By Jim Forbes

Antitrust developers, take note: Microsoft is once again talking about standards. In a speech to about 1,000 developers, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates announced that the company will drive its presence in the commercial segment of the Internet and online services through its involvement in standards organizations. The software giant has been working on new standards for the Internet that will, according to Gates, help guarantee the sanctity of financial information such as credit card transactions, banking and other forms of fiscal commerce.

In addition, Microsoft is developing code that will allow users to embed critical, password-protected financial data in their operating systems in electronic "wallets." That data can be encrypted and passed on to other computers with the permission of the wallet's owner, Gates said. The new technology could make its first appearance in the forthcoming version of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 4.0, set for release later this year.

This is not the first time Microsoft has used standards to boost its own wares. But during his speech, Gates was critical of upstart Netscape for not openly publishing APIs associated with some of its server and browser code. And Gates made clear that he intends future battles to be fought on his own turf. Gates' realm is, of course, dominated by full-featured, Windows-heavy PCs, not the skeletal models-so-called "network computers" that lack local storage and are typically designed to run applications written in Sun Microsystems' Java environment-now being touted by Oracle, Sun, IBM and Netscape, among others.