SAN FRANCISCO--Addressing the Seybold SF publishing conference, Microsoft (MSFT) chairman Bill Gates continued to sing the virtues of Windows NT, this time as a platform for Web publishing. Gates pitched NT as an integration point for the many publishers supporting 2M Gates on moving businesses and eventually consumers to NT a mixed environment of machines running Windows 95, Windows NT, and Macintosh operating systems. "One thing we tried to do is make the NT server capable of connecting to all these platforms in the same way," Gates said. "We have specific code to link to Macs. Because of our belief in supporting mixed environments, we will add new features," Gates added. He also pushed NT for general business use. "Our message to business users small and large is they should make the move up to NT, which is starting to be the mainstream," he said. Analyst Chris LeTocq of Dataquest interpreted Gates's comments as a subtle dig at the reliability of the Macintosh operating system. "In the publishing business, there's a need for a reliable operating system 2M Microsoft's opportunities in the "Web lifestyle" that you don't have to reboot four or five times a day," LeTocq said. "The overall message was that NT is designed to fit in, NT is reliable, NT has color management, and NT has things to help work with the Macintosh." In his keynote, Gates also reiterated that version 5.0 of the NT operating system would be available in the first half of 1998, refuting skeptics who doubt Microsoft can deliver the product by July. Microsoft's positioning of NT for the publishing industry is somewhat delicate, given its $150 million investment this summer in Apple Computer (AAPL), which has identified publishing as one of its core markets. Gates's speech included an onstage demonstration with Kevin Connor of Adobe Systems, a major supplier of publishing software, who praised NT as "a much more powerful publishing platform." Another key Microsoft message was its backing for the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) protocol, which Microsoft has built into the Internet Explorer browser released last night. Microsoft's Tom Johnson, demonstrating the new browser, called XML a way to get richer information to a Web browser, promoting XML as "the talk of the show." He described three advantages of XML: giving users data in a format they prefer, linking data from multiple sources onto a single Web page, and allowing granular updates by refreshing part of a Web page without downloading the entire page again. Jonathan Seybold, founder of the Seybold show, chided Gates in an onstage Q&A for not mentioning Java in his keynote, although it was listed on one of his presentation slides. "In Java, you do see an opinion from Microsoft that differs from other people," Gates said. "We see Java as a great language, and some applications can be written so they only make calls to the Java run time. "But we think users want access to their own platform," Gates added, citing Macintosh loyalists. He described Java as being useful for developers but ignoring users who want the advantages of their own platform exploited. "We doubt it can be successful to go down that path," Gates added. Earlier Gates had talked up Microsoft's 2M Gates on Java's successful application standards efforts: "We are putting a lot of investment into these standards groups. We have more people involved in the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C] and Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF] than anybody else because we think that will drive market growth." In other parts of his keynote, Gates: • Said a new beta release of Microsoft Office for Macintosh will be available by year's end. • Emphasized cooperative work with Adobe and Quark, both publishing software companies. • Revealed that Expedia, Microsoft's online travel agency, is already profitable. • Positioned Windows 98 primarily for the consumer, not business market. • Named two factors Microsoft evaluates before entering a new market: where software expertise is a key factor and where the market is worth at least half a billion dollars.