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"Today's companies thrive when their employees can effectively collaborate, visualize and act on business intelligence and prioritize scarce time and resources," Gates said. "Information workers are the driving force behind business innovation. To adapt and succeed in the 'New World of Work' today and tomorrow, they need advanced tools that will help them make the most of their unique talents, experiences and judgment." Gates described how workplace trends such as the shift from manufacturing- to services-based economies are shaping technology innovation in the coming decade, as is the growing need for people to collaborate across organizations and time zones. Other forces include the larger and more complex streams of information that employees must handle in today's "always on, always connected" technology environments, the demands for greater transparency and accountability in business processes, and more intense competition to recruit talented employees from a shrinking work force. The Next Wave of Microsoft Office Products Gates pointed to the next wave of Microsoft Office products, currently code-named "Office 12," as a significant development to advance information work in this changing business landscape. "Office 12" will be available in the second half of calendar year 2006 with the first beta version expected this fall. In the next generation of Office, Microsoft is focused on delivering tools that enable individual workers to make a stronger impact with their daily tasks, manage their communications and collaboration in a unified environment, and more readily visualize and extract valuable insights from large volumes of incoming information. All of this will help enable businesses to be more competitive in the "New World of Work" by extending the capabilities of software to drive better business performance. It will also give IT departments a more standardized, integrated architecture for efficiently managing the complete life cycle of documents and other content. In addition, the next generation of Microsoft Office products will further incorporate open XML standards and provide rapid development tools. The transcript of Bill Gates' speech and multimedia content:
I'm bold enough to title this morning's talk "The New World of Work," because I really think we are at a big change point in terms of how we think of information. We're really moving from having provided tools that were really great at the individual level, if you wanted to author a document or a spreadsheet or a presentation, and we have in Microsoft Office some wonderful tools. Over the last five years, we've been making the move to look at what is that information management like as you have groups of people, and how does that information come together with all the information in your backend applications, say, SAP software, and all the other data that comes into your organization. Do we give you the rich kind of views that you need there? And how do we make sure that that unstructured world of the office work with e-mail, and faxes, and phone calls, that connects up to that very structured world. And the things we're putting together now, we see it as quite dramatic in making sure that Office gives you the right visualization and the right richness connecting up to all of those things. Transforming the Landscape Now, this is all done in the framework of a somewhat changing landscape. When you think about business, the need to have partners, the need to think globally, the need to use talents around the globe, all of those things are of a much greater imperative. And there's a process that sort of feeds on itself, where the more that technology makes it possible to connect up work across company boundaries, work across national boundaries, the more that competition is fueled by that, and it becomes almost an imperative. Two of the books that I've read recently on business that I found very enlightening, one was the Jack Welch "Winning" book, which I think is a great book, a lot of ideas about how organizations can work better, a lot of talk about these new imperatives. Another is a Tom Friedman book that says "The World Is Flat." Kind of a strange title because, of course, the world is not flat. But what he means by that is that there used to be a very small part of the world's population, Europe and the United States, that were really engaged in capitalism and creating products. So you had a scale for business of about 800 million people. Now, between technology and what's happened in a lot of countries, particularly China and India, you've got more like 4 billion people all participating. And whether that's the market for talent, or manufacturing, the market to sell products into, that scale really changes things, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. And that everyone has to step back and think about how that affects them. Even countries have to, and particularly even the United States that's led before these flattening events really needs to think through what is our lead, what's our excellence, how do we renew the things that we do there. So I thought that it captured the idea that there's a big change taking place here. The book was very good at saying that it's not just what's happened politically, or what's happened technically, it's the way those things come together that's created the big phenomena.
And in the realm of technology, it's not just like a one-time event. It's not like we had an earthquake and the Internet showed up, and that was it, things went back to some equilibrium because now that technology was there. Technology continues to advance. And, in fact, one of the most fundamental things about technology, that is connecting software between different companies, and being able to exchange rich information, we are just now getting that piece in place with a lot of technical work that goes under the heading of Web services. We've been able to browse, that is, see a page of information, from different companies, but we haven't been able to mix and match information which would allow you take things like the buying process, or the collaboration process and make that seamless across company boundaries. We're just getting there. And that is a pretty phenomenal thing. It's required a lot of investment. And so it just takes technology to the next level. Technology is also more pervasive in terms of these devices. Many of you have been coming over the years, for example, you've probably seen that the Tablet devices that we had four or five years ago were quite clunky, heavy, software not quite as good compared to what we have now. We say over the next couple of years for portable devices, that will become a mainstream thing. We'll talk more later about phones and how those are changing, and even connecting up to all of this information. Workplace Trends So, technology in those senses is standing still. Now that we've got the platform of the Internet, and low-cost connectivity, the thing that is driving the most change is the improvement of the software that sits on top of that platform. So, we talk about software being at the center. In the workplace, we've got people coming into your workforce who really throughout their educational career have been using technology. We talk about Net-gen meets baby-boom. Baby-boom is the manager, and Net-gen are the workers. And for them, the idea of having four instant messaging sessions open at once, and one of them is video conferencing, and they can find everything out on the Web, that's just common sense. And so they come in with a willingness to use technology, and a deftness using technology that's very different. Certainly, in many industries, including the one we're in, there's competition for this high quality workforce. In the United States, you know, university-by-university we're going through and saying, are we getting the best people, and what are the key factors for attracting them. How can we make the jobs they come into ones that are very attractive? Taking out the parts of the job that aren't interesting, and really using tools and empowerment, particularly software, to le them feel like this is where they can have the biggest impact. One world of business that seeks the idea of more collaboration between companies, economic transformation talks about the collaboration across national boundaries. The idea that the information should always be available, these systems are 24 hours a day, and I think that's very clear to people, even as they go off on vacation, they've got their cell phone, or their portable machine. The Web sites are up all the time, and you want to be able to respond to customer inquiries, see trends that are taking place there on a 24 hour basis. It's a very, very different environment. The information flow doesn't just happen up and down the hierarchy. The information should be transparent, and the role of the hierarchy is much more to set strategy, and provide front leadership than simply a conduit for information. Too Much Information or Too Little? One of the great phrases that people use to talk about today's environment is that there's information overload. And in a certain sense, that's absolutely right. You can just see it in some raw numbers. E-mail is up by an order of magnitude since it really started exploding about nine years ago, and just going further, if we take all the different pieces, instant messaging, SMS and e-mails that are delivered that we're going to see another very dramatic increase, that's the trend line. A lot of things coming into your Inbox or coming onto your phone that you feel like you need to pay attention to. So, in that sense, it's overwhelming, there's just too many of those things. But I don't think that really captures the full picture, because, after all, when we deal with information, we have a goal in mind. Nobody is paid to do search or to just find information. At the end of the day, you're paid for designing a new product, having a satisfied customer, and doing that with the minimum amount of time, and the minimum amount of people, and yet bringing to bear the best skill sets both inside and outside the company in different locations that you can to get that done. And so, I think if you start to ask people in companies, is it easy to find the person with the best expertise here? Is it easy to find out when you did a project like this in the past what were the lessons learned about that? Is it easy to see the trends going on with the customers, what they like, what they don't like, really capture from a global sales force the places where things are going well and not going well, understand the design wins and the design losses? Even looking into the numbers, and getting past currency changes, or ways that things might have been reorganized over time, can you really get the insight into those number? When we show people what we call pivot tables in Excel that let you show sales data, go into it by region, by product, look at it in different ways, that's something we've had in great shape for many years, over three years, and yet people are still surprised to see the attachments with which you can take that information, spot the trends, annotate it, go off and share that with other people. That's not because they don't have Excel, it's because they haven't connected up Excel to back-end information in a way that makes it really easy to navigate and understand. And they haven't gotten that business practice up as soon as the sales is closed, everybody is notified, that's up there, and everyone knows how to look at the data in this form. You still have a tradition of printing these things out as opposed to having this in that rich form. I think you can talk to any company about the budgeting process, and the amount of paperwork and sort of wasted energy that goes into that, and then even three or four months into the year, have things changed? Is it easy to understand what the new assumptions are, how that relates to the original budget, whether it's head count, whether it's sales results? And see those things put side-to-side in the right way. Jack Welch's book talks about that the budgeting process is often kind of a strange exercise that didn't amount to much. Well, whatever that exercise is, the information that people have during that process, the ability to compress it so that you can start your budgeting process as close to that new year as possible, so you get rid of that uncertainty, a lot of it has to do with information empowerment. This is a process that I wager there is no company here that you couldn't halve the amount of time you put into it, and double the amount of insight that you get out of it by improving the software tools that are brought in to bear. Even something simple like personnel review, getting lots of people's input, really seeing how you're ranking things, how things have changed over time, having the right numbers to make that an efficient process that feels fair to everyone involved, and can be compressed into a reasonably short period of time. Very, very complex, not done all that well. Project planning, is it clear when a company sets a goal to introduce a product, or improve something by a certain amount that there's a clear location you can go to, get the right information, the subset of that information that outsiders should see is available, you get notified when that information changes. And it's just common sense, everybody knows how to navigate to find that information. I would say in all of these cases, we're really dealing more with information under load, that you have to seek the information out, it's not in the right form, it's still split across different systems, and as soon as you hit any boundary, even a division boundary, not to mention a company boundary, you get real loss of information there. So it's a balance here. We still want a lot of information, but we want it presented in a way that we understand and all those forces brought together. And we want to be able to set up a simple work flow that says say I want four or five people to review this and get back to me, and have that be able to be easily tracked, and just straight forward. So there's no contacting IT, or programming, you just sit down, a few clicks, make little diagrams to describe what you want to do, and that's off and running in a very rich way. Information Access So we are not even halfway towards delivering the information that people want. When you think about information going through a process, at the individual level you start with content creation, and that's a place where I'd say we are more than halfway towards having ideal tools. There's still more that can be done in terms of making those documents look good in an automatic way. We're making some changes in our user interface in Office to expose, make it easy to find the functionality, make it far more visual, that you get all the power that's there in that tool, but there we've accomplished a lot. When people think about presentations, it's very standard, you don't have multiple packages and confusion between those. When they think about navigating numbers it's clear that Excel is used to do that. But, it's as you get into the further steps, as you want to, say, send that out to people, and you want to let people know what's changed, and how important it is for them to look at that information, that's where things start to break down. Today it's largely done through electronic mail. So you end up with lots of e-mail in your Inbox, lots of these attachments, no easy way to easily organize that in terms of the different topics you're working on, and prioritization, and there's a real temptation that the thing that comes latest is the one that you shift your attention to, even though that may be the least important thing that's in there. As you have e-mail, there's always this question, we spend a lot of time to organize it and categorize it, which actually turns you into a filing clerk, or do you just leave it in this one big bucket, in which case navigating through and finding things, and knowing which things you want to keep, which things you don't want to keep, that's a problem. We really have gotten very sophisticated in understanding what we call document lifecycle, particularly with all these new regulations, there's a real interest in companies in being very explicit about what do we keep, how do we keep it in a way that it's easy to find, and what don't we keep? How do we not clog up the system and have too many things, and getting those policies to work across all these different systems. Doing that in your accounting application is easy, but for e-mail it hasn't been. With e-mail we need to make sure that it doesn't just extend to the e-mail on the business servers, that it extends to the PCs themselves, and the phones, anywhere where that might be found. One of the things we've introduced is when you start a piece of e-mail, if it's something special, like attorney-client, or something about financial figures, as you pick that e-mail type that determines who it can be sent to, and what the policies for, say, keeping it, if that's what's necessary, or having it have a limited lifetime if that's what's appropriate. And so e-mail becomes rich, and management has some control over that. So the whole idea of what happens to information after it's authored, how do you see it when you're sitting on a mobile phone, or expose it out to partners when that's appropriate, we're getting a very rich structure that allows that to happen. So you still have the bottoms-up empowerment, but you have these tools of management that are being brought to bear on it. So it's a really different way to think about information access. Where Search Falls Short One of the things that has really exploded over the last couple of years is search. And I want to talk about search a little bit, because search in many ways is magical, but it's not the end solution. And even with search we need to think about different kinds of search. We have search that's on your PC itself, where you'd like to be able to find all your documents that are easily there. You've got search within the corporate environment, and then you've got search within the Web. Search in the Web is dealing with billions of documents, engines like our own, Yahoo, and Google are now indexing between 5 and 10 billion documents. And it's pretty phenomenal that if you want to find information today it takes on average about 11 minutes between when you start and when you finish. If you compare that to five years ago where maybe half the time you'd never find what you were interested in, or you'd have to have a bunch of assistants helping out to do that, that's pretty good. So even in the Web context this idea that it's a treasure hunt, you get a bunch of links you're always clicking through, that's not ideal. As we move to the other locations, the current solutions fall even further short of what needs to be done. Within a corporate environment you have lots of documents, but there are two things that are very different about those documents than the Web. One is that you have protection. Everything on the Web is open, it's public for everyone, within a corporation there are many, many boundaries, financial data, personnel data, lawsuit related data. So you want control over exactly when people are searching for things, what shows up. That really affects the design of corporate search in a very deep way. Another thing is that you don't have the idea of these links. On the Web the way the most relevant thing is found is based very much on an analysis of, if somebody is pointing to a document, that increases the likelihood that that is the document of interest. That doesn't work in a corporate environment; there just aren't that many links done between various memos and things. And often the information comes in a much more structured thing, it's not just the documents; you want to go into, say, your directory of company employees and find out who would know about something and therefore, documents offered by them, based on where they fit in the organization are far more interesting than something that somebody arbitrary put together. So search has given us a glimpse of what's possible, but we need to take this a lot further. We need to get very direct answers, and we need to take the idea of searching at the desktop, the corporate level, and this Web level and kind of bring those things together. The New World of Search I want to quickly show you some recent developments in search, because this is a very hot area. We actually put out this Monday a free add-on to Windows that's called Windows Desktop Search. It's a trivial download, takes a couple of minutes to do. It's certainly the most interesting feature we've ever added in between major releases, because it really can change the way that you navigate and find information. So let me just show this here. This is your taskbar, so you get a little search thing here, I just clicked on it, and I can see the searches I've done this is called the Deskbar here, I can see the searches I've done. If I want to say something like mail from Steve, you can see that as I type it's going through and showing me exactly that documents that meet that. So here are the things in Outlook e-mail that are from Steve, and here are documents that are attachments that are in those messages. And if I want to see that in a large way I just hit Return, and then I get a window that lets me step through those things. So here I can just click on the various things, and I see a preview of exactly what's there. I can just say I just want to see e-mail, I can say I want to see documents, I can even go over here and say, I just want to see appointments that I have with Steve, and see exactly what's going on with those. Inside documents you've got different kinds of documents, you've got PDF documents, you can do preview, you've got Excel documents you can go in and look at, a lot of different things that are available there. So all the document types, you just navigate in, and if you want to go and edit those things, then they become immediately available to you. So you're navigating around and you don't really have to think about putting things into folders, either in e-mail, or your files on the desktop nearly in the same way. You just go down here and type in whatever you want. Even if you want to find something like a program you type in the name and that would show you exactly what is supposed to come up there. So this is the desktop search. It doesn't really impose any constraints on your system. When you put it on it will sit in the background and actually look at these documents and build this index, and that includes the attachments that you have and that kind of thing. I'll type in here another query, let's say I'm looking for things related to summit, any type of meeting where we've got summit. Here you can see, I've got some PowerPoint presentations, so when I click on that it will go off and build the preview. It actually sees the different slides and what's going on there. Depending on the size of the document it goes off and does that for you. So much more, it's about keyword navigation. Now I've got this presentation, I can go up and look at the different slides. Of course, if I want to edit this, then I just open it up, or if I'm ever in a situation where I'm look at e-mail, I can just right-click on the e-mail and you can see there's reply, forward, delete, all those things. So often I'll just sit here in this search context and manage things. Of course it connects up where you can also click and do Web search, but here what I've been showing is just scoping to what's on my desktop. Now, we can increase that scope. There are some file servers in the corporation that I've got files on, and it would also bring me the results of that, as well. So you can choose exactly what you're interested in. Let me go down and switch a tiny bit, and talk about the Web search. Web search, the key goal is to get away from this treasure hunt that I talked about. We can make the documents more and more relevant, we can use deep understanding of these documents to do very interesting things. But, we really want to get to the point where you're just getting direct answers. So more and more we're analyzing what people are typing in, and then going through an authoritative process to find the answer. So if I want to say something like, what is the population of India, and I entered that in, that's going out on the Web and it's finding all the different documents that are there, but as well as presenting these documents you can see up here that it's actually told me that in Encarta, which is an encyclopedia which it trusts, it's one of many, many sources that it will draw from, it sees that population there. So in that case it wasn't 11 minutes, it was very, very direct. There are other good examples, here I've got, what country has the second-largest GDP? That's Japan, a very precise answer, that computers like to give. Some things may be a little less serious, calories in spinach when you're off on your trip trying to stick with your diet, or kilometers in a mile. So slowly but surely these things will get richer and richer. Today we say we cover about a quarter of the things that people are interested in, we can get very direct answers, but more and more as we've covering things like sports, movies, business information, stock type data, we're going to get that up to be a higher and higher percentage. And there's a lot of, of course, very powerful natural language technology that's going into looking at these documents, and finding the information that's inside them. So search really is just at the very beginning, whether it's the Web-type search, or the desktop-type search. Those will improve a lot, they'll come together, and you'll just come to think of those as a standard element of the system, particularly for people who have lots of e-mail, and lots of files, it's a very dramatic change. In fact, we've seen some people who used to do a lot of folder filing now switch over and just simply use this keyword way of pulling things up. Business Impact What kind of business impact can it have if we bring this information together? If we're really saying that Office becomes this lens onto the data that really counts in a big way? We've got to take and move up from the desktop level to these things called portals, and we have to bring into them not just the Office information, and outside information like market research data or forecast data from other companies, but all the information inside the company, connecting up your SAP or Siebel or PeopleSoft, any of these back ends, and having them be visualized in that very simple way, you can apply little workflow capabilities, or really look at quality metrics that are based on success metrics that are based on different types of data. That means stitching this all together. That's where these underlying technologies like Web services and XML are finally reaching the maturity that you can expect that all of this really does come together, that it's not super fragmented in terms of where you need to go, literally based on who you are in the organization, with the software we'll have by next year you'll just sit down and you'll navigate into the project that you care about, to the customers that you care about, and you won't even know exactly which of these backend sources that information is coming from. I think probably the best way to get a sense of this is to see a little demo of how we're pulling this together with scorecards. So I'd like to ask Chris Capossela, who is a vice president in our Information Worker business, to come out and give us a glimpse of collaboration and business insight coming together. CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Welcome, thanks, it's good to be here. Good morning, everyone. (Applause.) So I just wanted to take about eight minutes to give you a quick view of some of the things that we're doing to try to make the New World of Work a reality today. So I'm going to show you two or three things. The first thing is what Bill was just talking about around scorecards. Scorecards are a great way for executives to align their strategy with action inside the organization. As Bill mentioned, the more and more data that people have and the more and more access people have to that data, the issue really doesn't become getting to it, it becomes prioritizing and helping to sift through it all. So here what we're seeing is a product that we'll release later this year that actually shows a portal page that any employee inside a company can see and you see that the executive team has built a balanced scorecard to really share with employees what the top strategies are and how they're doing on the scorecard itself. So we see financial performance is a green, customer satisfaction is green, operational excellence is a yellow, et cetera, et cetera. If want to drill into something within our financial performance metrics, let's say maintaining margins, I'll see that we have a couple of indicators underneath that, the absolute profit looks fine but in this case our profit margin is a few points under what we planned and things are trending actually badly. So very quickly we can help get people focus on what are the key metrics at the corporate level that we care about in each one of our categories of performance. In addition to a balanced scorecard like this, you might also consider a financial organization presenting more of a P&L-based scorecard, so again you have profit and loss, revenue costs, et cetera, and you can see our different trend lines here. And one interesting thing that we've done is to provide context around this scorecard. So we've got some sort of Excel charts here showing us our profit versus cost and our profit versus plan, but then importantly we know that a tremendous amount of data inside organizations actually lives in very, very unstructured formats, it isn't all just about back-end systems. So here we've got spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and Word documents that are all related to the financial scorecard so I can see the latest information that's not just coming out of, let's say SAP, but that my actual end users have created related to our finances. And this is, of course, very context-based, which is very helpful for people to sift through information. If I click on product revenue, I'll update the reports to show us some product revenue reports, I'll see product revenue spreadsheets and analyses and I'll see maybe a map of the U.S. that actually shows our product revenue mapped by each one of these states so we can see where we're strong and where we're weak. Average discount percent looks pretty bad right here so let's go ahead and click on that one. Once again, we'll look at what our plan was and we'll see that we have an issue in quarter three, down below I can see a bunch of analysis. If I scroll down, this is actually a more structured report on all the promotions that we've done so I can spot where those discounts have gone awry, and I can even, of course, drive action here by creating tasks for people to actually get work done based on this financial scorecard. So I can see that Paul Duffy has an action item around reviewing the different regions for discount issues, I have an action item around creating a formal plan for resolving them. They're high priority, I have due dates, I have percent complete. So the scorecard allows us to really help our people prioritize but then it also allows us to drive action based on these priorities. We're seeing a lot of interest in this type of solution to help link action to strategy. The second thing I wanted to give you an insight into is how we're using collaboration tools to really simplify the way people can collaborate together. Today, as you heard Bill talk about, there are lots and lots of different communication channels that people are getting inundated with. There's e-mail, there's a mobile phone, there's your voicemail, there's instant messaging, there's Web conferencing and people are just having a hard time understanding how all these things can work together. Well, one of the things we think we can do is to help integrate all of those different communication channels into tools that are very simple to use. So here on our scorecard you can see that we actually have presence information from each one of these people. Paul Duffy is actually online, he's marked as busy; Yancey is online, he's marked as away, and I can just start and instant message right from here to reach out to these people. In this case what I want to do is actually switch over and show you a brand new product that we just released called Microsoft Office Communicator. And at first glance this looks like an instant messaging client, which it certainly is, but what we've done is to bring this together with a whole bunch of other communication channels to really provide one tool that lets people manage all of these different types of communications. So if I want to communicate with Paul, I can actually start searching for his name, and because this is integrated with our e-mail system and this is integrated with our directory system, it will automatically search through all 55,000 employees at Microsoft and find me the ones that match what I've typed and it will pull information from their e-mail and tell me, oh, Paul is actually currently busy, he's free at 11:00 a.m. This is coming directly from his Outlook calendar. And I can see that he has a note that says he's reviewing profit irregularities from right there. Now, if I want to contact Paul, I can see that we've actually done the work to integrate this with our PBX so that we can call Paul in his office, we can call Paul on his mobile phone or on his computer or if I just want to use instant messaging I can double-click and say, "Are you there?" and send that off and now we start a chat session. In this case this is very secure and IT has control over this chat session and logging this to make sure that we're protecting your property. He says, "Hey, Chris, what's up?" We can actually do this chat now, just like many people do instant messaging, but in this case I'd actually like more of a face-to-face communication. A lot of people don't like the impersonal nature of instant messaging. So right from within my instant messaging client I'm going to start a videoconference here and you notice I don't go to some different tool, we actually just crank up the video and there's Paul backstage. Hey, Paul, how are you? PAUL DUFFY: Hey, Chris, how are things? CHRIS CAPOSSELA: They're great. Let me just start my little video. Now, I'm just using a $40 or $50 webcam that's hooked up to my computer and he has the same thing with his computer and we're just using the Internet to do this, we don't have any fancy system here. Now I don't have to type and we can actually have a more personal interaction. So, Paul, have you had a chance to look at the promotion data? PAUL DUFFY: Yeah, I've made some progress. We should probably look at it together. Can we share it now? CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Great. So what I'm going to do is to click on another item right here on the menu and I actually want to share my application with Paul so we can look at data together using our computer. This is going to launch something called Microsoft Office Live Meeting, which is actually a hosted service that we provide that allows us to actually share our desktop and share applications and review things on screen together. Live Meeting is a great way to connect with people inside the company but it's even more powerful in the way that it allows you to connect with people outside the company. Because anyone with an Internet connection and a phone can actually join this Live Meeting and we can work together on a PowerPoint presentation or a spreadsheet or what have you. I'm going to share our corporate scorecard, which we were just looking at a minute ago, and now Paul and I are going to actually be able to work on this thing together. You can't see Paul's screen, but if you could, you'd see that as I navigate here on my computer he's seeing the exact same things happening on his computer. He can grab some annotation tools, circle something, we can continue our videoconference and actually work together on a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation or what have you. He can ask questions, you can have lots of people join this meeting and post questions, you have all of the videoconferencing controls that you'd expect. So you see all of these different communications channels coming together: instant messaging, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, e-mail, calendaring, et cetera. Let me go ahead and shut that down and I'm going to switch over -- we're going to say bye-bye to Paul. PAUL DUFFY: Bye. CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Bye, Paul. And let me switch over to the last thing that I wanted to show you. And this is a really common collaboration pain point for people. We're looking at my e-mail and you're seeing that a person named Yancey Smith has started an e-mail thread, and he's e-mailed a whole bunch of people inside the company and outside the company, and he's attached a whole bunch of documents to this e-mail thread. Now, this is far and away the No. 1 way people collaborate across companies today because it's relatively easy, but there is a lot of pain associated with it because what happens is this starts a whole bunch of e-mails and everyone changes the attachments and nobody really knows who has the latest version of these things, and as Bill said, it just becomes a very inefficient way to work together on a particular project. So what I'm going to do instead is to select this e-mail, and I'm going to actually create a Groove Workspace. Groove is a very exciting product that we recently acquired and we're really excited to have Groove and Ray Ozzie joining Microsoft. And what this is going to allow me to do is to create a special folder that's very specific to this project right on My Computer and it's going to automatically invite all of those people on the mail thread to create that same folder on their computer just using peer-to-peer infrastructure, so IT really doesn't have to get involved here to create a shared Internet connection or anything along those lines. We take all of the e-mails from that thread and post them right to this space and we take all of the attachments across all those e-mails and post them right here. So now we have this special folder or workspace that has the context of this project that might last a week, it might last a month, it might last two months and anytime I'm working on these documents we'll automatically synch them with everybody else who has these documents on their computer; so a very, very easy way to collaborate in a very ad hoc fashion. So those are three quick things that we've done or that we're working hard on and these are all things that are either available now or very soon in the future, one around scorecarding to really drive strategy and action, one around unifying communication channels into one simple, easy to use tool and this ad hoc Workspace collaboration environment with e-mail and with Groove. And with that, let me turn things back over to Bill. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause.) Digital Workstyle BILL GATES: So what you saw there, we're empowering a new digital workstyle. You saw a little bit of presence there where you saw what your coworker was up to, you saw unified communications where even the desktop phone was being connected in there, you saw the business intelligence to bring up the rich information and, as we said, that was software we have today. Next year with a major new release of Office, we'll bring in a much higher level of document lifecycle and workflow and make those business intelligence presentations even dramatically richer than they were there. So that's why we talk about this as a very dramatic change. One element that's interesting is that the hardware will continue to improve. I mentioned the Tablet, the portable device being big there. The phone also will be far more powerful than it is today. The phone will be able to connect over different networks, for example, a wireless network inside your corporation, so-called Wi-Fi, and so the voice minutes can just be on that network. These phones will directly connect to your Exchange e-mail, you won't have to buy another separate server or anything. In fact, this is a scenario that we're finishing this year to make phone connected e-mail just commonsense, very rich, all the power of Outlook with scheduling and even the special features like rights management brought down there. Next-Generation Phone Corporations are putting applications on these phones because they want to be able to manage those phones in the same way that they do PCs to make sure things are up to date and secure. Over time on these phones the amount of mapping information you're going to get will really be surprising, not just maps with nice little lines on them but satellite photography and imagery that we and other companies are gathering so that if you're looking to go to a store you'll see exactly what it's like, you'll see the traffic overlaid onto that map there, so mapping both on the phone and the PC is an explosive thing that just comes in essentially as part of your searching for information. We'll be able to use voice commands more and more on these phones. We'll be able to take the pictures that you take and even analyze what's there so if it's a bar code we can go and bring up product information, if it's a foreign language we can send off a message and get a translation of that, if it's an expense receipt we'll figure that out and file that away the right way. So it's not just the PC that's getting smaller and better, it's also this phone and the software that we give to the information worker has to incorporate this in as well. In fact, for many people you've got a PC at work, a PC at home, your portable PC, you've got your desktop phone at work, you've got your portable phone and you've got your phone at home and making sure that's holistic, that your contact list, your schedule, the rights management, the applications, the notifications come across those, that's a big part of our vision and a big reason why we've gotten involved in investing in that phone software in a very deep way. Digital Lifestyle I wanted to also touch on the twin of digital workstyle, which is digital lifestyle. This is moving also at a pretty incredible pace. I'm sure you've all seen the move towards digital photography, now more digital photos taken than film photos and really becoming commonsense, the resolution, the ability to share, sometimes the dedicated cameras but also in the phone where the phone can be set up so it just automatically goes to the family Web site and the relatives can see those things and annotate those things. Family scheduling getting done in a rich way and making it easy to share your work calendar, there's a subset of that that your family wants to see, so you're set up there. Of course, music and TV as well, the next generation networks that are being built by telephone companies and cable companies will really redefine television as a rich digital experience, a lot more interactivity, a lot more personalization than we've had before. And so these two things go hand in hand, because after all, the PC and the Internet are common elements. When you go home you can do work, when you're at work you can see your family information and connect up and so having this be seamless, whether it be information on the phone or your PC or the user interface, that's one of the key things we want to accomplish. Now, a big change taking place here is the move towards high definition. Whether it's watching movies or TV shows or in videogaming, this is where high definition is exploding. And it's very compelling. In fact, this was a big week for us on this. At the E3 show earlier this we introduced our next generation gaming console, which is called the Xbox 360. And it's hard to explain this numerically, it's anywhere from 8 to 40 times better capabilities in terms of the graphics. But what that means in terms of realism is quite phenomenal. Also for the first time we're really providing games that appeal to all ages, both men and women, and we're bringing in this social element. We started that with Xbox Live in the original Xbox. Our Halo game has had literally hundreds of millions of hours of playing time on it and now every new game will have that kind of social interaction. I thought I'd just show you real quickly a video and look closely to see this resolution so you'll get a sense of how it's just dramatically different than videogaming in the past. (Video segment.) BILL GATES: So you're seeing a couple things there. One is the realism, for example, with those cars, you can pick any car you want, you can put your decals on it. If you ever get in a wreck it is very realistic, your car will be damaged for all time. (Laughter.) And so it's at a whole new level. And actually what you were seeing there, those are just previews of the work that people are doing with our development kits. Of course, the system ships for the holiday this year and software developers will just get better and better at being able to take advantage of the power we've got with our software tools, with Xbox Live and the chips that are built into this thing. You were also seeing a couple of the screens that have to do with this communication capability. Chris showed you the idea of videoconferencing in the work setting; well, here with Xbox you have these headsets, you're talking to each other, there will also be an add-on video camera so if you beat the other guy you can kind of taunt him as you exclaim at your success and you're really connected up in a very social network. And so there's a lot of games that wouldn't have made sense in the past that are a lot more social in nature and for the first time we'll have the idea of spectators so you can watch and learn, we'll have the idea of contests so that people can come in and do things and so it's much richer. And your idea of your presence with your buddies, you'll probably share not only what game you're playing but we can also take and if you're on the PC, say, what music you're listening to, you can invite the person who's on the PC, hey, come and let's play this game and there's a rich connection between the Xbox, which would typically be in the living room, and with the PC that would be in the other rooms in the house. You can connect up, even get at the photos and music that's up on that PC. So it's really the big move towards digital living room using gaming, the world's best gaming as a way to kick that off but it gives you the silicon and graphics interface to make television navigation and photo and music navigation, all those things a lot better as well. So what we're saying is that this is a decade where digital work style, digital lifestyle really are coming into the mainstream. The pervasiveness of broadband, the advances in the hardware, when complemented with the imperatives in business to work and use information in better ways, allow software to step up to that challenge, and so sharing, communications, authoring, all of those brought together in a simpler way. One thing we really understand about this is there are imperatives around simplifying, having less moving parts, less number of software things that you have to have, taking one piece of software, which is Office and the servers associated with it, and making that across all your workers the lens onto information. And so they will have to learn far less interfaces, you'll have fewer things to deploy, you'll have a simpler information architecture for who has access to what information, how you make it simple to do that, and a lot of productivity benefits to go with it. So it's a very exciting time for how software helps information workers. Thank you. (Applause.) © Copyright 2007 by Finfacts.com |
