DG: Can you run through a couple of those devices that aren't the ones that we've talked about thus far? Give us just a few words about each one so our readers might get a feel for things that they hadn't expected Windows CE to be built into?

JR: I've mentioned a few of them. I mentioned one, which is a milk analyzer. It analyzes milk, curiously enough. You take a barcode reading of the milk and then they have a thing that goes in and tests it and it reports back up to the network and that's all using Windows CE. And the curious thing is that it's using a whole networking stack because it's on a network. And it was written with ActiveX objects, so it's using the programming model. One example of the cool and interesting devices.

DG: Stick that sucker on my refrigerator and it'll blow its circuits.

JR: Another example is this: Windows CE is used in some Global Positioning Systems so that you have Windows CE in the device, it's got a wireless connection, and it's able to help people find their location within GPS systems. There are a variety of different sorts of kiosk devices where they've used Windows CE in the browser capability so that you go in and you can order things. I'll give you an example, Radiant Systems has built a sort of kiosk terminal for Chick-Fil-A brand. And I think it's also going to Taco Bell at some time -- where they look at the screen and order all of their chicken and it goes back and it hits a server and they place the order. So it's finding itself into a lot of retail situations. Then there's all sorts of ruggedized variants of things that you've seen with the handheld device and the Palm-sized devices where it goes into industrial situations. For example, the Marine Corps is using ruggedized versions of our handheld device in field operations. Windows CE is finding its way out into new and different places.

DG: Let me ask you some business-related questions, and then we can come close to where we're ending up. How does Windows CE relate to the Windows 2000 plan, which seems to be combining the Windows 98 world and the NT world, if I understand it correctly?

JR: That's really separate. In some ways, what's happening with Windows 2000 is they're hosting all versions of Windows of that plan on top of the NT kernel. And so there is, essentially, a moving away from -- at least with Windows 2000-- the old Windows 95 kernel, which is really what Windows 98 is hosted on.

The way that Windows CE relates is that Windows CE is obviously its own kernel and its own OS. What it shares with NT are a couple of key things. First, it shares a lot of elements of its networking layer. What makes it meaningful there is for people who have PC cards or Compact Flash cards or networking connections that they want to use. With little or no modification they can use those devices with Windows CE because we share that networking heritage. And then we share a subset of the Windows programming model, Win32. So that means that they can use the same development tools they used for Windows with Windows CE. They can take code they've written for Windows and apply it to Windows CE with some modifications -- changes to cut it down to the characteristics of what runs on Windows CE. So that's what it really shares. It shares sort of an underlying networking infrastructure. It shares a programming model and a subset of the API infrastructure so that Windows CE really is part of one overall development and connected environment.