Bill Gates Satellite Keynote to the
Bank Administration Institute's Retail Delivery '97 Conference
New Orleans
December 3, 1997

MR. GATES: Good morning. I’m sorry I can’t be there in person, but it’s great that through the use of technology I’ll have a chance this morning to talk about the opportunities we all have in this fast-changing Information Age. All of the key technologies that drive the Information Age are advancing at a pretty unbelievable rate: the hardware technology, the software technology and the communications technology that ties all these things together.

One vision that Microsoft has is that companies will be far more efficient in the future by adopting what we call a Digital Nervous System. Today, companies use a lot of different ways to move information inside their organization. There’s a lot of paperwork, phone calls, meetings. And now more and more of this is moving onto the personal computer connected up through the Internet. By reducing that paperwork and making information not only more available within the company, but also to partners and customers, and also available in an easier-to-understand fashion, companies can make better decisions.

This Digital Nervous System comes into play both for planned events like sales analysis, pricing planning, personnel review, and, perhaps even more importantly, in dealing with unplanned events--a customer who’s unhappy about something, a new regulation, or a move by a competitor. By getting the information to the people who need to have it very quickly, the quality of the decisions and speed of decisions can be far better.

Now, it’s reasonably straightforward how one goes about this. The most interesting thing is for each business to step back and think, how would they like information to move inside their company. How could they get rid of all the paperwork, and how could they empower people much better if the information was always where it was needed. I believe that that ideal can be achieved today with very inexpensive building blocks. The personal computer is part of it; the Internet is another key part of it. But also there is a cultural change, a move away from the paper world into the world of electronic mail and electronic forms. Some companies are making that transition today. And it’s very important to get everyone in the company involved. Unless you have all the employees, including the executives, reading their e-mail and using that as a primary means of communication, you don’t get the critical mass that then gets people being quite creative about how they can move things into this new digital environment.

The specific applications for business and for banks--there are many of those--are an important element of this. You want to make sure that sales information is easy to analyze--not in the way that it’s simply printed out, but by being able to dive into details and look at different trends and tie that in with the ability to send messages and create documents that talk about those business results.

The Digital Nervous System applies to all businesses. The difference between individual businesses will be how they use it to get out to their customers in new ways. In the banking industry, you know better than I there’s a lot going on right now. Fewer boundaries between products, an opportunity to broaden the offer and strengthen that customer relationship, a lot of consolidation taking place, a lot of looking at where are the costs, where are the revenues, more competition in terms of how various products are priced. It all really comes back to a customer relationship based on a brand, the trust and the breadth of services that can be brought together in an easy-to-use fashion.

Microsoft is an optimist that a Web presence is an important part of getting in front of these changes. Although today the percentage of the customer base that uses the Web as a primary interface is very small, we see that growing very rapidly. And it increasingly is a very interesting part of that customer base. In fact, we believe the right approach to your internal information systems can allow you to go out onto the Web with very low incremental costs. It’s not a case where you have to go off and create a separate set of systems. The way you use your existing systems to pool that information together for all your different channels can be used very effectively to build a state-of-the-art Web site.

So what is Microsoft’s role here? Time and again, people raise the question of are we going to take on some very broad role; are we going to have customer data or be doing financial transactions. The answer to that is no. We’re a software company. We believe that the software business is a great business, and we have a lot to do in our software world: making PCs simpler to use, making them easier to administer, bringing down the cost of ownership, and making them more natural--bringing in linguistic technology so you can just call up on the phone and ask questions, or you can make gestures, talk to your computer, or even type in natural language instead of dealing with the cryptic commands you have today. In the future, when you want to deal with the Web, you’ll simply say, what are the new movies that are nearby, or what are the Mexican restaurants. You won’t have to do anything other than simply speak out and the information will be brought to you.

So we have very advanced research activity and we invest several billion dollars a year in improving these building blocks that are at your disposal. The core products are, of course, Windows, Windows NT, Office and BackOffice. These are platforms that we use to go out to a broad set of partners who work to combine hardware and applications to create total solutions.

The PC industry is the competitive part of the computer industry. Because customers have a choice of different hardware solutions, the price performance is far better in this space than in any other part of the industry. The flexibility, the volume--it’s really been an amazing thing. And although it’s been good for the industry, particularly those who’ve embraced the PC, the big winner in the PC revolution has been the customer. Today, products that are quite powerful products are selling for even less than $1,000. And the ability to even take high-end applications and run them against PC technology is improving very rapidly.

Now, Microsoft does not do vertical solutions. When it comes to doing retail, branch banking packages or the variety of packages that banks need, we work with inside development groups in the banks as well as the industry solution providers. Our building blocks, like Microsoft Money and some tools we brought out recently that make it easy to build Web sites, are among the choices you have to move into these new areas and do it without major investments.

So what would a Digital Nervous System for banking look like? Well there are several key elements here. The first is to share all the information across all the different delivery channels. Instead of having stovepipes where you have different ways of gathering the information, we believe that whether it’s a branch interaction, a phone interaction, the Web interaction, an ATM interaction, all that customer data should come together with a common architecture. Now behind the scenes you’ve got your core processing systems. And although over time many of those will move down to use powerful PC technology, that’s going to be a very extended process. The solution that works today is one that allows those systems to stay in place and yet gathers the information from those different systems into a customer-oriented view so that when you’re working with that customer you can make great recommendations to them, even incorporating in new products that will become part of your strategy.

Pulling all that information together and presenting it in a rich way requires an architecture. So we worked with a number of companies in the industry to come up with a framework that makes this easy to do, a framework that allows the different applications packages to exchange information. This framework has a grand name. It’s the Windows DNA--Digital Network Architecture--for Financial Services. DNA is a general architecture that spans all industries, and it talks about how you do application development in this Internet-driven environment. We take that approach and we specialize it by creating working groups for particular industries. The financial service work has been the one that we’ve put the most effort into. The idea here is that if you have peripherals like check-processing machines, they plug in very easily. If you have specialized systems for new products, they plug in very easily. The idea is to make it seamless so that you have all these different pieces that come together to create that interface out to deliver the very best customer service.

This is an evolving architecture. And in fact, we’ve been very pleased with the response we’ve gotten from a lot of partners to moving in this direction. I’m listing here some of the companies who’ve helped with the definition so far. These are all companies that have products that tie in. We’re broadening this group even further with a series of workshops we’re having; the next one is in early February here at Microsoft headquarters. The idea is that you should be able to pick the best of breed of different software packages and not have to spend a lot of money doing the integration of these packages. Simply by defining what the packages are, you should be able to have all the information come together. I see this as a very, very key initiative to allow these information systems not only to be better, but also to be very low cost to assemble. Again, it’s an evolutionary approach. The Windows DNA approach reaches out to the mainframes and all of the important protocols that are there, as well as connecting up to the delivery systems, including all of the standard Internet protocols that are involved.

Microsoft has been working with banks in using personal computers in an incredible variety of ways. Obviously, they’re used inside banks to manage information--spreadsheets, databases, all the normal processes that go on inside the bank. We’re also very pleased with the specialized packages that have become available. I list a number of areas here; I won’t go through them all. One interesting thing we do is we use our Web site as a place to present great case studies. So you’ll see a fairly lengthy URL up there, a subsite of Microsoft.com, which is Industry/finserve, where we keep up to date a lot of case studies across all these different application areas and across different geographies.

So the opportunity to learn about how other banks are integrating PC technology and using packaged software more and more to build their delivery services--you can access that in very great depth, far more than I could go in today, by going up to the Web and digging into what goes on there.

When we talk about BackOffice, these are the database and mail and management services that let all of your servers work together. That’s not just the Windows servers, but also the Unix servers that you brought in in many cases, and the mainframe that will continue to be a core system for a very high percentage of banks for a long, long time to come.

We wanted to really illustrate some of the great progress here. One of the things we’ve done is we’ve created a contest for the very best packages that provide industry solutions. So at our booth there at the show, we have a lot of different finalists from our industry solutions award that are showing off the work that they’ve done. Later this week the award winners will be picked. This morning we’re going to show you three of those, and so I’d like to ask Mike Dusche, who manages banking applications for Microsoft, to go ahead and give you a real look at some of the wonderful things that have been achieved.

MIKE DUSCHE: Thanks Bill. We’ll be back to you shortly. And if things go well here, I’ll actually be allowed to return to Redmond eventually. So what we’re going to do this morning is have a little fun and show you some demonstrations of the technology that Bill’s been talking about. But let me say this: the robustness of this framework is best demonstrated by the people that you know and have been working with for years in your industry. So we’re going to ask that banks and independent software vendors themselves actually come up and do these demonstrations to show how they’re solving the problems that Bill’s talked about today.

(Demonstration by Key Bank and Siebold representative of a scalable in-house platform based on Windows NT and Internet Explorer.)

MIKE DUSCHE: Well you’ve just seen a variety of delivery channels that the banks use today to talk to their consumer, each scenario built on commonly available technologies like Microsoft Windows NT and Internet Explorer, each one connecting back through a robust server technology, using a data integration specification known as Open Financial Exchange, servers built on the Internet Finance Server toolkit that Microsoft released today, then connecting back to mainframe existing databases. And now Bill, we’ll return back to you.

BILL GATES: Thanks Mike. A key issue in all of this is the adoption of the Internet as part of people’s everyday activity. We talk about this as the Web Lifestyle. What we mean by that is people using the Web without even thinking that it’s unusual, the same way that you’d use the phone today to get access to information. Our proposition is not that banking alone will draw people into this, but that the breadth of things that are available there--whether it’s news, or a topic that’s a hobby of theirs, or electronic mail to stay in touch with friends, or just using the Internet for work activities where you can share documents and coordinate things far better than ever before.

This Web Lifestyle is a very broad thing. It’s fueled by the improvements in communication speeds; it’s fueled by the reduction in PC prices. Today we find that over 40 percent of U.S. homes have a computer, and the majority of those are now connected up to the Internet. That 40 percent number will grow over the next four years to over two-thirds of homes, and the vast majority of those machines will be Internet connected.

People will start to take for granted the idea that if they want to schedule an appointment with a doctor or they want to collaborate with a lawyer or share ideas about how to prepare their taxes they’ll be able to do that through the Internet. The more people who get connected up, the more that draws in other people to be connected. As you go around the show today and meet people and they hand out business cards, you’ll probably find about half of them have an electronic mail address. Well I would bet over the next couple of years that will go up very rapidly until virtually 100 percent of people will have an electronic mail address and it really will be something they use on a regular basis.

So the Web is becoming absolutely mainstream. If you survey people who are graduating from college in the United States, over 80 percent of them expect to use the Web for lots and lots of their activities, including their banking activities. The Internet is great news for banks, because it means that you have a way of reaching out to your customers with no one getting in between. You decide what’s on your Web site. You decide exactly what you want to offer to those customers. No one is in the middle collecting any of that data; it’s totally your relationship. Because of fantastic things like Moore’s Law that says that chips will get more powerful at exponential rates of improvements, you can know that this is simply going to get better and better. So it’s a low-cost way of reaching out to your customers. In fact, as the Internet grows in speed, you’ll be able to not only present screens of information to those customers, but also if they’re interested, somebody can come on the screen and talk to that customer or even present a video image which in many cases would be one way, from the bank to the customer, and not necessarily from the customer back to the bank.

So consumers are the big winners when it comes to the Internet. They’re going to have more choices in every area than they’ve ever had before. Think about buying books. Today there are six major resellers out there on the Web. People go out and can find from a very deep inventory; they can send mail to their friends to find out what’s important; they can see best-seller lists. It’s really streamlined book buying, and actually has grown the market. The people who are connected up in that way say they buy more books and give a lot more books than they would have if they hadn’t had that choice. So these customers that are on the Internet are going to be quite sophisticated.

The financial institution gets to control the platform and view this is as a full-service channel. It’s a channel that’s open 24 hours a day; it’s a channel that’s accessible anywhere you go. Not only will ATMs be available as Internet-type terminals, but over time, in hotel rooms and in any area where there’s pay phones, you’ll start to find public Internet terminals. Eventually people will have a smart card-type device that they just plug into that terminal, and immediately the information they care about--their mail, their schedule, their financial update--will all be there exactly in the format that they want to have it in. There’s really no geographic limitation in terms of how all of this is delivered.

In the case of the Internet, there’s a lot of hype around. A lot of people say that things will change overnight. I think in some ways that really hides the fact that things will change dramatically, but not overnight. Just the social diffusion of this as a way of working and people being comfortable with it means it will take more than the next five years to really get everybody involved. But it is being adopted far faster than any new technology ever has been. If you put the PC or the Internet up against things like TV or the phone, it’s really stunning, the rate of adoption is so incredibly fast. One thing I think people continue to underestimate is the ability to make these things easier to work with. The cryptic nature of the PC and the effort to manage files and things like that--we have plans within very few years to make a lot of that go away. Although underneath the covers it will still be fairly complex, that won’t be exposed out to the user.

Let’s check the status on where Web Lifestyle and banking are today in the United States. Most banks have Web sites. Very easy to put up a Web site, put out some information. But if you really dig into this and say, how many of those banks let customers come up, check their account balances and perform transactions, it’s a very, very small percentage of those bank Web sites. And a site that doesn’t let you do those things is a pretty limited site. Sure, you can talk about your products there, talk about what open job positions you have. You’re just not going to see people coming back again and again to a site like that. And you’re not presenting information that’s customer-specific. So you really haven’t entered Web banking until you’re setting up customized pages that relate to a particular user.

I think if we look at the brokerage industry, the usage there of really deep sites that offer a huge range of options has progressed more rapidly. The percentage of brokerage accounts in the country that are moving over to be Web-based is very high. There are 2.8 million of those accounts and they tend to be some of the more high activity accounts. Every advance here really draws the person in, even things as unusual as buying cars today. About 2 percent of the cars in the United States, the transaction is closed through the Internet. In about 15 percent of transactions, buyers say they’ve gone to the Internet to get key information like what is the dealer price on the car, what is an appropriate trade-in value, what are the various ratings on those cars. So they’re using that information to be a more informed buyer. This will spread out to many other types of transactions quite rapidly.

So I think that for banks today, there is an opportunity to get out in front and be a pioneer on these things. But if they wait too long, they will have missed an opportunity, and there will be a class of customer who will be disappointed not to have this as one of the ways of interacting with the bank.

Let me talk about bill presentment. It’s an area where Microsoft is doing work in a joint venture with First Data Corporation, and it’s also, I think, a key area for banks, because if you say, what’s going to get customers to come to your Web site on a very regular basis, I think bill presentment has got to be at the top of the list there. The ability to see your credit card charges, to see how your finances are lining up--that information can be presented in an easy-to-use fashion. Banks are involved with bills in many different ways. And since we formed the joint venture with FDC, we’ve put together an advisory board and we’ve gotten a lot of advice from banks about how we could be a back end that facilitates them doing more in this area. The retail bank has real interest in terms of bill presentment; the bank itself is a major biller; and then the wholesale bank, working with merchants and billers, provides a wide array of services.

We want to plug into each of these things and let the bank do the things that it’s good at, and yet get bill presentment to critical mass. This won’t work if people have to go to every different biller and see their Web site and interface in a different way. It won’t work if a low percentage of your bills are presented electronically. The only way that this really becomes a benefit is if it gets a very high percentage of the billers and a very high percentage of the banks involved. To do that, it actually requires some pretty rich technology and scale so that the costs can be brought down very dramatically. The user interface here is very straightforward. Any type of browser you have, you connect up. As you go to your bank Web site, one of your links is to see this list of bills. This site is completely branded by the bank. The bank chooses what kind of information they want to put up there. Then, when the user clicks in on the individual bill, that screen is controlled by the biller. They can use it to provide customer service, to provide promotion for other products, or they can actually sell some of that space as simply an advertising opportunity for other people who might be interested in their customers for different types of transactions.

How does all this work? Well, because of the advice from the advisory board and many other people we’ve gone out and talked to, the way that MSFDC works has been evolving. Here are some of the key facts about where we are on this. It’s an outsource bill presentment and processing service. You don’t see any of the MSFDC branding whatsoever. The data that’s created--the bank owns that for all its customers. So no other bank, no biller and no FDC rights are there to use the data in any way, shape or form. There is a direct site, an MSFDC site for bills only, simply to get the customers whose banks aren’t involved, give them a chance to go out and do the payments, because the billers want to be able to address a high percentage of their customers in the early days to make it worth getting involved in this. And this is a service where the bank is getting paid to present the bills. So it not only drives up your traffic; it lowers your costs in terms of processing the checks that are involved here, and there’s revenue that’s very directly associated with that Web site. It’s been one of the real problems banks have with a Web site; saying, what is the real business case here to justify making this investment. Bill presentment is one of many things we think you’ll see that will make that Web site become a significant profit center.

There’s a lot of work that the banking industry has done on privacy guidelines. We think those are very good in some ways. I think the industry will have to go even further in some of those things. This approach uses the current payment system, the ACH. There is a pay-anyone capability, but that’s only on bank sites. It’s only for bank customers coming through that bank site. We set up the architecture to make it very easy for banks to customize the interface, very easy for billers to customize the interface. And we’re working with a wide range of our solution providers to be able to step up and help banks and billers do this very rapidly and very inexpensively. So I think MSFDC will be one of the ways that bill presentment gets to that critical mass that’s very important.

Let me just recap some of the things I’ve mentioned today that are new: Windows DNA for financial services--that rolls up all the things we’ve been doing with financial companies and puts it in an overall framework. And so although we’ve been working with partners on that, this is the first time we’re talking about that publicly. We’ve got a new release of our Money product that is completely brandable by the bank. We’re also announcing today that we’re working with the gold interchange standard to try and align that so we have convergence between OFX that we and several other partners have put together as an interchange standard to make sure there isn’t a disconnect there between how those things work. And we’re also announcing a number of banks and billers who will be piloting our bill presentment technology early next year: Wells Fargo, Key Bank, Advanta. And billers--many, many major billers. In fact, getting billers signed up for this system has proven to be the easiest thing about getting it going. They’re very enthused because although they pay to have the service work, it’s far less expensive for them than the way that they’re managing bills today. And that marketing opportunity they get through the Web is actually quite a bit better than they get in a paper basis. If you take a customer who’s concerned about their bill and needs more information, electronic mail and the Web give that biller a chance to interact in a more expeditious fashion and in a way that the customer’s going to like a lot better.

So there’s a lot of opportunities that you have here: the opportunity to get out in front on the Internet and have people get at their financial information through the PC. I think this Web lifestyle is a very important trend. It’s not just a trend for young people; it’s not just a trend in the United States, although those are the places where we’ll see it first. This is a big shift that will affect entertainment and education and businesses of all types. Financial businesses, because they are so information-driven, will be among the first that need to pioneer these things, and that will just further the adoption of this approach. I think if you look at information flow inside the bank today, you can find that there’s a lot of ways to use the low cost PC technology to do that in a better fashion and to really empower your employees to allow them to feel even more involved and understand the business, and how your business is going to be the one that goes out there and improves customer service and seizes this opportunity to offer a broader range of products.

We’re very excited about all these changes taking place and look forward to working with all of you. Thank you.

THE MODERATOR ASKED QUESTIONS POSED BY MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE

QUESTION: We have heard repeated claims from Microsoft that it is in the business of enabling bank participation in the online world, yet strategies such as Microsoft Investor seem to be clearly positioning Microsoft operations in the realm of banking. The competitive battlefield of the present and future seems to be clearly defined. Your view, please, Bill.

BILL GATES: Well Microsoft is doing a wide variety of Web sites. We have Expedia that relates to travel; we’ve got CarPoint that relates to car buying. The investor site in particular is not a site where you can do any kinds of transactions. You can’t buy stocks; you can’t move money around in any way. It’s simply an informational site. So you can go in, get stock quotes, get some opinions about what’s going on with stocks. And it’s got a free portion in it and a paid-for portion. So it’s like a financial magazine up on the Web, although it does allow you to enter in your portfolio in there for track or be notified when certain things take place. Investor, like all the things we’re doing, is simply a case of reaching out and building something that we think customers will be interested in. I don’t believe in any way it overlaps what banks are looking at doing. The Investor site is focused on the United States because that’s where we thought we could do something interesting and worthwhile. We do have a number of banks who come in and use the promotional space as part of Investor to draw people over to their services. And so we see that as a very complementary thing.

Microsoft has put a lot of rich software behind that Investor site. Why has that site become so popular? It’s really about software. It’s the same thing that makes MSFDC attractive to us and got FDC to think of us as a good partner; we can build software that’s interesting there. All of that software is a platform that’s available to anybody who wants to use it under their brand name. So in the same way we took our travel platform and let people like American Express use that, all the software that’s there in the Investor site is available to people as well. I don’t think there’s anything about Investor that banks should view as overlapping what they want to do. We’re very sensitive to this. One key thing to understand is that the amount of business we do with banks, in terms of licensing Windows NT and Office and BackOffice--that business far exceeds any of the revenue we’re going to get from these Internet-related things. So we are highly motivated to make sure that banks view these as all very complementary. We think software business is a great business, a challenging business. If you look at the profitability of a leader in the software industry, that is clearly a business that one should stay very focused on, particularly when the research horizons demand that we really revolutionize the way that people interface with these things.

I think the banks are really beginning to understand this, although in the press there’s still sometimes a lot of controversy. When you really dig into the facts, I think you’ll find there’s nothing we’re doing that overlaps where financial institutions want to go. We’re here to listen and learn, but we’re going to provide software technology for the banks that are interested in it.

QUESTION: Several Internet banking systems currently under development are finding incompatibilities with Internet Explorer 4.0 and this has delayed rollout. What will Microsoft do to keep its future releases of products fully backward compatible with current PC systems?"

BILL GATES: The world of the Internet has done a very good job being driven by standards. These standards are controlled by neutral bodies like W3C and IETF. HTML, which is the key technology for Internet Explorer, is based on the W3C standards, and it passes all of their tests. There are some areas where there’s been ambiguity about how HTML works and what things go on. And because the Netscape browser is popular, there are cases where people did things that only work with a Netscape browser. Or it is possible to do things that only work with older versions of browsers. The industry as a whole and Microsoft in particular have to do a very good job about making sure these standards get more precisely defined and that the tests get more precisely defined. We are very interested. If somebody’s having a problem with how the browser works with their Web site, we’ve got a group that jumps right on that and is able to resolve those problems very quickly. So I’d like to follow up on the specifics as well as make the general point that the standards are here, we’re adhering to those standards. Because the standards are moving fast enough, you’re always going to find there are things on the edges that need a special dialogue. But overall, the Internet is all about being able to exchange information, so we pledge to follow all those standards bodies things in all the different products that we do.

QUESTION: Microsoft services, such as Expedia, Sidewalk, the Web and auto buying service, and now MSFDC, have very clear benefits to Microsoft and consumers. But it’s safe to say that these changes change the fundamentals of the market and scare the heck out of firms that compete in these industries. How can these firms compete? Should the firms pay to play with the companies that control access and navigation such as Microsoft or AOL? Or is it a realistic proposition for banks, airlines or others to build these types of services on their own?"

BILL GATES: In terms of building a branded presence, each company is going to have to take their brand and go out there and decide what it stands for and what services are delivered under that brand through the Internet. It’s a huge opportunity. It is important to note that MSFDC is different than many of the other things you mentioned. MSFDC--we’re not positioning that as a big brand. The vast majority of these transactions will be done where you don’t see the MSFDC brand. What you see is the bank’s brand and it’s simply the bank presenting that service. Whereas something like Expedia for travel information, travel booking, that is a brand that will be promoted and get out there.

People like AOL are in a position to capture eyeballs, and you can go and buy advertising so that people who come in through the AOL service are promoted to go to your Web site. It’s just another way of spending your advertising budget. You can have a print ad that’s got your URL in it, or you can have something with AOL where you direct traffic in your direction. Internet advertising today is fairly inexpensive, because there’s a lot of Web sites out there and the number of advertisers is still fairly few. And so getting lots of play out on the Internet is reasonably straightforward. There is no one who will ever have a choke hold or any control over this thing.

And technology providers like Microsoft--you should just use whatever building blocks are the best for you. We think we’ve got those. When you use our building blocks, in no way does that mean our brand shows through; it doesn’t mean we know who your customer names are or anything about that. It’s simply a tool that you’re choosing to use. In some of these new businesses, it’s not clear who’s got the right background. For example, in the case of bookselling, at first it looked like the specialized Internet company, Amazon, would be the leader, but now they’re seeing massive competition from Barnes & Noble and Borders, and many other people are coming into that arena. And those companies, because they have the physical presence and they have the larger volumes, they have certain advantages they bring to that game.

So all you can really say at the end of the day is that the Internet will be incredibly competitive. You have to pick what things you want to do and what kind of partnerships you form to go after doing those things. Certainly I think every bank needs to go out on its own with its own brand and its own Web site and have those transactions up there. There’s no need to do that any way but just having the bank build that up using the building blocks, but those are invisible to the customer.

MODERATOR: Thank you very much Bill. We really appreciate your being with us. Let’s have a nice round of applause for Bill Gates.