FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Las Vegas, NV, November 20, 1996 –- The newest version of Microsoft's leading office suite for Windows 95 won BYTE Magazine's Best of Show award. The award recognizes new products that are innovative and will have a large impact on the industry. The ceremony, part of the COMDEX/Fall '96 awards, is co-sponsored by SOFTBANK.
In addition to winning Best of Show, Best Application winner was Microsoft's Office 97 (Redmond, WA, http://www.microsoft.com/office), which adds a wealth of new features to its popular desktop applications, plus the new Outlook e-mail/personal manager/calendaring application. Finalists were Stratus's Isis for Database - ODBC (Marlboro, MA, http://www.stratus.com), a database companion that adds fault tolerance against system crashes and Corel's Office for Java (Ottawa, Canada, http://www.corel.com), a Java-based, cross-platform application suite that supports the thin client model of network computing.
Best Technology winner was the Chinese speech recognition from the Lexicus Division of Motorola (Palo Alto, CA, http://www.mot.com/lexicus/). It delivers continuous voice dictation for people speaking Mandarin. Finalists were Microsoft's Windows CE operating system for handhelds and the emerging DVD storage standard by Philips, Sony, Hitachi, Time Warner, Toshiba and Pioneer.
Two new web programs from one company won the Best Web Product category, NetScape's Communicator and Constellation (Mountain View, CA, http://www.netscape.com). Communicator combines the latest Navigator with e-mail, workgroup, and conferencing software, while the Constellation technology is a new cross-platform desktop environment that provides a new interface for customizing and organizing information. Finalists were VOSAIC, from Vosaic LLC (Chicago, IL, http://www.vosaic.com), which delivers high-quality streaming MPEG video over the Internet, and Digital's AltaVista Search My Computer Private eXtension (Littleton, MA, http://altavista.software.digital.com), a powerful search tool for desktop and Intranet applications.
Wyse Technology's Winterm 4000 Series Enhanced Network Computers (San Jose, CA, http://www.wyse.com), which supports the new network computing model plus access to legacy hardware, and soon, shared, remote Windows applications, won Best System. Finalists were the Archistrat 4s-NXS workstation by The Panda Project (Boca Raton, FL, http://www.archistrat.com and Madura by Flat Connections, Inc. (Fremont, CA, http://www.flatconnect.com), a system that crams a RISC processor, 33.6 Kbps modem, RAM, ROM with Java engine, and RSA security on a PC card.
The winner for Best Laptop was Texas Instruments' Extensa 900 Series Notebook (Temple, TX, http://www.ti.com) which provides top-of-the-line features such as 8X CD-ROM, 12.1 inch active matrix display, and a Zoom video PC card slot. Finalists were Fujitsu's ultralight LifeBook 600 Series (Milpitas, CA, http://www.fujitsu-pc.com) and Apple Computer's eMate 300 (Cupertino, CA, http://www.newton.apple.com/) designed for the education market.
Best Handheld winner was Philips' Velo 1 (Sunnyvale, CA, http://www.velo1.com), a handheld with a built-in modem based on the new Windows CE operating system that delivers strong PC connectivity. Finalists were Hewlett-Packard's New HP Palmtop PC for Windows CE (Palo Alto, CA, http://www.hp.com/handheld), which offers a 640 by 240 resolution display that's wider than other Win CE devices, and the Apple Message Pad 2000 by The Information Appliance Division, Apple Computer. The new MessagePad (http://www.newton.apple.com/) boasts a powerful 160-MHz StrongArm processor.
Symantec's Visual Café Pro (Cupertino, CA, http://www.symantec.com), a visual rapid application tool for developing applets and applications that connect to relational databases, won Best Development software. Finalists were Borland's Open J Builder "Latté," a visual Java development tool, and Borland's C++ Builder "Ebony," a C++, RAD development tool (Scotts Valley, CA, http://www.borland.com).