Evolving the PC Platform

Every member of the PC industry has an important business goal that involves growing the PC market among business and home users. An important key to growing any part of the PC hardware market is to increase the ease of use for PCs in general and to provide support for new kinds of hardware in particular:

• Business customers need improved ease-of-use capabilities for hardware, both to increase end-user productivity and to lower support costs, resulting in reduced total cost of ownership.
• Home users need easier-to-use hardware to overcome barriers to learning and using unfamiliar technology.
• All users need hardware and operating-system support for new technologies that will lower costs, improve usability, and improve performance for communications, applications, and media titles.

The endeavor to make PC hardware easier to use can only be accomplished as an industry partnership among hardware vendors, PC manufacturers, and Microsoft to design hardware, operating systems, and software that work together effectively. One of the most exemplary efforts for this endeavor in the recent past has been the Plug and Play initiative that the industry has embraced.

To continue evolving both the usability and new capabilities for PC hardware, the industry must continue to work on evolving the PC platform in key ways:

• To enhance the usability and supportability of existing and new hardware devices in ways that lower everyone's support costs.
• To broaden consumer PC capabilities so that the PC becomes a center for entertainment, communications, and home productivity.

Microsoft is dedicated to working in strategic industry relationships that deepen and strengthen support for evolving the PC platform. To this end, Microsoft is involved in these efforts:

• Working with industry groups to define standards for new technologies.
• Designing operating-system support for new bus and device classes to ensure new technologies can reach a broad market quickly.
• Enhancing the Windows operating systems to make it easy for both hardware and software developers to exploit operating system capabilities.
• Offering the "Designed for Microsoft Windows" logo and testing program to enable users to identify hardware and software designed or take advantage of the Windows operating systems.

The intent of the PC 97 Hardware Design Guidelines and the "Designed for Microsoft Windows" program is to make PCs, hardware components, and software easier to use. The system design requirements defined in this guide support a synergy among PC hardware, Microsoft Windows operating systems, and Windows-based software. The new PC 97 requirements for systems and components are based on the following high-level goals:

• Support for Plug and Play compatibility and power management for configuring and managing all system components, including new requirements under the OnNow design initiative.
• 32-bit device drivers and installation procedures for both Windows 95 and Windows NT written as defined in the Windows 95 DDK or the Windows NT DDK.
• Compliance with standards for system platform, buses, and devices:
• Buses and devices meet industry specifications for each bus type.
• Devices meet industry standards and specifications for each device class.
• System and devices meet minimal performance standards.
• System and devices meet guidelines for ease of use and industrial design.