I spent 90 minutes in the Windows Hardware pavilion at WinHEC last night and saw some cool stuff. Most noteworthy was a hybrid disk drive that incorporates non-volatile flash memory into a conventional hard disk drive. The impact on performance is pretty huge, as you can imagine. This technology is still pretty early, but it should be commercially available when Longhorn ships.
I also got a chance to look more closely at the “Metro” technology. It looks like there will still be room in the world for PDF files. The real impact is to replace the old Enhanced Metafile (EMF) format with a new, smarter native format for printed output. There’s a big overlap with PDF files, but it’s not as direct a competitor as early reports, including mine, might suggest.
Ed Bott 