As their annual hardware developers' convention kicked off Tuesday, Microsoft Corp executives touted a touchy-feely future of computerized "experiences" -- high-tech homes, offices and automobiles filled with digital music, movies and communications.
Meanwhile, in the real world, computer users grappled with an all-too-familiar experience, ridding their personal computers of yet another malicious worm.
The computer worm dubbed "Sasser" has infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, causing the systems to continually crash and reboot. Microsoft released a fix for the flaw that the worm exploits several weeks ago, but many computer owners had yet to apply it.
On Tuesday, Microsoft executives conceded that the software giant needs to deal with fundamental issues -- including security -- before it can convince people to invest in futuristic technology.
"If you do all the fundamentals, you don't get a lot of credit," Jim Allchin, who heads of Microsoft's Windows division, told the audience of hardware engineers and developers. "If you mess up the fundamentals, you get all the abuse."
Tom Button, a Microsoft corporate vice president, took it one step further, arguing that better security and reliability are absolute necessities.
"In order to really grow the industry, we have to conquer many of these areas of classic failure," he said.
But although Microsoft has made security a top priority for the past couple years, its top executives didn't devote much time to the topic at the annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Instead, they focused on the whiz-bang gadgets of the future.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates offered a brief glimpse of a major Windows security update, called Service Pack 2, that is due out sometime this year. But he said that while security "is a required thing, we feel very optimistic that will be in place."
The company urged hardware makers to devote resources toward supporting Microsoft's vision of a future rife with multiple electronic gadgets. That includes everything from a mobile phone that can record video to a remote control with a biometric sensor that could one day double as a telephone.
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