March 2006

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Business Week
JANUARY 23, 2006
Mister Vista's Perspective

Microsoft's Joe Belfiore talks up the soon-to-be-released operating system. Security and reliability, he insists, will see big gains

It has taken Microsoft - a half-decade. But come this fall, it will roll out the long-awaited Windows Vista operating system (see BW Online, 11/18/05, "Microsoft's New Word: Accountability" (/technology/content/nov2005/tc20051118_179356.htm)). Like every generation of the OS before it, Vista promises to change computing. With a market share already north of 90%, any new version of Windows reshapes the entire PC ecosystem. So software developers, PC makers, and corporate tech staffers are gearing up hard for the new release.

Vista may have been the most challenging version of Windows to get to market. Delays and feature cuts along the way hurt morale, as more nimble rivals brought other tech innovations to market (see BW, 9/26/06, "Troubling Exits At Microsoft" (/magazine/content/05_39/b3952001.htm)). Now, with the finish line in sight, Microsoft is preparing for a massive launch. At the Consumer Electronics Show, Chairman Bill Gates made Vista the centerpiece of his annual speech (see BW Online, 1/5/06, "For Gates, It's Entertainment " (/technology/content/jan2006/tc20060105_303089.htm)).

BusinessWeek's Seattle bureau chief, Jay Greene [jay_greene@businessweek.com], recently sat down with Windows Vice-President Joe Belfiore to talk about the road to Vista and the feature that will drive sales. Following are edited excerpts from their conversation:

Windows Vista is coming out this fall. Why are people going to buy it?

There are a few ways we think about this. One, we want Windows Vista to be a PC experience that makes people confident and comfortable with their computers. So there's an awful lot of work we're doing in the areas of security and reliability to make your computing experience very smooth and confidence-inspiring. And that ranges from protecting you against sites that are phishing or trying to steal your identity in Internet Explorer, to delivering parental controls so parents can feel good about their kids using the PC, to protected-mode usage for Internet Explorer and your user account that makes it much more difficult for viruses to affect your PC.

A second big area is to make it easy for you to find the things you're looking for, to manage lots of photos, to deal with a really large music collection. So we've built search capabilities right into the operating system. Within the Start menu, you can type a few letters of a document or an application [name], and it will come right up, and then you can launch it. There's a new photo library that makes it very easy to find your photos. There's a sidebar that helps you get information from your favorite news sources and keep all that right there at a glance. So the second idea is really trying to make it easier to deal with a barrage of information that people get today.

And then the last thing for consumers is some of the great entertainment features...very cool and compelling slide shows [using the photo library]. Windows Vista includes a new Windows Media Player that has much faster and simpler ways of dealing with a giant music library. It has lots of very attractive views, including album-art views, and it integrates really nicely with some music services so that you have a great way of browsing for and buying or subscribing to music.

The breakthroughs in Windows XP were really the ease with which users could manage digital photos and music. Are the new capabilities in Windows Vista that much better than what you have in XP?

I think they're that much better than what you have in XP. Taking the two examples you gave, the photo support in Windows XP, while it's nice, really is not helpful if you have thousands and thousands and thousands of images. Anyone who's owned a digital camera for a year or two years starts to collect those, and being able to rate them and find all your good pictures really quickly, or to tag them and find all your holiday pictures when it comes time to make your holiday card, or be able to print them in simple ways or order prints from them -- all these things are fairly difficult to do with Windows XP relative to Windows Vista, and so those are the kinds of things that we've tried to improve.

I'd say the same is true for music. Since the time Windows XP shipped, there's been a lot of innovation in music services and different ways that you can buy music, or put it on a device, or subscribe to music, and the music features in Windows Vista help make all those scenarios work a lot better.

Windows XP really helped unleash digital media in ways that I don't think consumers realized when the operating system debuted.

Are there new applications that will come out, that folks will discover once they have Vista, that maybe aren't so apparent right now?

Undoubtedly, there will be. It's one of those things that's a little bit hard to guess...given such a large and active sort of developer community creating new value for Windows.

But if I were to try to venture a guess, I do think that the scenario of watching TV on your PC, and having your PC enable lots of devices around your house -- like your TV set, your game console -- to give you that digital-media experience in any room, would be one.

That requires purchasing the Media Center Edition of Windows Vista, right?

The scenario I was describing requires the Media Center software, yes.

Do you anticipate with Windows Vista that the share of Windows operating-system sales for Media Center Edition will climb significantly?

I think so, yes. Today we're seeing, for example, in the U.S. at retail, about half of the desktop PCs selling with [the Windows XP version of] Media Center. And I think that the trend will continue.

When is Windows Vista going to ship?

We'll have Windows Vista available for people to get in the last half of this year.

What are you going to do to support it? What are the rollout plans?

We certainly believe, as do all or most of our significant partners, that it will be a big-deal launch. It will be a big deal for consumers, it will be a big deal for businesses, it will be less expensive to roll out and easier to manage. I think we did a pretty big Windows XP launch, we did a pretty big Windows 95 launch. We're going to see a launch with Windows Vista that's going to certainly be up there in that category.

Do you think Vista will have the same kind of industry-changing impact, and if so, how?

I do think it will. I think that it has enough platform richness in it that we'll see third parties do work that we can't even imagine today, and some of those things really matter.

And then for businesses that have to manage hundreds of thousands of PCs, simply the ability to do that at much lower cost and in an easier way will affect their business, and so that will have a significant effect as well, and I think it will really make Vista a computing phenomenon that will really matter.

You talked about security earlier, and security has always been a concern. Is this going to be a game-changing system in that it's bulletproof, in that the folks who write malware just won't be able to figure out how to get past this? Or is this just yet another iteration in the constant cat-and-mouse game?

I think this is a game-changing system. We, as operating-system creators, with Vista have the opportunity to go deep into the core of the system and make changes with the intent to make it bulletproof. There are ways that user accounts have been modified that make them much more difficult for attackers to get through. There are ways that Internet Explorer has been modified to make it much more difficult for attackers to get through. And when you do a significant revision of the operating system, it allows for enough application-compatibility testing and hardware-compatibility testing that you can make some deep changes, so that those types of attacks are much more difficult.

Bulletproof is a tricky word. Is it really game-changing enough where, if you're a ne'er-do-well, you're going to throw your hands up and say, "Gosh, there's no way to get around this thing?"

You know, people will certainly continue to make attempts at it, but I think the changes that we have in Vista this time around are more significant than any changes we've made in any past version of Windows to address this. And I think it would also be fair to say it was our No. 1 concern in trying to do a great job for our customers, and really make this as completely virus- and malware-resistant as we possibly could.

So by the time this launches, it will have been roughly five years since the last version of Windows shipped. Why did it take so long?

Well, I wouldn't characterize it as having been five years since the last version of Windows shipped. In the last five years, we've shipped three releases of Media Center and one update release with the Xbox 360, and we've shipped two versions of Tablet. And we've shipped the Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was a pretty significant update to Windows XP. But we've made it available for free to everyone, because we wanted to address as many security problems as we could.

Just to be clear, though, when you talk about new versions of Media Center Edition and Tablet, and even the Service Pack, they're all working off the same code base. There's Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Tablet Edition?

That's right.

So, granted, there are folks in the Windows division who have been working very hard. But it isn't entirely fair to say that you came out

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Models Come Alive - Will Wright, Maxis/Electronic Arts

@ The PC Forum

Dyson: Good evening. Now we’re going to have the really fun part of the conference, because Will Wright, who has made generations of kids come alive, is going to talk about models coming alive. He needs no introduction. I’m sure you’d rather hear him than me, so come on up, Will. Thank you. [Applause]

Will Wright, Maxis/Electronic Arts: Hi everybody. [Audience responds, "Hi, Will!"]

Esther asked me to come to this conference and talk about models because that’s kind of what I do – build computer models. The name of this talk is Models Come Alive. But for me, this is more like what really happens when I make these models alive.

Because the models I do are game models. I don’t really care what data they generate, as long as it’s interesting. That is a nice position to be in. Ever since I was a kid, I have been building models – all the time. I built hundreds and hundreds of models, and my mother would come and complain and tell me that one day I’d have to get a real job. So I kind of have the last laugh now, because I’m still building these things. [Laughter]

I’m going to talk about models on the computer as well as models in the player’s head, because games are really running on a coprocessor system – your imagination is half the experience. We’re always trying to find ways to leverage that imagination. Also, a lot of the dynamics we use to build these models map to the dynamics outside the game, between the players.

Science has been using models for hundreds of years. Typically, science takes all this data from reality and tries to find the simplest possible representation of it; it tries to compress the data down into some very elegant description, which we call a model or a hypothesis. Games pretty much turn the crank the other way. We’re trying to find a very elegant set of programming code that we can generate a very elaborate, expansive world with. In some sense, what we’re really trying to make for the player is an elaborate phase space or possibility space, a world that they can go into and unlock different events, actions or situations. One thing that we’ve noticed is that players, especially recently, are getting very, very good at sniffing out the size of a possibility space. You can go into a game and within about four or five minutes you can get a really good idea of how open-ended or how linear it is. Anybody has that ability – just your average game player. It’s amazing how we can get a perception of the size of a phase space just by pushing on it in a few places. So it’s actually kind of challenging. The game players want much larger game spaces to play in; they want larger sets of possibilities.

But these are the three rough areas I want to cover: topologies, dynamics and paradigms. Topologies are the structure of a system: what the elements are and how they relate. The dynamics define how the structures change through time. And the paradigm glues the two together. It gives us tools for understanding the ways topologies are changed through dynamics. Now, before I go off on this scientific-sounding stuff, I want to have a disclaimer saying that I’m just a game designer. This is just stuff I’ve learned through experience while doing games. For me, I have liked putting LEGOs together since I was a kid, and if something looks square like this, it is attractive to me – I can plug it into other squares and make something. So I treat dynamics like that. I can pull little components out of a box and stick them together. We do a lot of this experimentally.

Grouping is another dynamic you often see in games. It’s a way for players to aggregate a large number of objects and bring them to a higher level of abstraction so that, for instance, they can move a whole group instead of one. You can group similar or specialized things. It gets interesting when you look at specialized groupings. Specialization is promoted by communication. The neuron, for instance, enabled larger creatures to start evolving because there were communication structures between different parts, so cells could specialize in individual functions. They lowered the cost and the friction of that communication. In some sense, specialization breeds most of the networks around us. You see it a lot in games. We see networks that are explicit within the game, such as technology networks and structures. We also see it in our communities. In our Sims fan community, there’s a network of specialized participants, and casual players that are pulled up into it. This network shows the flow of content between specialists. At the highest level, the tool builders make tools that content artists use to feed the Webmasters, who in turn feed the story creators, and so on. It’s kind of like an ecosystem. There’s also a reverse flow of recognition, so the Webmaster is gives the highest recognition to the content artists, who in turn appreciate the tool builders. In some sense, what we’re really building with these games are communities. That’s our primary thing. We want to build a strong community around the game, which is kind of an excuse to build the community. And we want to have all these dynamics occurring within the community.

Other dynamics include allocation, which is how you spend time and material. This is very much the model that most people have when they play a game: How they are going to spend their limited resources. Mapping is a way to make temporary associations or networks to increase functional performance. For example, if I’m playing a fighting game and choose to be Godzilla, my best friend might say, "I know the best one against Godzilla is Megagodzilla." So it’s an orthogonal relationship. A lot of fighting games are like that. State machines parse an environmental situation, pick from a fixed number of behavioral states and then run that behavior. That’s a kind of mapping dynamic. Mapping is very important to online games. A lot of players come into these games – hundreds of thousands of players – and they just randomly happen upon each other and make friendships or start hanging out. One of the biggest things we can do to increase the retention in these worlds is to fix that mapping problem. For every person that walks into one of these online worlds, there’s a small group of people that they would totally hit it off with, and there’s probably a large group that they would totally hate. The other people they meet and play with is going to have the biggest impact on their experience in the game. If we can somehow target and measure the people that we should map them to, the retention should go up drastically. To do that, we’re starting to analyze their behavioral play patterns in the game. With a game like Sims Online, it’s actually pretty easy because they’re already having social interactions with each other, and we can measure which profiles are more compatible with others to make that match.

Boundaries develop as a result of that grouping. And specialization slowly evolves from that. Specialization involves propagating information material through networks back to the control system. That propagation involves allocation decisions, building those networks involves mapping decisions, and at some point the specialization jumps up to the next level and the whole process starts all over again. This is something we are seeing not just within the game designs and the models that we build, but also within the player communities and the way they operate. They are actually doing this level-jumping themselves.

The systems that we really want to study are what we call complex adaptive systems. They are the soft, squishy things that change, evolve and have behavior, including economies, cities, organism and ourselves. They’re similar to cybernetic systems in that there is an "in" and an "out." But they are a lot more complicated on the inside, where there is a system that allows them to learn and adapt to their environment. Some are very simple mechanisms, while others are vastly complex, like our brain. There have been attempts to simulate simple versions, such as genetic algorithms and neural networks. The results have met with fairly limited use, but they still advanced the understanding of these systems. One of the more useful tools that came from this is the idea of adaptive landscapes, which was originally proposed in biology by Sewall Wright in 1932. He was trying to view evolution as a hill-climbing function. The hill represents different genetic possibilities, and the process of evolution is represented by moving up the hill toward higher levels of fitness and rates of reproduction. This concept applies to a lot of systems, such as economics. It also applies to games. In The Sims and all of our game designs, we think in terms of the gameplay landscape. When a player is moving through the game and doing their stuff, in their mind they have some idea of what success is, and they usually map it onto certain dimensions. In The Sims you can either go for material success or social success, but the highest level of success is achieved by going straight up the middle. In some sense, it’s like bowling; what they want to do is roll it right down the middle. But most people start heading off one way or the other, because they’re greedy or they’re too friendly, and they end up in the gutters. [Laughter]

The gutters are the local maxima, so if they get stuck there they have to take a hit to get back up to the larger peak. We’ve actually measured this. This is a map of how 30,000 players played the game. We’re actually trying to map the game state space: what the most populated regions are, what the biggest attractions are. Our ability to collect and use metrics like this is going

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