Where Are We Going? How Vista Looks to Change It
How will technology impact your financial well being today and into the future? After hearing Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates describe his vision of the future at the CES Keynot address in Las Vegas last evening, I can say that "you aint seen nothin' yet". Bill showed off the capabilities of the latest Windows OS, Vista and some of the advanced capabilities of a Vista equipped PC when combined with Windows Media Center and, for those of you that are into gaming without a PC, the X-box 360. As I write this on a Vista equipped PC, I'm using none of the futuristic features that Bill was waxing euphorically about last night. The Big M’s vision of your PC pervading every aspect of your life has never seemed more imminent.
Some of the concepts introduced include the ability to use a the combination of a PC running Vista, an X-Box 360 controller, and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology to conduct a virtual flythrough of cities, allowing you to easily locate a business, recreational facility, or any other place you’d like to go. In the demo, it was combined with real time traffic information to approximate a street level drive through Las Vegas, complete with actual traffic conditions.
Another vision astutely rendered by the Microsoft demo team include HDTV content obtained by either streaming from IPTV partner sites or downloaded for later enjoyment. Another development that promises to go hand in hand with this is the new Windows Home Server software. Shown on an HP home server promised later this year, this will simplify the migration of homes throughout the world to a centralized, digital entertainment platform.
For those of you that would die with the remote in your hand while watching sports, the integration of the Vista platform with third party providers, such as FoxSports.com, is pretty astounding. You’ll be able to not only enjoy your games in pure HDTV if they’re being broadcast that way, you can view multiple games at once, in different windows. You can fly any of the windows to a position of prominence at will. You can set up the system to be personalized for the way you view sports. Want a stats bar to scroll along the bottom of the screen? Fine. How about having scores of other games, but only college football, because hey, golf’s a game, not a sport, and you never liked baseball anyway. It’ll be no problem.
If you count fantasy sports among your addictions, what good would all those stats be without automatically showing you how your fantasy roster was faring that Sunday, or this time of year, Saturday? The way they had Vista set up last night, it actually does that!
The file management capabilities are a definite productivity enhancer as well. Lose a file? You can easily find it with a couple keystrokes, even if it’s on another computer on your home network. Add this to some pretty advanced, though simple, image editing capabilities, and you have never been able to do so much, so simply on your computer.
Will it really all work this way when it’s released 3 weeks from today? Well, no one really knows for sure, no matter what they say, but Microsoft has Betaed the crap out of it this time, so there’s definitely hope. They released to testers in 7 countries in the hopes of refining the interface and working out the bugs before, rather than after the release.
How does this affect your finances? Well, for one thing, to take advantage of all this gee whiz technology, you’ll not be able to use your old, POS computer you’ve managed to nurse along for the past 5 years. The hardware requirements are pretty stiff. If you’ve looked at new computers at all lately, you’ve no doubt noticed the “Vista Ready” tags on many of the machines now. That’s because you can’t just plop a new copy of Vista on anything and expect it to run, and exude functionality on just anything.
The bigger picture however is that all sorts of new applications are going to be developed and existing ones refined for the new OS. New development means investment opportunities for you. The direction that Bill was indicating are heavily user content influenced and very multimedia centric. It also seems fairly certain that 3rd party developers and content providers will use financial data in much the same way that the Microsoft demo wowed the audience last night with sports statistics. Imagine that instead of immersing yourself in a couple of college football games and a NASCAR event, you had a couple of customized financial tickers scrolling over your screen as you watched MSNBC or Bloomberg. At the same time, integrated financial applications extracted pertinent data in much the same way as the fantasy football app pulled player stats from games in progress. As opportunities arose, you’d know about it, or possibly of the have the app take advantage of them for you. With a bit of minor tweaking, fuzzy logic in the app could automatically adjust for your risk tolerance or preferred market niches.
There’s much more at the CES that will influence the way you live in the future, and doubtlessly some things that will make some of you struggle even harder with the need to get debt free. About Westinghouse’s 82” LCD TV being shown in Booth 21701…….
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