Microsoft's Bill Gates outlines his future vision for business applications

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This is the full transcript of his speech.

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"Well, thank you. It's very exciting to be here at Convergence and talk about business applications. In many ways, all the Microsoft R&D goes towards having that final application that allows a business to do a better job.

Recently, I got a reminder that I should always use digital technology wherever I go. I was at the World Economic Forum and I'd gone to a press conference and not taken my Tablet PC. And so I just grabbed a piece of paper and doodled some notes, and this is actually exactly what I put down.

Consequently, I left those notes behind and the press captured them and mistakenly thought that Tony Blair, the prime minister of the UK, who sat next to me, that these were his notes. And so the British tabloids had a heyday with this because handwriting experts determined that only a weak leader would write things like this. (Laughter.) And clearly, he was confused about the press conference or something strange was going on.

Eventually we did get that straightened out, and now I can actually show you a little magnification of some of the key pieces here: Record '24.' (Laughter.) That could not have been Tony. Why does Bono wear sunglasses? (Laughter.) And finally -- oh. (Laughter, applause.) Oh, here we go, yeah. (Laughter, applause.)

So that's how we determined it wasn't the prime minister, it must have been me. (Laughter.) So next time I'll have my Tablet and won't have that problem at all.

We're in a very exciting period in terms of the advance in information technology. The Moore's Law exponential improvement continues to really change the framework that all software is developed in. We see this in many areas. We see the processor moving up to 64-bit, and 64-bit servers will be very, very inexpensive. In fact, they'll carry no premium over the 32-bit servers, but in terms of being able to have huge memory size, wonderful performance out of that, they'll just be a lot, lot better.

The speed of the network we're connecting up to, whether it's the backbone or inside the business, is going up massively and now many businesses are putting in Wi-Fi networks so you can be connected up even as you carry a portable or a Tablet machine around.

The disk capacity, letting us now think about things like video storage and data mining, click mining things that wouldn't have been feasible -- or at least cost-wise, practical -- in the past, are all now becoming very, very reasonable.

And so the hardware industry is delivering us these capabilities, big screens with great graphics capabilities, smaller portable devices. The premium cost for Tablet over a portable PC will come down from about US$150 to about, oh, say $60 over the next years; mobile phones with more capability, GPS location, Internet browsing, the ability to connect up to applications, the ability to notify you of things.

So it's in that framework that we say the opportunity for software is greater than it's ever been, whether it's for work activity, which we call the digital work style that is emerging, or whether it's at home, which we call the digital lifestyle. All of these things set us up so that software is really the only limiting factor in terms of the ease of use, the security, the willingness to dive in and take advantage of that.

Now, we see when it comes to new software things are moving fairly rapidly, a little bit differently in the consumer space than in the business space. In the consumer space, it's not as many issues about compatibility and aligning all those upgrades together, and so typically consumer type software is being updated on yearly or even sometimes a six-month basis, things like Instant Messaging and cloud-based capabilities. In the business space, it's more a stair-step where you'll get, say, a new version of Office and use that for two or three years and then get a major step up as opposed to that continual upgrade.

Now, making it so that these compatibility issues, the difficulty of getting things installed, making that very, very straightforward is important so that in the business space as well, those improvements are flowing through.

For applications, this has always raised the tough issue of, 'Can the customizations that are done by a firm be done in such a way that when you get upgrades to those applications they don't have to be reintegrated in?' The way the user interface, the data model, the logic comes together is orthogonal in a way that lets you get the best of both worlds there. A lot of innovation is taking place in that to make sure that we can finally get that so you don't have this big version tail, that we make it easy for you to always have the latest and greatest. And, of course, for us that's good because the pieces work together that much better and we get feedback on exactly the things that are out there. It's a very competitive space, but also a space with lots of opportunity.

We have many ways to measure the innovation that goes on. One that I've talked about in the past is the size of the R&D budget. It's now the biggest R&D budget of any company in the world. I was never sure if that was the right metric to use, so here I've got one that's just another slice of it, which is looking at the number of patents. It's an imperfect measure, but you can just see the general slope there that shows in the fiscal year we're in that ends the middle of this calendar year we'll apply for over 3,000 patents. That's up a factor of ten over about a six-year period, so a pretty steep climb there. And that's across so many different areas: the business applications, platform security, voice recognition, ink recognition, computers that can look at things and find patterns in a much richer way, data mining type things. And so software platforms are getting much more effective.

Now, all of that R&D typically goes into products that are available at exactly the same type of pricing they had before, and so the leverage for us is more volume but just a better and better software value because of the billions that go into those new capabilities.

People in some senses have more awareness of the changes in digital lifestyle -- photos, music, scheduling, Instant Messaging, communications -- than they do over in the work domain. And that's unfortunate because in terms of improving the economy, making things far more productive in terms of untapped opportunity, the work space is actually as rich an area as the home space.

If we think today about how people navigate to the information they care about, how they get notified whether something has changed, how they share information and collaborate, which has been e-mail for so long. SharePoint is now coming in and starting to change that, all the different mail addresses and modalities that they have to work across in communications -- the phone, the mobile phone, the mail -- trying to see things organized in the way that they'd be interested in, in either a work or home context, that's been very tough. We haven't been able to model things out. We hadn't had great business intelligence; meetings, you can't have digital participants at a distance in the way that we think that you ought to be able to do that.

And so, every business activity can be made better by advanced software and we talk about that as a new world of work. Of course, one of the main vehicles we have for delivering that is constantly improving Office, but then getting applications to connect up, and I'll talk about a lot of very specific things in terms of our applications where we're going to connect up in new ways.

Now, as we do this work, the breakthroughs are very exciting and, in fact, we happened to capture one of those on a video that we got of some of the work I was doing recently and so let's go ahead and take a look at that.

(Video segment.)

(Laughter, applause.)

BILL GATES: That connectivity is very powerful. (Laughter.)

Well, Doug talked about five different themes that are really the themes that we use when we look at the R&D plans but that's not just true of our Business Solutions, it's true for the entire software development budget, all of our R&D. And so it's really my role to make sure that we are delivering on each of these five areas, so I thought I'd step through them, talk about what that means for the different products, including the types of the applications and as I go through these I actually have three demos that will illustrate some of the great stuff, all of it coming out really in the next year with either the existing platform, or the improvements that come out and the newer versions of the applications that you've heard that we're coming up with.

Over the last few months as we've really plotted out this roadmap and I've seen the demos of these applications. It's amazing to me the progress we're making, really changing how you navigate the data, understanding about roles, letting people connect up in new ways. We're taking the application to a new level of flexibility and it's really driven by these five things.

Empowered Users

I'll start with empowerment. Empowerment has really been a theme of Microsoft almost forever -- the idea of the PC itself as changing the computer from something that's just there, just at the center to something that's sitting on the desktop and available to everyone. And so the nature of the software, the nature of how you think of your relationship to the device, it is very, very different.

One of the challenges that has emerged is that in business applications, you have very structured data, very controlled data, appropriately so, and then there's this whole other world of e-mail and documents. And the two do need to relate to each other, because after all, if you have, say, a customer that you're negotiating with or a problem with that customer you want the structured business data and track that. But then you also need to be communicating with that customer, drawing in your colleagues, thinking about different alternatives and that needs to be done in a way that you can link back and forth between these two worlds.

In fact, most of the exciting innovation taking place today is in this boundary -- collaboration is in that boundary, workflow is in that boundary, business intelligence is in that boundary -- and so it's really fascinating how we as a company with Office and with the business applications will extend both Office and the applications and make those two things come together. We'll publish the extensions so other applications can connect up to that, but we can pioneer those areas and really lead the way by the way that we do that connection, and so that's very, very important for us.

A great example of how this goes on is how we're thinking about the user interface across all of the different applications, and so here to show you an example of that is Matt, who's a little shy. I hope he'll be willing to come up and show us this at work.

MATT GUSTAV: Thanks, Bill.

You heard Bill mention the importance of understanding exactly how work gets done in an Office in a business and that really comes down to a personal level and understanding what people do in their roles within an organization. You heard Bill mention the importance of us understanding those roles and how that's going to manifest itself in some of the software.

So let's take a look right now at what you're going to see in Great Plains 8.5. We've touched very briefly on role pages for 8.5 throughout Convergence; we want to take a little deeper dive into it today and show you what that's going to look like as it spread across not just the Great Plains product, but you're going to see this common theme across all of the Microsoft Business Solutions areas of expertise.

And you can see as we look in here we've got Susan, her homepage. She's in our world. Susan is our sales order processing clerk, and as we've mentioned before, Susan wants to see things that are important to her as a sales order processing clerk. These are things that she does on a day-to-day basis and we've talked to hundreds of clerks and we know that things like these types of reports are important to her, and that she wants to have her Outlook front and center.

But its' also important that we understand other personas as well, and let's go in and take a look at another common persona. We'll go in and take a look at Phyllis. Do we have any Phyllises out there? OK, do we have any accounting managers out there? There you go. Well, guess what? In our world, Phyllis is our accounting manager and so what you're going to see here is how this homepage has now changed a little bit and morphed into what we expect Phyllis would want to see in her day-to-day basis, and you can see things that are important to Phyllis might be, let's say, the receivables. And some of the reports that are in there, for a trial balance perspective, one click away as opposed to several clicks away, empowering users to get at that data sooner and easier than ever before.

And Phyllis might actually want to see some metrics and track some different things on her homepage as opposed to trying to dig through them in some other fashion. Again, we've talked to hundreds of Phyllises, and again Phyllis and Susan share one thing in common -- they like to have that Outlook front and center. So there, we want to make sure that's available to her as well. And along with the quick links to exactly see receivable summaries, something Phyllis wants to see on a day-to-day basis, it's right there, easy to get at.

One of the more powerful features of the role pages has been pointing to things that Phyllis needs to do or reminders of things in her day that she might want to know about without having to go and dig through the system to get. Here are some tasks that the system has auto-generated for her. Here are some to-dos, let's say she wants to go and take care of these past customer transactions; she's one click away from having that right at her fingertips.

Now, none of this is all that wonderful if Phyllis wants to customize it and she can't. So we're going to build in customization obviously throughout this entire product where she can go in and select which metrics are important to her. She can go in and select if she wants the to-dos to show up, what level of detail she wants to see as well.

Let's say she wants to go in and create a new reminder, something that's important to her. She can go in and make a new reminder -- let's say base it on a smart list favorite, for instance, another concept that most customers are familiar with -- go in and say whenever I see let's say a customer on hold or over credit limit, whenever I have more than one of them, put that on my reminders window so I can go out and take a look at it. Again, we're taking that concept of roles based navigation and driving it forward into the first screen you see when you come into Great Plains to help empower users.

You also heard Bill talk a little bit about bridging the gap between structured and unstructured data. We're going to take a look at this now as we hop over here to our Business Portal running again on SharePoint. Take a look what's going to be coming in one of the future versions of Business Portal and that's this concept of searching across the entire domain to get my data.

If we go in here, this is the page that if you're running Business Portal you'll be familiar with, just the customer page where I can see all my customers. Here's where the power really comes in. I'm going to go in and search for a customer that I happen to know is Northern Family Hospital. So I'll just search for North, and you can see here that I've got all of the unstructured data in my SharePoint that has to do with that customer, whether it's a presentation that we gave to them or a proposal or a couple e-mail threads that have been going on; I've got all of that data unstructured right now.

Those of you that are using Business Portal today and SharePoint today can already recognize that it does a great job of doing that and those of you that aren't using Business Portal and SharePoint, shame on you. You should be; it's wonderful technology.

But the big addition that's going to be made in the future and unlocked by the Web Services technology that you've heard us talking about all week is over here on the right hand side where you can go in and see that we've pulled up data from the back office, from the ERP system. We've crawled through that to find out how many customers have a North in there. Well, we've got here's our Northern Family Hospital, here's the transactions that are associated with all those customers.

If we dig down a little bit deeper into that data you can see that, yes, there's the information and wouldn't it be nice even if we could go in here and we'll just make a change and we'll do something simple like change the name. And again using the power of Web Services we can go in and this is using an InfoPath form -- for those of you that haven't used InfoPath you should go learn about it, it's another wonderful Microsoft technology. We'll just refresh that, and voila. In the back office ERP system now those changes are reflected. Why? Because we're using a common toolset, a common UI, common Web Services, and again you'll see this across all of our Microsoft Business Solutions products to make it easier for everyone to deploy and get at that type of information to once again, like Bill said, empower users.

Thank you. (Applause.)

BILL GATES: Thanks, Matt.

Insightful

The next pillar was about meaningful information, making things insightful and here we've made a huge investment in our SQL product to have business intelligence capability, including a reporting services capability that really is unequal, there's never been anything quite as flexible and as rich as that.

We have a model of the data that's very rich that understands the multiple dimensions, things like time and geography, and so being able to take that kind of platform capability and connect the applications up to it really is very, very high leverage, far more richness than anyone just building the reporting logic into an application itself could ever do.

We have many other pieces that come into this. We need to take Excel and make it understand rich structured data even more than it does today. We've done a lot with XML imports, but we can go beyond that to have native understanding of the information. We can have a lot of workflow logic where if some business indicator is different than you'd expect we can have that trigger a notification or trigger an action that needs to take place. And then we have BizTalk that can take the data and move it around between the different applications including legacy applications.

So this is a huge area for us, more and more connector type capabilities -- more in Excel, more in SQL, and then the applications connecting up to that and showing how it really is valuable.

Connected

Another pillar was connected and here the dream is quite simple; it's that software on any computer connected to the Internet should be able to talk to software on any other computer, independent of where they are located, with operating system is being used, what language the application is being written in, and connect in a very deep way in that you can authenticate who's at both ends. You can make sure the information is reliably exchanged between the two systems, and you can have very complex protocols so that it's usable for business type activities.

Now, this has been missing. We've had bit-level connectivity with the IP standards, but we haven't had software-level connectivity. It's been a dream for many decades but now that dream is finally being fulfilled with a set of work around Web Services. We started with XML, the data format, then we had some simple protocols -- SOAP, WSDL -- and now we have this full stack in a group called the WS-I group that blesses these stack profiles that really give the guidance for how software can connect together.

This is very powerful. Some of you today when your applications want to connect up for shipping or taxes or various things, you're already using something that sort of either is a Web Service or was an early attempt to do this type of thing connecting out.

Here where this can work for the different components of the application, work within a company across company boundaries, it really is a revolution. It's a revolution that we made a commitment to starting, oh, about the year 2000, but it will be the rest of this decade before all the software is enabled this way.

We are very committed to this. You've seen with the Visual Studio we've had out, the new version coming out this summer, some great extensions there, and this is very important for us in everything we do, including the applications themselves.

And I think a great example of this is what you're going to see us do first in Axapta but then in a very broad way, so let me ask Jeff Comstock to come out and show us how this integration works. (Applause.)

JEFF COMSTOCK: Thank you, Bill.

So, the first thing that we'll do in this demo is we'll generate some Web Service using a preview of the Axapta Integration Framework that we'll be shipping in 4.0. Then I'll show you how easy it is to integrate an application, InfoPath, with those Web Services, as well as how easy it is to program against those Web Services from Visual Studio .NET.

So what we're looking at here is essentially a catalogue of Axapta Web Services and what all this stuff on the page is telling us here is that there are no Web Services available for us yet. So let's just jump into Axapta so you can see what it's going to take for you to generate your own Web Services, along with the Web Services that we'll be providing you out of the box.

So on the right hand side we have a few classes that represent the business logic that we want to expose, and I just want to walk you through these classes really quickly.

So, the first class is the customer service class and it contains the business operations that we want to perform. So we want to do things like create customer, get customer, update customer. These are also the business operations that we want to expose as Web Service methods and we'll see that happen in just a moment.

The next class we'll look at is the customer class and this class represents the customer, so it has properties on it that you'd expect to see on a customer like city, country, name and those kinds of things. We'll use this class to generate the XML document structure that our Web Services will emit and consume.

So just from these two we have enough to generate Web Services. So I'm going to click over here on the left, generate Web Service. What that's doing is going to through all the classes within Axapta, looking for those classes that are marked similar to the ones that we just looked at and it's generating Web Services for us.

So let's bring back that catalogue, refresh this view and now we see we have some Web Services available, create customer, get customer, the same business operations we saw on the customer service class. So, great -- now we have industry standard Web Services available.

But, of course, the important question is how do these Web Services make your integration projects any easier. To give you an idea of that, I'm going to be taking an application, InfoPath, and I'm going to use these Web Services to integrate with Axapta. InfoPath is just an Office program, this is just InfoPath right out of the box. We'll design a form on the fly here, we'll point the data connection to the Web Service that we just generated and we'll receive and submit data, so we'll call a Web Service to get some customer information, we'll change some of that customer data on the form and then we'll call another Web Service to update that same customer.

So we'll just point it to our Web Service location, we see the business operations that are exposed,. So first we'll get a customer, next we'll update that same customer. We just need to point it at the data structure we're going to work with, which is the customer, and I'll finish this wizard.

Now I just need to drag a few fields over, I'll drag the ID field and the query field and on the data side I'll drag over the customer with controls.

So InfoPath gives us a default form based on the data, this will be fine for our demo here, I'll go ahead and preview that form, and let's bring up the information for customer 4,000. So I'm going to click Run Query here. What that's doing is calling our Get Customer Web Service, which is calling into Axapta, calling into the business logic, returning that customer information for us here in InfoPath.

So let's just change something about this customer. Let's change the name of the company from Light to Light and Design. We'll click Submit and what this is doing, what it's already done, is called our Update Customer Web Service, again calling into the Axapta business logic and persisting that.

So let's go back to Axapta. We'll list customers and we see on the top customer 4,000 is now named Light and Design.

So we've very quickly shown we can take an application, integrate it with Axapta using these generated Web Services very quickly.

So lastly, we've been hearing more and more from you customers, partners and ISVs who are building .NET applications and you're saying to us very clearly, 'Hey, make it easier for us to integrate these .NET applications with your business management suite.' So I'm going to just very quickly show you how Web Services helps us do that from Visual Studio .NET.

What I'm showing you here is a very simple Winform .NET application, it takes some customer information, calls a Web Service to create a customer.

So I promise not to walk you through all this code. There's just one key thing that I want to show you. I'm bringing up IntelliSense on a .NET C# customer class, and what IntelliSense is showing us is all the same properties that we saw on the customer class within Axapta, and this class was completely auto-generated for us by Visual Studio .NET just by pointing at the rich Web Services that we're generating. So programming against these strong types makes integrating with Web Services from Visual Studio .NET very straightforward and very easy.

So let me just run this. Let's make sure it's as easy as I'm claiming here. So what I've got here is I'm pre-populating the form so you don't have to watch me struggle at typing this in, I'll hit create and that's taking the information from the form and calling the Create Customer Web Service, says it's created it. Let's go back to Axapta and let's list customers once last time, and we see customer 1,000 -- Fabricam -- has been created within Axapta.

So we've seen how we can generate Web Services from within Axapta and easily integrate using those Web Services from applications as well as Visual Studio .NET.

What I've shown you here today represents the work we're doing for Axapta, but you can expect to see Web Services capabilities in the coming versions of all of our business management suites.

Thank you. (Applause.)

BILL GATES: For those of you who haven't done much Visual Studio programming recently, let me assure you what you just saw there was very, very cool. (Applause.)

Total Cost of Ownership

Well, the next pillar was cost of ownership and when we think of this we think of it in a very broad way. We think of all the expense of doing customization, we think of maintenance fees, we think of personnel costs, moving data around. We think of dealing with errors, we think of the inflexibilities of the systems not letting you change in a way that you want to.

And so if you really look at it very broadly, the pie is very large, and the opportunity for software innovation to take elements of that and bring them down substantially is still very, very dramatic.

A few of the pieces like the hardware costs, that's naturally coming down. The communications cost is naturally coming down. But it's the costs that are harder to measure, around maintenance and lack of capability, that really now I think everyone would agree, although it's tough to be numeric, that is the biggest piece there.

Microsoft has always had a view to go for high volume and low cost of ownership, low cost for the software license and to have as much built-in capabilities so that the need to spend money beyond the software license can be minimized as much as possible.

Now, one of the ways we're doing this is through integration, where we're able to take something like our Software Updating Service and have that work on the operating system, Office and the business applications -- one place you go to see what's up to date, what's changed there. That's a very simple thing, taking Active Directory, using that to manage group policies so that it manages operating system resources, Office resources, Exchange resources and the applications resources.

So we see ourselves that one of the tools, one of many that we have to drive this down is that ability to have a stack and be able to turn to you and say, 'Hey, this is something that we've integrated. We have customers using exactly this and so there's no system integration that you have to do.' One way to think of us, although it's a fairly narrow way to think of us -- it's sort of a type of system integrator that does this by the design of the product rather than after the fact.

Adaptive Processes

Maybe the most visionary thing in the five pillars is this idea of adaptive process, really instead of thinking of code -- lots and lots of lines of code as the ultimate representation of what the business process is -- instead, using a very high level form that's far more visual in nature and captures at different levels of detail what's going on with that business process.

We call that model-driven design, and there's been discussion about this for many decades. What it's been historically is simply a diagram that is unrelated to the code and very quickly the two become disassociated, and the diagram probably sits as a printout and isn't providing much help.

What we see is where you start with that diagram, that model, and then as you provide levels of detail eventually you use code to do that. But we can check to see if the model and the code are consistent and view it as simply one document in the system, and a way that you can visualize things, visualize performance. Even a business decision-maker could take that process and see how many times did something wait in one stage for over a day, how many times did the error redo path get taken, how many customers are sitting at a stage and who are they. And so it's not just a design capability, it's a way of thinking of the entire system.

And so this is something that you'll see us building in more and more and more. This is how we get the customization to be both cheaper and more and more orthogonal from the kind of improvements we're making in the base applications themselves.

So as a great example of how this comes together, I'd like to ask Kari Hensien from the CRM group to come up and show us how this comes together. (Applause.)

KARI HENSIEN: Thank you, Bill.

All right, on behalf of the entire CRM development team, I'm very excited to be able to share with you today a sneak peak at the next release of Microsoft CRM. A key goal for Microsoft is to provide a CRM solution that is able to be tailored to the unique way that your organization does business.

Now I know if you're like me, throughout these past few days at Convergence we've been hearing from customers talking about challenges around being able to manage information stored in multiple systems. And a key challenge with that is more than just managing that information, but getting that information to the right person to meet their needs.

In the next release of Microsoft CRM we're going to be continuing our work to improve the workflow processes and make it even easier for you to call out to these back-end systems and use that information to make better decisions.

So what we've done here is shown you and created a quick implementation of Microsoft CRM for Fabricam Corporation. They're a property maintenance company. And at Fabricam a sales rep has just received a call from an account looking for us to provide new maintenance services.

So let's go ahead and kick off the workflow process for this by creating a new opportunity. So I've brought up the new opportunity form, and I'm simply going to paste in the title here quickly and we'll select the account that it will be associated with. Let's save and close.

Now, what happened when we saved and closed is the workflow process has now kicked off. And it's important to note that at Fabricam there are basically two distinct business processes in our company: one for managing opportunities around new customers, and a second for managing opportunities around existing customers.

Now, with new customers we obviously have to do a little bit more work to build the relationships, to do a background check on the account to see if it's actually a customer we want to be doing business with.

And for the existing customer we've already got an established relationship, but it's still important for us to call and take a look at the financial information and see if this is an account in good standing.

Now, each of these two processes in the past required several manual tasks, and any time, as you know, when you take a sales rep and you ask them to do things like paperwork, set up meetings, document what's happening with a project, you're taking their time away from doing what they do best, interacting with customers and closing new business.

So let's now go back and take a look at that opportunity and see what the workflow process has now automatically done on my behalf.

When you look at the opportunity, you'll notice that we now have a SharePoint Team Services link to the site. What that basically means is the workflow has automatically created a place for me to work on this opportunity with my virtual team.

So what I'll go ahead and do is now take a look at that site, and you'll see that not only is this a SharePoint Team Services site, it's one that's been customized specifically for working on an opportunity with my sales team. You can see that it's provisioned the site with some templates and documents I need as a salesperson. It's started to populate the site with tasks that are important to managing the project around the opportunity. And finally, it's provided a place with insight back into the Microsoft CRM system.

Let's go ahead now and jump back into Microsoft CRM and take a look at the next step in the workflow process. And that step is really about provisioning in Microsoft CRM the structured business process.

Since this is an existing customer, I can follow a shorter process, and you can see here that Microsoft CRM has created a quick three-stage process and associated the activities I need to do right in that process.

So in conclusion, what we've show you is how we've been able to simplify the life of a salesperson by automating a look-up and determining if this customer is a good customer. We've created a workplace where I can bring my entire sales team together and keep them on the same page. And finally, we've improved the organization's ability to manage the opportunities going on in the business.

All of this was done with Microsoft CRM, its workflow capabilities and rich customization so that we could tailor the product to work the way Fabricam works.

Thank you. (Applause.)

BILL GATES: I thought I'd give you a quick glimpse of some of the things we're thinking about in terms of user interface in the years ahead. Many of you I'm sure have heard about the idea of Windows having an even richer presentation system, completely upwards compatible from what we have today, and that's going to make visualization richer than it's been. We're also thinking in terms of scenarios and how we can present information in a nice way there.

This gives you a glimpse of a screen. Here you've got a worker looking at different invoices, some past due, some due and if the user would just click that they want to process a certain set of these things, then they get a button that comes up for that and then they'd see in the second stage those things have been moved down and now they can delegate those things out.

So when we talk about better user interface, it's really not just the color schemes or the animation or those things, but it's actually mapping it into this part of our applications and thinking about the way the shell in Windows changes, Office changes and then these kinds of guided interfaces in the application, so the user feels very comfortable across all those different domains. They don't feel like the user interface is different and it is taking advantage when you have the latest hardware of that in a very, very nice way.

When we talk about our platform being integrated, and I hope I gave you some examples of how our dialogue with you in terms of how you want the applications to be better, not only is driving the R&D priorities inside our Business Solutions group, but also all the way down into SQL, Windows, Office and the whole connectivity strategy we have to create more flexibility. Having us think about it that way and drive it into that high volume platform really means that these are things that eventually you'll be able to take for granted.

When people ask me about why we have such an incredible commitment to this area, why are we increasing the R&D and driving these new things forward, it's partly because it's a great business, great opportunity to understand needs, but it also has been fantastic for us in all the work that we do. In the same way that building Office for Windows in the '90s allowed Windows to mature and gave us a sense of what was needed there, here the applications we're building and the needs they have for the platform are really pushing us in the right direction. And therefore we're going to get the combination of the great smart people on the platform side, the application side driving together, and making sure that we're getting that rich synergy is a really fun part of my job. So it's an integrated platform value, meeting as many of the needs as we can and then having the extensibility for everything else that's needed there.

I hope we've given you a key sense that we see when you get to the overall value of software business applications are at the center of that equation, that they are the context in which so much of the work is done and even the unstructured work has got to come in and relate to that.

I hope we've given you a sense that we see massive room for innovation. Today, work is not as efficient as it can be, and the tools of software, although they have scratched the surface, started to show us what can be done -- even the idea of the Internet and e-commerce and digital sales reports that you can dive into and see in the appropriate way and share that with other people -- even those basic things are still coming together for everybody to have those in their system.

There are many big breakthroughs ahead -- the natural interface on these systems, the way you'll have them wherever you go, the way they'll hook up to higher speed wireless -- but the thing that will determine if that comes through in terms of value is the entire software stack, with the applications at the top.

So again thanks for being here and thanks for all your guidance as we drive our software platform forward and letting us see the great things you do with it."

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Related links to this article:
Microsoft Corporation

Watch Bill Gate's speech at 56K

Watch Bill Gate's speech at 100K

Watch Bill Gate's speech at 300K

See the Bill Gates PowerPoint presentation

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e-Government National Awards 2004: Winners were announced on 19th January
The e-Government National Awards (www.e-GovernmentAwards.org.uk) recognise and praise the best strategies, achievements, teams and individuals in UK e-Government. The guest of honour at the 2004 Awards dinner was Ian Watmore, head of e-Government at the Cabinet Office e-Government Unit.

Full details on winners can be found at this link.

A gallery of photos of Awards winners and the dinner can be found at this link.

Organiser for the awards was PublicTechnology.net, the leading online news provider for those in UK e-Government and public sector IT, with 29,300+ readers per month. The Awards were supported by the Cabinet Office e-Government Unit and Socitm. Platinum sponsor was Intel and also a sponsor was Jobsgopublic.