MR. KARMANOS:

It is always dangerous to talk about something that supposedly alters the course of history, but I’m sure that when the books are written on the late 20th century, the stories will zero in on what the Mothers’ Club did at Lakeside School in Seattle in the late 1960s. The mothers took proceeds from a rummage sale and installed a computer terminal at the school. They then purchased computer time so the students could experiment with this newfangled gadget. Bill Gates attended that school, and that is how he was introduced to computers.

Thirty years later, Mr. Gates is certainly doing his share to change history. As co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft Corporation, he has done more than anyone to make computers a household item. Because of his intelligence, vision, and energy, computers have become the essential tool and are having huge impacts on how we live, work, learn, play and communicate. Mr. Gates, then barely out of his teens and a Harvard dropout, founded Microsoft in 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his boyhood friend, Paul Allen. Their first job was writing software for a company that had designed the first microprocessor-based computer, a little Altair 8088. Microsoft’s goal was to write and supply software for personal computers. At the beginning, success was hardly a sure thing, even his family had doubts. As Mr. Gates writes in his best-selling book, The Road Ahead, his mother suggested in a 1975 Christmas card rhyme that the software business might be a turkey.

All the late, all-night sessions writing software code paid off. Within a short time, virtually every personal computer manufacturer licensed a programming language from Microsoft, including IBM. Microsoft soon came to dominate the software business. Its release of Windows 95 was one of the most publicized product launches in history. Last year, Microsoft had revenues of $8.6 billion; it now has more than 21,000 employees in 50 countries. Microsoft says its mission is to continually advance and improve software technology and make it easier, more cost effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. In recent years, the company has become involved with encyclopedias, television, city guides and photo archives. Mr. Gates’ corporation is developing one of the largest resources visual information in the world, a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. Then, of course, there is the Internet. Mr. Gates is one of the biggest believers that interactive networks will provoke even greater changes in the way we live. Please join me in welcoming Bill Gates to the Detroit Economic Club.

MR. GATES:
Good afternoon. It's a great pleasure to be here and share with you some of my enthusiasm about the future. I'll be talking about computers. It seems strange that computers could gather together such a large audience. When I was a student, I was known for being very good at math and reading a lot of books, and so when the Mothers' Club put that computer into my high school, the kids were trying to figure it out and came over to me and said, "Hey, help us figure this out, it's a real puzzle." It seemed like fun, it was a challenge. How could we write software to make the computer do interesting things? But at that time, computers were so expensive, I thought of my future in terms of being a lawyer or scientist. It was only when I was fifteen years old that I first read about the miracle of chip-making. This is the idea that chips are being made smaller and smaller, and so every two years it's possible to make the chip twice as powerful without any increase in price. That's exponential improvement, and it's just unheard of in other parts of business. Over a twenty-year period, the chip becomes a million times more powerful. So something that would have cost $10,000 costs one cent. nd that's exactly what's happened during these last twenty years. Computers are a million times more powerful. We could say with great certainty that twenty years from now, computers will be again a million more times more powerful than they are today.

So what are we going to do with this? How is it going to change the world? We’re taking the computer and making it a tool for everyone. The computers of twenty years ago were simply for large companies. They kept track of bank accounts and travel reservations. But today, already the computer is cheap enough that on most desktops, knowledge workers have a personal computer, and increasingly in homes, over forty percent of American homes have a computer. But we really haven't seen anything yet. The kind of information we get, the ease of getting that information is nowhere near what it will be even in five years' time. So the world is changing more rapidly now than ever before. The previous advances that are comparable, the things like the printing press, telephone or television, each of those took an entire generation to become popular, and people had a lot of time to get used to it, to get ready for what it implied, and it was mostly the young people who grew up when the invention was out who had to adapt to it. Here it's all compressed into a much shorter period of time. And so the need for governments and companies and even individuals to think about what it means to them -- what are the opportunities, what are the problems -- these have become incredibly important.

As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip-making, I thought, well, what is the key missing element? And I'd been working on software, so I decided maybe that was the thing that was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and he kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time, because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers, IBM, DEC, they did all the software. When we called them up and said we'd like to do an operating system, they’d say, "Who are you?" We’d say, "We're high school students." That was the end of that conversation.

We did have one nice job that we got. A company called TRW had bid to take the Northwest power grid and control it using computers, and they had been so ambitious on this bid that they weren’t getting the systems done, and it was really a tough problem. And so they kept asking around, "Where are there experts on this kind of computer?" Well, my friends and I had become kind of famous at finding problems with these computers because one of the companies that bought the computer had a deal that as long as they could find bugs, they didn't have to pay for it. For a year we kept finding bugs until finally the company said, "No, no, you have to pay for this." But by then they recognized what we could do. So when this project was in trouble, we got hired, and that was my first job during the summer as a high school student, and I got to work on power grid software. But there wasn't a clear path really to a software company. So I went off to college, to Harvard, and while I was there, the very first personal computer came out. It was quite modest. It was a bag of parts that came in a plastic bag, and if you put it together, all it could do was flash its lights. There was no keyboard, there was no screen; it was fundamentally useless. But even so, because it was computer, a lot of hobbyists bought it, and that started the industry that we have today.

Now, seeing that things were getting boring, I decided I needed to be in on the ground floor, so I called up a lot of friends. Together with Paul Allen, my co-founder, we started Microsoft and dedicated ourselves to building this software. At Harvard, I met Steve Ballmer, and he and I stayed up late at night talking a lot. He wanted to go off into the world of business, and he had the view that working for a large company was absolutely where he could make his big impact. So what's interesting, about four years later, after Microsoft was having so many people coming to get its software, I knew I needed somebody to help me out. So I called up Steve, and I said, "You've got to come. You've got to come help us. We need business management." And Steve was right in the middle of going to Stanford Business School. And I dropped out of college, so I didn't think it was a very big deal, but Steve said no, no, his parents wanted him to finish business school and maybe he'd talk to me in a year. Well, there was a very urgent need to get his help. So I offered him part of the company and convinced him to drop out, and since that time, he's been my partner in running Microsoft, and that's part of what’s made it a lot of fun is we've worked together every step of the way. We created a company just built around developing software.

Hiring great people to do that, we used stock options. We've shared more wealth than any company in history with our employees, and it's been a central element of our success that those stock options have become very valuable. We have worked on a worldwide basis. The nice thing about software is people's needs around the world are largely the same. The need for a spreadsheet, for word processing is pretty much shared. Now, you have to learn about the languages, world languages. For example, in Japan and China the alphabet has over 50,000 characters, so you have to do a little bit of work to the software to make it appropriate for what they want to do. But by having that global approach, we've been able to get the majority of our sales outside the United States. That was a very smart thing, because it meant as those countries woke up to the potential of software, we were already there working with the customers, building partnerships. It was far more difficult for anybody else to come in and use one of those markets to grow to a size to challenge us in the worldwide market.

Well, year by year, computers were getting more powerful. And the vision was always that they would talk to each other. But that really didn't happen until the set of technologies coming out of the universities moved into the business world. These technologies collectively are known as the Internet. They include the idea of very low-level protocols: How do computers talk to each other? How do computers identify each other? How do you send electronic mail between different types of computers? Some of those standards are a wonderful thing that are fueling the growth in the use of computers. Today we should think of computers not just as a thing to manipulate numbers, but much more as something to help us communicate. A fundamental application is electronic mail. For people who use it, you can't live without it. When you run a business that way, you have a lot fewer meetings, you could get work done almost any time day or night. I don't know if that's good or bad, but you have incredible flexibility.For me, I love the idea that most nights I get a chance to go home early and see my young daughter; but after she goes to bed, then I'm back down in my den checking electronic mail, answering the questions people have had through the course of the day and putting together my thoughts. I'm able to share those with everyone in the company around the globe instantaneously. And so in the world of business today, when things are moving so rapidly, I can't imagine a company that will get by without giving its employees all electronic mail and making it something they use everyday.

This idea of the Internet, together with the PC that keeps improving, will revolutionize the way business works. It will make it easier to buy products, it will make it easier to find products, it will make it easier to consult with people. It will even hire consultants who never actually come to your place of business, they simply work with you through a videoconference across the Internet, and you can work on documents together. Not only will you be able to see their face, but also on the screen you can call up a spreadsheet or contract and sit there and do the editing and make sure you agree on things without ever being in the same place. So the Internet will make the world of business move faster, and it will make the world a smaller place. I was just in India a few weeks ago, and it was amazing to see how India is seeing the Internet as a great opportunity because they have hundreds of thousands of Ph.Ds who are capable of doing high-level work, engineering work, software work, design work, and they like to participate in the world economy. As we get them hooked up, they'll be able to make it known what their expertise is and even close contracts across the Internet and provide their services. And so the world trade of manufactured goods that relies on low-cost shipping now extends to other areas as well. And there's incredible opportunity as part of that.

Business will be the first place where this all happens. But the impact of information technology will also move into schools and into the home. In fact, over time, that is the place where the impact will be the most dramatic. Today, people who are comfortable using a computer can fill out their taxes there, they can look at their bank account, they can see the latest sports scores, they can play games with their friends. Warren Buffett, the investor who lives in Omaha, loves to play bridge; and I kept telling him he had to use a personal computer, that I viewed it as a personal failure for somebody who was so numeric not to have a spreadsheet, wasn't working with a computer, and he always said no, no, no, he loved the way he had been doing things. And so the only way I finally drew him in to buy a personal computer was showing him that he could play bridge with his friends in New York and his friends in California. And so now he's got a computer. And once you start using it for an application, then you'll find you start using it for other things as well, so he does electronic mail, and some day I may even convince him to fire up a spreadsheet. It's sitting there on his computer, it's ready for whenever he wants to do that. So the applications are incredibly broad. It's not just taking work home, it's not just a home business, it's not just educating the kids; it's almost any hobby you can imagine. This ability to reach out and find people with common interests doesn't exist anywhere else in other publishing mediums. You don't have to own a newspaper in order to make sure that your ideas will be heard. Here in the Internet, anybody with a computer can publish, and it's their standards for how you go out and find people who want to work with you on a common cause. Even in this last presidential election, you started to have a glimpse of the impact it could have. Presidential candidates were giving out their Internet addresses and you could go up there and see their speeches. In fact, the politicians will have to be careful to be more consistent because all the different speeches will be there in one place and can be compared to each other quite easily. They'll even have a politician speaking about a particular topic; anybody who's watching that has got a computer can indicate that they like what they're hearing, they agree or they disagree, so there can be real-time feedback to that person about whether they're on the right track or not.

This idea of involving people or letting them really have the background behind the issues, there's a deep interest in that. We do an Internet news service now, and if you've entered your ZIP Code, any time you're looking at an issue in front of Congress, we'll show you the position that your representative was taking, you can see what your congressman and your senators say, what they've done and how they voted. You’re much more in touch, you can decide whether you should send them a letter or vote for them next time, are they doing the things that you really care about. Let's say there's an issue about the budget. Today it's very difficult to go get the material and understand the history of the budget and the trade-offs being made there. When you get that information on the Internet, the ability to drill in and get the detail you care about is very, very straightforward. So I think even in the political realm, people will be far more informed.

When we think of computers in the future, we should just think of the PC as we know it today. It's getting a lot smaller, the screens are getting better, but there will be different form factors. There will be a computer you carry in your pocket; anywhere you go. It will tell you where you're located, it will show you a little map, you can ask it where's a nearby restaurant or directions to some place you want to go. Your messages will always be up to date, your schedule will be there. It will track your spending, and any information you put into that machine will automatically be transmitted back and so all of your data will be totally consistent.The advance in the hardware technology is almost impossible to describe verbally because people have a tendency to think of the machine in terms of what they see now. People often ask me, what's the future of the TV versus the PC? The fact is we're going to create a device that combines the best of those but goes far beyond either one of them. In your living room, you'll have a large screen on which you can watch movies, and play games, but also call up information. In your den, you'll have a device that you sit closer to it that will have a keyboard. You'll be able to do your homework, fill out a form, do your taxes there, whatever you want to do very easily. And so you won't have a distinction between what was a TV set and what was a PC. These will be connected together. Now, four or five years ago people talked about interactive TV and they said the phone companies and cable companies were going to deliver that literally overnight. It turned out they were optimistic. It's very expensive to run all those extra wires, and that's the toughest problem we face, is making sure we have high-speed connections. Year by year, these connections are getting bigger, more and more optic fibers are being run, and new satellites are being put up. If you look at a decade's time, everywhere in the United States we will have these high-speed connections, even high-speed enough for video conferencing and movie watching. Sending a video signal around is the most difficult thing. I believe the majority of adults will take the Internet for granted ten years from now. They'll be using it so much as part of their everyday life, they almost don't think of it as a special thing. They'll be doing electronic mail. If they want to make a purchase, many of the purchases they'll do on the Internet because that's the world's biggest catalog and you can compare the prices there. Take something like buying a car. Even if you don't buy it over the Internet, you'll certainly go up there and learn about the different models that are available. Today already on the Internet you can go out and find out how much the dealer paid to buy the car. It might help you to negotiate to know exactly what they paid. You can walk in and see what the Blue Book price is and see what all those reviews looked like. I thought this is a case where seeing would be believing, and so I've asked Chris Capossela, a Microsoft marketing manager, to come up and give us a quick glimpse of an Internet site. This one is called CarPoint, and will give you a sense of what we can already do on helping people who want to buy things out on the Internet.

[Presentation in which Mr. Capossela shows how easy it is to compare features and prices of a variety of automobiles. Mr. Capossela and Mr. Gates are ultimately stumped, however, by an intractable technical issue: When in Motor City, which sports utility vehicle do you buy? ]

MR. GATES:
The Internet is like a glass half full. Whenever somebody writes an article that says somebody is going to solve all the world's problems right away, those of us who are involved know that there is still a lot of work to be done. But I’d say even more strongly, when somebody says that there's really nothing out there today, I think those people are missing something very important. Whether it's buying books or making travel reservations or finding an obscure product or meeting friends, the Internet is in use today and people are getting an incredible amount out of it.All of the things that people want to see improved will be improved; the speed, the security, the ease of finding things, there are great companies competing to do that work. One of the most interesting things is to change the way that we interact with the computer. Today it's done almost entirely by the keyboard and the mouse, and that works very well when you're creating long documents. But when you're in a meeting, it's considered, even at Microsoft, a little bit antisocial for somebody to be sitting there typing all the time. So what we really prefer is to have a computer that is simply like a tablet that you can sit and do handwriting and the computer will recognize that correctly. Also, for a tiny little computer that you can put in your pocket, the keyboard couldn't work because it can't be big enough, and you don't really want to hand-write on something that's very small. So that's a case where you'd like to be able to talk to your computer. If you want to get your messages, you want to get to the phone and dial in and have the messages read to you and your voice be recognized.The biggest breakthrough in making computers fit into the world won't come just as the price keeps coming down or as they're connected up to higher speed; but rather in interacting with them, talking to them, listening to them, writing in a way they understand, or even having the computer see us through a digital camera.

And this is the most exciting work going on at Microsoft. We're spending several billion dollars a year in R&D, and part of it is this actual interaction, teaching the computer about language. We've been making progress on that. The computer has gone from being able to find spelling errors, now it can find grammar errors. Whenever you have a document, it can check your grammar and even make suggestions to you on how to improve those sentences. If you're working with these tools, it's pretty important that you take advantage of them because whenever you send someone else a document, the computer will check their grammar and so you can see their grammar mistakes very efficiently because the computer points it out for you. The increased intelligence of the software programs is very crucial to broadening this market. Twenty years ago people were very optimistic about getting computers to work in a more natural way. There have been demonstrations of computer speech recognition for a long time. And it turns out that if you train a computer to a particular speaker and you stick to a very small vocabulary, it's quite easy. But if you want to try and do what humans do, which is recognize lots and lots of speakers and a big vocabulary, it's extremely difficult. It turns out that speech is fairly ambiguous. If you just look at the waveforms of what people are saying to you, there are many different interpretations. Subconsciously you're taking the context of the conversation and deciding what the best choice is. Our speech recognition group likes to call themselves the Wreck A Nice Beach Group, because when you say wreck a nice beach, if you don't intentionally pause between the words, it sounds absolutely identical to recognize speech, and the way you tell the difference is you know whether it's a speech about beaches or about speech. And then without thinking about it, we know it. But if you want to talk to a computer and have it recognize speech, and it said wreck a nice beach, you'd laugh, you'd think what a stupid computer, even though it doesn't have any information to help it there. So you literally have to teach the computer context. It has to understand the common sense about the world that everyone knows. But with all of this incredible power, this is a factor that we're going to get. There is no doubt that we'll be able to do this.

One of the cooler aspects of this is teaching the computer to see. The cameras on the computers are getting very inexpensive, and you need them for video conferencing. The computer’s going to be able to see who you are and even see gestures that you make. If you want to record a document, you gesture like this; if you want to throw the document away, it will go and delete it. And it can even recognize different expressions, so if somebody sent you mail, the computer could not only send a return receipt, it could notify the person who sent the mail how you reacted to it. We've got a little bit of a video about some of this video recognition work we're doing, and so let's take a look from the researchers themselves about how they see this.

[Video presentation on a computer that recognizes and responds to gestures.]

MR. GATES:
As a technologist, I can say that the tools will be amazing. The way that we apply those tools will determine whether we receive the full potential. If you believe in these as much as I do, the idea of allowing everyone to have access becomes very, very important. Today we were over at the Detroit Library System opening up a center there with over forty computers that anyone will be able to come in and use the Internet. There will be a help desk there, and that help desk will be backed up by Microsoft so that we can make sure everything is running smoothly. This idea of using community efforts, using the libraries, the schools, community things like the Focus:HOPE here in Detroit, that's also doing a great work with computers to reach out and make sure the access is there, that's very important. Even as we improve these computers, we need to make sure that remains an incredible priority. The United States has been the country that has embraced computer technology more rapidly than any other country, and it's no coincidence that the U.S. economy has benefited from that and created more jobs than any other economy. There will be increasing competition here, and we want to make sure that we watch carefully the great work that will be done in Asia, India, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan; all of these countries are really focused on this computer revolution and their companies are investing very heavily. If we're smart about this, we can cooperate with them, the companies here will maintain a very strong position. So even though the last twenty years have been pretty amazing, I can stand here with great confidence and say the next twenty will be even more amazing, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this all turns out. Thank you.

MR. KARMANOS:
We have received a few questions. I tried to pick out some for you. First question is: What is your view regarding the most efficient use of computer-based technology to improve learning in public schools?

MR. GATES:
There are a lot of great experiments going on in terms of how you get the computer into the classroom setting and re-designing a curriculum to take advantage of it. I'm not just talking about math and science. I'm talking about history and English, music, all the things that kids learn. It's wonderful that people are trying different approaches because no one has the perfect answer here. The best results have come where people allocate enough money, not just to buy the hardware, but also to train the teachers, to get the new curriculum in, to connect the computers up so that they have access out to the Internet. The most ambitious programs have been where you give every student his or her own computer, it's called the schoolbook program. It's a portable computer they own and they take it home at night and they can use it, they bring it to all their classes. That's been tried out in over 50 different schools and it's very successful. Business Week had a write-up about that this week. Now that approach, we won't be able to apply that everywhere, and so the lab-based approach would be far more typical. think the interest would be in the sharing of different ideas. A neat thing is you can get everybody connected together. You get parents able to dial in and see what the homework assignments are; they can participate. Teachers can share with each other. Students can find other students, not just in their own schools, but around the world.

MR. KARMANOS:
What plans does Microsoft have to enter the hardware business, i.e., routers, switches, desktops? And another question people asked about was: Is Apple going to make it?

MR. GATES:
Microsoft has decided to stay away from the hardware business. You won't find us making PCs themselves or routers or switches or any of those things. We have great partners in the PC business, people like Compaq and Hewlett Packard, and many, many others, Gateway, Dell. And in the communications business, we have a partnership with Cisco, in particular. We work with all the companies to make sure our software and their communications hardware is going to work well together. The only type of hardware that we do is peripherals, that you can see outside the machine, that let you use the software in a better way. So we do a mouse, we do a joystick, we do a keyboard and we're looking at a couple of other things. The wildest thing that we've done is a Barney. I'm not kidding. We did a lot of a computer-controlled Barneys, where the kids could talk to it and it hears what they're saying and it sings to them. So if you're not bored with Barney it’s going to be a great product to have in your house. It's a creative use of software and not a case where we want to get into the main part of that business.

In terms of Apple, Apple is a company that's made incredible contributions to the world of personal computers. They took the Xerox graphic technology and put it in the first mass-market product, and Microsoft supported the Macintosh from day one. We were the only company there with software when it first came out. We have a lot of customers with Macintoshes and we continue to do more Macintosh software development than any other company. Apple has a real challenge. They have to regain people's confidence. They moved too slowly to improve their operating system. Even though they have been spending a lot of money on that work, they turned to an outside company and they bought that company to try to get their engineering back on track. We're very hopeful they will regain people's confidence and continue to be a healthy participant.

MR. KARMANOS:
Do PC users have a problem with the year 2000 that plagues the mainframe users? Is Microsoft addressing the problem?

MR. GATES:
PC software stores dates in a way that avoids the year 2000 problem. If you use an Excel spreadsheet or an Access database and deal with dates, they will do the date comparison properly for many thousands of years to come. Because the PC is newer, we can sort of anticipate, certainly in our recent releases, that that was necessary to do that right. The real problem here is software that was written a long time ago. And where you don't have the people who can go in easily and find the places where it's comparing dates, that's where the computer could get confused thinking that 00 means 1900 [not 2000]. I'm surprised at the figure that people throw around in terms of how much it's going to cost to fix this. For the PC industry, the good news is that a lot of those applications will be thrown out, and as people build new applications, they're going to use PC technology because PC technology gives you more hardware choices, more software choices, and has far better price performance than any other type of system.

MR. KARMANOS:
Bill, how do you keep up with the incredible pace of technology?

MR. GATES:
The easiest way to keep up is to stay in the lead. [Applause.] I take two weeks a year where I just go off and read the latest research reports and play with the latest work that's going on in Microsoft or universities. All my engineering executives are putting together material for me to read as I go off on those two weeks every six months. And at the end of it, I write several memos to people about where we should set our priorities and what the opportunities look like. Beyond that, I'm on the Internet at least an hour a day looking around seeing what's new out there, going to competitor sites and seeing what they're saying, going to partner sites and seeing what they're saying. Within the company, because we have electronic mail, if there's something interesting that's happening, I'll get a message where somebody says, "Hey, check out this site," and it has the address, and all I have to do is click on it, and then of course it comes up. If I think it's fascinating, then I can mail it out to other executives in the company. So we're all seeing a common pool of information. We have turned our library into an incredible resource. They're not just physically moving books around, but they are the experts of how you go out and find market research data, primarily using the Internet. If I don't have time to look into something, I just mail a request to them. It's incredible. They get back to me electronically within a few hours with all sorts of great things and data. It is very hard to stay up to date nowadays, but fortunately, there is a means, whether it's the PC or Windows. There are all sorts of options that most users don't have to think about. They're very safe, staying within the mainstream just benefiting from the incredible competition that's taking place there.

MR. KARMANOS:
This would be the last question: Can you please tell us more about your plans to launch satellites to speed up the Internet connections?

MR. GATES:
Okay. There are some exciting things going on. This project is one of them. It's called Teledesic, and it's actually not part of Microsoft. It's Craig McCaw, who founded McCaw Cellular and then sold that company to AT&T. He's an incredible visionary in the world of communications, and he came to me with this idea, putting up a lot of satellites. And what it will do is pretty important. Today when you connect up to the Internet, if you live in a big city, you can get a high-speed connection because they can run a wire to your business, ideally an optic fiber since that has the most capacity. But as soon as you get away from the big cities, even in the United States, you go to small cities, rural areas, it's not economic to connect everybody up. So what could happen is that this need for high-speed communications could put a further pressure on urbanization, which is a bad thing because you've got the crowding and all the problems there.

The idea of Teledesic is to launch 800 satellites, and these satellites would be designed so that one of them would always be above you and you could be sending data to it very easily. The satellites that stay in place over the Earth are up at about 26,000 miles. And that means that it's very expensive to send data up. You couldn't have in your house something to transmit data -- you could receive, which is easy, but transmitting is hard. Teledesic satellites will be only a thousand miles above the Earth, and so it's a lot easier to send the information -- the power required is proportional to the square of the distance. By having these satellites at a thousand miles, every part of the globe will be connected to the Internet with high speed. Africa will be connected, Asia will be connected, rural hospitals, rural schools. The system is fairly expensive to launch, about $8 billion. Once it's there, it can be used by anyone. When it's going over a developing country, the prices will be very, very low for this. So it's a complement to the fiber rings that are being put in by the phone companies and the cable companies in the very dense areas. And it's an example of all the different things that are going on. Now that we know the Internet is where the action is, the kind of entrepreneurial fervor that's been attracted there to make it better and cheaper and part of everyday life. Thank you very much.