows XP launch, which I will most probably see when I get home on TechTV or download the video footage.

They had a 30 minute break, after which they were going to have a kind of more in depth feature look at Windows XP, but for me, it was a rather large disappointment.

What did I come away with, a few CD’s a T-shirt and a breakfast. Better do a lot more in future if you intend to get people to come to your events at 7:30 in the morning!

me101, aka the 'Crazy Irishman'


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