"What makes people successful? It's people. People are the heart and soul of business," Muglia stressed.

Citing Windows enhancements, the planned Vista OS (http://www.infoworld.com/reports/SRmswindowsvista.html) features improved security and compliance and enables a mobile workforce, Muglia noted. The version of Windows that will follow the upcoming Longhorn product, meanwhile, will feature operating services virtualization, giving it the ability to virtualize key system services and run multiple instances of them at the same time, Muglia said.

Virtualization is critical to Microsoft's strategy and is integrated with all the company's tools, said Muglia. "We really think of it as part of your overall infrastructure," he said.

Microsoft's Chris Caposella, corporate vice president of the information worker business unit at Microsoft, demonstrated an Outlook voice access feature that enables dialing into Exchange Server and giving it instructions via voice commands.

Capabilities linking Visual Studio to SQL Server also were demonstrated, as was Expression Interactive Designer, which is based on the Windows Presentation Foundation presentation subsystem.