Gates: Let's talk about web apps

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates reached out to web developers at a conference in Las Vegas on Monday, in a keynote speech which picked up on the growing popularity of web technologies.

Gates was speaking at Mix '06 in Las Vegas, the first edition of a Microsoft conference aimed at developers building new-style online applications that combine web and mobile access.

The Microsoft chairman said, in essence, the development world has changed with the advent of new web technologies that give people any time, any place access to their data - a far cry from the PC-centric world of the past. "Everything we do now, we have to be user-centric, not device-centric," he said.

Gates also pledged to bolster the company's development efforts on Internet Explorer, which he said has lagged in recent years.

Gates said: "In a sense we're doing a mea culpa, saying we waited too long for a browser release. I expect us to move very very rapidly there because we see great opportunities."

Gates said Microsoft is already working on the next two versions after IE 7, which is due later this year with Windows Vista, a long anticipated update to Windows XP.

On Monday, Microsoft released several product updates, including a "refresh" of the IE 7 Beta 2 preview, and Microsoft's Atlas Ajax web development kit will have an updated licence allowing customers to run web applications built with Atlas.

This week, Microsoft executives will explain in more detail the company's full arsenal of software and Live hosted services for building web applications on a range of devices including desktop PCs, mobile phones, gaming devices and Media Center PCs.

The expansion of web-connected software to a larger group of consumers is something that can't be ignored, according to Microsoft. Charles Fitzgerald, general manager for platform technologies at the software giant, said: "More and more activities are happening online. Whatever industry you look at, that's where people are spending time. Our latest web technologies [can be used] to drive better customer connections online."

Moreover, the popularity of "mash-ups", which let developers combine parts of one website with parts of another, has driven a new way to look at websites. Increasingly developers can think about sites as "components" in their applications, Gates said: "This is a powerful idea whose time has come, and we're really just at the beginning."

Gates on Monday also discussed the changes to web usage that will come from the broader adoption of RSS and related Microsoft-led initiatives, including Simple Shared Extensions for sharing calendaring information and Live Clipboard.

He said: "You can think of RSS as the start of the programmable web. As websites start exposing their APIs, amazing things happen."

Microsoft intends to build deeper RSS support in Windows Vista and IE 7, allowing people to subscribe to web pages as well as podcasts and photos.

The Mix '06 conference is also an effort by Microsoft to attract more web developers and designers to Microsoft products.

Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at Salesforce.com, noted that Microsoft has been very successful with traditional Windows developers. But it has not been as successful reaching "internet developers".

Gross said: "Until now, Microsoft tools have been very Microsoft-centric. I'd like to see how they are really going to approach the internet as a development platform."

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com