SEATTLE - Stung by slowing personal computer sales and its ongoing antitrust challenge, Microsoft unveiled last week a new version of its Windows operating system that it hopes will help boost the company's fortunes.
Calling the 18-year-old Windows operating system "the most successful software product of all time," Bill Gates, the company's co-founder and chairman, said the forthcoming Windows XP version would mark "the most important Windows release since Windows 95," a blockbuster that generated worldwide attention and made Windows nearly synonymous with personal computing.
Analysts were less buoyant, with some questioning whether XP would provide the "upgrade pop" - users either buying new machines or installing XP over existing versions - that made Windows 95 so successful but that has been absent from the most recent revisions: Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows Me.
"The challenge is, what hardware will it work on?" said Chris LeTocq, research director for Gartner Group. Noting that Windows XP is being aimed at computers sold after January 1999, he said, "People at home keep systems around a lot longer than two years."
Due out in beta test format soon and for sale by the end of the year, XP stands for the "experience" that all sorts of digital media - such as movies, music, photographs, wireless networking and home video - will bring to the PC.
One factor that could boost upgrade potential is XP's reunification of operating system software from its bifurcated ancestry: Windows 95 and Windows NT, the Windows operating system aimed at office and networking use.
With XP, Microsoft hopes to beat the drum for making the PC a living-room "hub" for digital entertainment, Web access and information management.
Microsoft's vision foresees continued expansion of high-speed Internet access to homes, along with wired or wireless networks connecting numerous devices in the home.
More than one-fifth of American homes have more than one PC, Gates said.
Because consumer versions of Windows must accommodate a wide variety of peripheral attachments and configurations, they have been notably unstable. With XP, Microsoft hopes to bring the reliability of Windows 2000 to the consumer realm.
Take "remote assistance," for example, whereby a user can seek online help from a more technically adept friend or associate, who can remotely log on to the user's machine and run programs.
The process could raise security concerns, but Microsoft executives say that XP will include a personal firewall for blocking hacker access, encryption for remote-access sessions, password protection and user-defined time-outs to prevent unauthorized access after a session has concluded.
Left unaddressed were issues involving integration of XP with Windows.NET, the set of software services Microsoft is working on to transplant the PC's functionality to a variety of wireless and handheld devices connected to the Internet.
