Remarks by Bill Gates
Microsoft Corporation
Nov. 16, 1997
Las Vegas, Nevada

MR. GATES: Good evening. When someone first told me that I was scheduled to give this speech on Sunday night, I was worried that nobody would come.

(Laughter.)

MR. GATES: But, I guess I've been in the news enough recently to attract a little attention.

(Laughter.)

MR. GATES: Well, the theme of what I want to talk about tonight is how great the PC has become, and how much greater it's going to be. I was thinking about all the reasons I love my PC, and I had to pick just a few and boil it down. And so I'm going to start with my top ten list of why I love my PC. The number ten reason why I love my PC.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: Has somebody done this before?

(Laughter.)

MR. GATES: The number 10 reason is, I love using Barney software with my 18-month-old daughter. Now, I constantly find myself humming Barney's song. In fact, I can't even say the word "computer" in my house, because if she hears me say it, she'll just start saying, 'puter, 'puter, 'puter, and she won't do anything until I take her and let her play with that. And that really is a lot of fun.

The number nine reason I love my PC is, every function in my new house is managed by the PC, and sometimes it works.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: I'm the only one who can get an NT error message when I try and flip on the light switch, so it gives me a lot of motivation to make things simpler. I have the house that deserves to have a little banner on the front saying, "Intel Inside."

(Laughter and applause.)

MR. GATES: The number eight reason I love my PC is, what other machine allows you to plug and play, embrace and extend, and link and embed. We have a lot of interesting terminology in this business. I think every three-letter acronym is being used, and we're well along the way to using up all the four-letter acronyms.

The number seven reason is, with electronic mail, anyone can send me their thoughts with the click of a button, and I get a lot of electronic mail. And it's every helpful to me to know what people are thinking about our products. It's a great way to stay in touch with what's going on. With electronic mail, you just -- immediately when you think something up, you can sit down and rattle off a message. In fact, my colleague Steve Ballmer, he's a great user of electronic mail. He's always coming up with ideas.

In fact, I have a little sample of email from Steve here, where he was so enthused, and his typing is not too good, so here's what it was. I've got the different version where we decoded. The reason we put spell checking into electronic mail, and now grammar checking, is to help Steve out so we can know exactly what he means when he sends us these messages.

Okay, the number six reason, I can program in any language I want. That means the PC is ecumenical. You don't have to get religious about COBOL or Fortran or C or Java, or whatever it is, you can use them all. In fact, people who use the programs don't even have to think about what it's written in. I expect in the years to come, there will be many great new languages. Java is a great language, one we support very well. But that doesn't mean that people have to rewrite or try to fit everything into a single solution.

Number five, and this is a real doozy. In just one weekend, I can sit at my PC, collaborate with attorneys all over the world, comment on a 48-page legal brief, and email it to the Department of Justice.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: There's a certain irony in using those Internet technologies that are built into Windows to build the case to defend those Internet technologies.

(Laughter and applause.)

MR. GATES: And it worked perfectly.

The number four reason, I can gather information on the Internet, so I make sure never to repeat myself in speeches. I think that's very, very important. In fact, I made a short little video clip that will show how careful I am about this:

[Video clip of Bill’s speeches in which he repeats his standard themes (again and again and again).]

[End of video.]

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: Okay. Now, for the third best reason, I do my best work using my laptop on the airplane, and I don't have to store a server under the seat in front of me. There's a lot to be said for portable computing.

Number two, the PC empowers everyone in the world to publish their ideas, opinions, and dreams of changing the world. And there are some great examples of that out there on the Web. Let's just go over here and see what we've got. Ah, yes, my favorite Web site, People Against Poodles. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. There's the poor little dog, cute pooch or ambassador of evil. And this is very sophisticated Web site. Why Pooh-pooh must die.

(Laughter.)

MR. GATES: Well, just about every opinion you can imagine is out there somewhere.

And, finally, the number one reason I love my PC, I can use Microsoft CarPoint to show Ralph Nader my Corvair collection.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: I haven't done that yet, but I'm sure looking forward to it.

The PC industry is different than any other industry. The volume, the openness, the innovation, it's really unequaled. In fact, comparisons are often done between this industry and others, and it's just stunning when you look at it. The price of a mid-sized auto, it's about double what it used to be. Cereal, I admit I don't buy that much cereal, but research shows that, too, has doubled in price. And if you take that and say, what would those prices be if it were like the PC industry, the car would cost about $27, and the cereal would cost about one cent. So, I think there's a lot to be learned by watching how this industry has done what it's done.

It's not just the impact on budgets for information technology. As these prices have come down, they've allowed these tools to be the central enabling factor for the information age. And, if anything, I think people are underestimating what that means for the decade ahead. Just look at some of the recent advances to catch a glimpse of this. A 300-megahertz Pentium II chip, that's quite phenomenal, and it's not just the speed of the single chip, it's the way those are put together, the way the software takes advantage of those in clusters that's driving our performance forward at more than the exponential improvement rate that Moore's law predicts.

Storage size--people want to keep videos, people want to keep their personal photos, and now we have 16 gigabyte drives that are just 3-1/2-inch drives, and so storage capacity would not be a limiting factor. In fact, in many cases, if we can predict what you're interested in, we can overcome bandwidth limitations by going out in advance and storing things on the disk that you might want to get. And then when you get to your PC and call it up, it's the speed of the hard disk rather than the speed of the communications link.

I think the advances in transferring technology will fundamentally change the way we think about reading material off of the screen. These new 20-inch LCDs, today they're very expensive, but certainly the trend line shows that those will be commonplace in a few years' time.

In the area of bandwidth, we've seen great advance now in ADSL. There are many flavors of DSL here, but this is a technology to watch. It's a way of using the existing twisted pair that the phone companies already have to businesses and residences, and getting anywhere between a megabit and six megabits of connectivity speed. And so, that's really fantastic. That, along with the cable modem trials, really will start to usher in an era where things like video clips on Web sites aren't just a novelty, but they come to be expected, and they make it a lot easier to work with the information. We've got DVD disks now. They're driving up the capacity. People who used to find CD-ROMs rather limiting, a lot of them are having to think, how do they take advantage of the extra capability that's there. And it's there without any increase in price.

I didn't put on this slide, but another great thing is the way that there are inexpensive PCs now that are very powerful. And that's growing the market. It's rather stunning the way even in these last six months we've seen it bring new buyers into the market, and get buyers to move up to the latest technology.

MR. GATES: Well, there's a theme about how all this technology will be used in businesses. The theme is digital nervous system. That companies will differentiate themselves, based on how effective they are at using these tools to make better decisions, decisions that relate to planned events, things like sales planning, or project scheduling, or unplanned events, things like a competitor doing something very well, or a customer who calls in and isn't satisfied with what's going on. By having all the information available, not just to the executives, but to everyone in the organization who needs it, and allowing people to collaborate, no matter where they're located, even bringing in partners who are outside the company, companies will do far better than they have in the past.

And we're already starting to see some wonderful examples of how this is taking place. And it's really extending itself throughout the organizations. I decided it would be fun to take a really impressive example. It's a little out of the mainstream. And I heard about some work that's going on in the U.S. Marines. And they agreed to come and talk about what they're doing. So I'd like to welcome out onto the stage, Major Jim Cummiskey, who is doing some great things with new technology.

So what kind of things are you doing with PCs?

MAJ. Cummiskey:It's a real pleasure to be here, Bill. I work for the Marine Corps’ tactical system support activity. We're located in beautiful, downtown Camp Pendleton, California. And we build tactical systems out there to keep Marines alive on the battlefield. Our customer is a pretty important guy. He's a sweaty, filthy Marine with a rifle, who is struggling to get to on top of a muddy hill somewhere. So we're pretty passionate about building that software right.

And we recently did a really large amphibious exercise, about 26,000 Marines and sailors, at Camp Pendleton. And we developed some off-the-shelf hardware-software solutions. I'd like to show you, if I may.

One of the maxims that Microsoft talks about is this concept of eating your own dog food. And we really like that concept in the Marine Corps. I think that resonates with us, primarily because of the quality of the food they feed us in the battlefield. It certainly looks like dog food, but it's fairly tasty.

All this gear I'm going to be showing you today is my gear, my personal gear. This is my notebook I use routinely, in my personal and professional life. This is my handheld PC I'll be showing you later. And we call these meals we get on the battlefield MREs, meals ready to eat. So it makes sense that we eat our own MREs.

This particular box, we put out on the battlefield in quantity. We had a wireless modem. We had land connectivity, a battalion Intranet, if you will. And we did some pretty cool things with it. This is a fairly typical box, but it's got a few differences. It's got a waterproof membrane over the keyboard, it's got a big hard disk, it's got a lot of memory, but there's one thing we really like about this, it really appeals and offers a lot of value to the U.S. Marines, and that's this.

(The Major throws the laptop across the stage and then walks over to it and stomps on it a few times).

Now you see, Bill, this is a pretty tough box. I wouldn't characterize it as Marine-proof, but it's clearly Marine-resistant. Now, this box here, when I turn it on here, and one of these days this isn't going to turn on, but as you can see, to those of you in the front, it is running.

So we come back over here, Bill, I'll show you how this particular box, and this -- hopefully you can see this out here, it's just a -- this is what we call an operation order. And what we use this for is to synchronize the battle at any particular time. And this is really important to us. So you'll be seeing this order later, on the handheld PC.

The handheld PC offers us an opportunity to push situational awareness information down, as far as possible. Marines call situation awareness, basically define it as, where we are, where the bad guys are, and where our buddies are. So we have some sense of what's going on in the battlefield geometry. And by pushing this critical information down, we give that Marine who's struggling to get on top of that hill a fighting chance.

So hopefully this will be on your monitors, out there in the audience. If we take a look here, again this is my own personal box, so hopefully I don't have anything too embarrassing on here. If I tap on my task bar down there, you'll see this same operation order which was transmitted wirelessly from the notebook computer to the palm top.

MR. GATES: So you're using the browser that we've got on here?

MAJ. Cummiskey:That's correct, just a typical Web browser, and it's got HTML, and the user can click on it, so he can click on task organization, jump down there, click on his task and see what his commander wants him to do. And this is really important, because typically our state of the art tools for pushing around these information orders are a pencil and a piece of paper. And stenography is not a prized battlefield skill. So this particular box allows us to wirelessly transmit this information, it really adds a lot of value.

An even cooler app here, if I bring this up, this is a battlefield map, a typical map that we used on this amphibious exercise. And as you can see here, the digital map is rendered on the screen, and I have two units already plotted there, a second platoon, and a third platoon. And let's say I just flew in, in a helicopter, I'm first platoon, and I land about a kilometer to the east. So I'm going to go ahead and plot that unit, and I'm a platoon. Click on next, I'm an infantry unit, so I'll go ahead and type my name. There we go. And as you can see here, I now have a representation of where I am.

And I can literally move this icon around, we can hook this up to a GPS and get this moving. And if I receive an operation order from my commander, basically something simple, like go north and try to find someone's butt to kick, we'll continue to move north, and all of a sudden, let's say all hell breaks loose. And I'm getting machine gun rounds, tracers, mortars falling around me. If I go ahead and then click where I think that enemy unit is, and since this is a Marine infantry platoon, let's make it fair, let's put them up against a battalion. And I'll make it a tank battalion, we'll make it real bad. And I'll call this the bad guys, click on go. So now you see I've represented that. And if I had a wireless connectivity solution between this palm top and another, or a higher level box, I could pass that information around.

Now, I want to take care of that problem, because that guy is causing me a problem. So I want to put some pain on him. I go ahead and click on top of that, and notice I get these concentric range rings that pop up, and my little indicator, where I touch the stylus to the screen pad here--if I go ahead and click on the unit, it changes into a range and bearing. And if I now drag to that unit, I can see that it's exactly 1,500 meters away on a bearing of 309 degrees. And that adds tremendous value, knowing where you are, knowing where the enemy is, and being able to call fire on him, to have him stop hurting you is really important to us.

And that's about it, Bill. This is the application we built, and it really proved valuable to us, to help those Marines get on top of those hills.

MR. GATES: What do you do to rugged-ize the handheld PC?

MAJ. Cummiskey:Well, that was a big concern to us. We had a real problem with water, of course. Marines typically come ashore from the sea. We were concerned about ruggedization. So we went out and we worked with a vendor to develop a case. It's pretty cool. It's camouflage. It's got a thermal blanket in there, to keep the palm top cold when it's warm, and vice versa. It's also waterproof. And more importantly, it comes with this nickel-metal hybrid battery. One of those things they don't tell you about the HPC, when you hook up a cell phone, with a cellular modem, and it's not designed specifically for that box, your battery life goes down to maybe 20-30 minutes. This gives you up to three hours, three to, actually, six hours, depending upon the brand of modem. So we really like this solution, and it did a lot of magic for us.

MR. GATES: What kind of new features are you going to put into the application in the future?

MAJ. Cummiskey: This particular machine is based on a 1.0 CE version. We're very excited about the 2.0 version. And again I would characterize this whole project as more of a prototype. But the CE 2.0 version is going to use the color of course, its going to use the Ethernet support that's built-in, the one to many infrared. You know whatever solution we adapt, it has to be mobile Bill. You don't go into the attack with coax cable hanging out your rear-end. You have to have a solution which allows you to move these critical packets to get those marines on top of those hills.

MAJ. GATES: Well, it's been great working together on this. And it's fun to see technology making it out to the front lines.

MAJ. Cummiskey:Thank you very much.

MR. GATES: Thanks a lot.

MR. GATES: An important part of the PC market is large companies buying systems to move information internally. But, it may surprise people to find out that the small businesses are actually a bigger part of the PC market than the large businesses. It's over double the size, with 70 million PCs in the installed base. And, in fact, it's quite a bit faster growing, because a lot of these businesses have not computerized yet. And so there's an opportunity to grow that installed base by a factor of three in the next five years.

Small businesses have very demanding requirements. You have to be a jack of all trades, and handle many, many things. And so the PC fits very well. It's pretty neat to see the work that's going on to tailor products for this segment. Microsoft has recently created a version of Windows NT Server, which we call small business server, and a version of our Office product, that are based on feedback we've gotten from small businesses about what they'd like to see.

One of the great stories I've heard about, was how a company called Pink Jeep was using PC technology. And so I asked Paul Giovanni, from Pink Jeep, to come on out and tell us what he's doing with personal computers. Hey, Paul.

MR. GIOVANNI:How are you doing, Bill. I thought it was appropriate, since the major showed up in his uniform, and he brought his ruggedized hardware, that we should bring an example of ours as well.

MR. GATES: It looks great. Tell me about Pink Jeep.

MR. GIOVANNI:Pink Jeep tours is the longest running Jeep tour company in the United States. Next year we'll be celebrating our 40th birthday. And we take people, such as yourself, out into the National Forest on some of the most beautiful off-road terrain you could ever imagine. It's really incredible.

MR. GATES: So how does technology fit into that?

MR. GIOVANNI:About five years ago we started with an IBM system 36 solution, to store reservations. It was a monochrome, green screen, just basically a glorified database, that we had to marry to a manual system of magnetic white board, which we put magnets on, which represented the tours, and then on those tours we put numbers, which represented people.

A few shortcomings of that were, being magnetic, and having people walking by all the time, sometimes our tours would come raining down to the ground. So we knew that there was a better way to do things. And the owner, Sean Wendell, said we'd hire a solution provider, to look at moving us to the PC. And marrying that graphical environment with the PC.

MR. GATES: And so the solution provider actually came in and learned about your business to build a custom program?

MR. GIOVANNI:That's correct. We hired Bob Maxie from software innovations in Flagstaff. And he learned the business rules, the logic of the business. And he incorporated that into a PC solution that we have over here. And I'd like to show it to you.

MR. GATES: Good.

MR. GIOVANNI:What we have here is an electronic representation of our magnetic white board. On the left-hand side, you can see our drivers that are scheduled for the day, as well as the Jeep number that they're assigned to. Across the top, we have the hours of the day, starting at 7:00 a.m., and ending at 7:00 p.m. And all this nice colorful stuff in the middle of the screen is the tours that are going out today.

The pink tour represents our most popular tour, which is the Broken Arrow Tour. On that tour you can see, because of the graphical representation, a tour number, numbers in the middle, which represent parties on that tour. So there are actually three parties of two people, which is important to our drivers, because that represents three opportunities to get a tip.

MR. GATES: Good deal. It looks like you're pretty busy.

MR. GIOVANNI:We are busy. The nice thing about a solution like this is that, for one, when you bump the monitor, the tours don't come raining down to the floor. However, it does give you the flexibility of moving tours around, and rescheduling just based on a whim, or whatever you need schedule for that given day, or you can go back to the logic that's built into the program, and have it do it for you.

This has helped us in a lot of different ways. It's cut down on the number of errors. It's allowed us to book our tours more completely, which is important for a company like ours, because we have a certain allotment of tours per year. So the only way to really maximize revenues was to book the tours out more completely.

MR. GATES: Has it been more efficient?

MR. GIOVANNI:Absolutely. We can book now approximately twice as many tours with half the reservation staff. And we've taken the time to book a tour down from four minutes, to under a minute. And it also has allowed us to take some of the reservations that we're finding in a new avenue, which is the World Wide Web, and incorporate those into our application.

We hired another solution provider to help us get on the Internet. This is our Web site, which is only five days old. It's just now come up. We hired Canyon Webworks out of Flagstaff to help us design the Web. And what we've been able to do is show people about our company, who we are, what we do. So, as a customer, you can now get on the World Wide Web, and you can see what kind of tours we offer. You can take a virtual tour, you can read about what our tours are about, how much they are, and when you find something that's interesting to you, you can go back and go ahead and send us a reservation on line.

Entering the appropriate information in, choosing the tour that you want to go out on, how many people are you going to bring with you today, sending that to us via the Internet--we receive that on email and respond via email or a telephone call, just to confirm your reservation.

MR. GATES: Well, it looks like a super way to grow your business. I know as a small businessperson it's tough to be out of the office. And I really appreciate your taking the time to come show all of that.

MR. GIOVANNI:No problem, Bill, it's my pleasure. It looks like my Jeep's leaving without me.

MR. GATES: Not only do we have small businesses and big businesses using the technology. But, we have more and more individuals adopting what I'll call this Web lifestyle. The basic idea is that eventually we'll think about the Web the same way we think of our telephone today, or our television set. We'll just take it for granted. And during the course of the day, we'll go there to get information, we'll stay in touch with our friends, we'll organize things, we'll pursue our hobbies, and the Web will just, in a very seamless way be a very big part of that.

I think, over the next decade, the majority of Americans will be involved with this. There's a lot of critical mass that's being developed month-by-month to make that come true. An interesting story I heard as I was putting this speech together is that Kareem Abdul Jabbar just recently started using the PC. And so I thought it would be fun if we have him to come and hear a little bit about his experiences, and what he's excited about. So, let's welcome one of the greats, Kareem Abdul Jabbar to come on out.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: I see you've got a little mouse pad there.

MR. JABBAR:I had to get it up to eye level.

(Laughter.)

MR. JABBAR:Well, this is my new Web site, and as you know, I'm a new user, When the clocks changed from daylight to standard time, I had to call my son to change the clocks in the house, that's how digital I was. So this was all new to me. But, I could see the advantages in terms of getting things done really quite astounding, and I'm now a new user.

MR. GATES: That's great. Now, tell us a little bit about this Web site.

MR. JABBAR:Okay. This is --

(Laughter.)

MR. JABBAR:Why is everybody laughing about it?

(Laughter.)

MR. JABBAR:Of course, you would know a lot more about this than I would, but this is a Web site, it shows a little bit about my life. We'll click up here -- better click up here. There we go. And it gives you different aspects of my life, what I'm doing now, what I've done, what my new interests are. The biography section, for example, will explain what's been going on.

MR. GATES: Just click it again.

(Laughter.)

MR. GATES: There you go.

MR. JABBAR:There we go. It won't scroll for me, what's going on here?

(Laughter and applause.)

MR. GATES: This is a case where being short is definitely an advantage.

MR. JABBAR:Some embarrassing pictures from my past here. Me playing baseball, me and my dad, and different stats, and other things that I've done in my career, my acting career and, of course, my professional basketball career.

Let's try some activities here, please.

(Laughter and applause.)

MR. JABBAR:So, recently I've been involved -- I did a lot of touring throughout the world coaching, speaking on the importance of education, during Black History Month I was very active. I just did a history book.

MR. GATES: Tell us about the book you did.

MR. JABBAR:Well, it's a book on Black American history, and you can -- it's actually got a hookup to Barnes and Noble through Internet. And that's -- there we go. And there's my book, finally.

(Applause.)

MR. JABBAR:As you can see down at the bottom of the page, we're connected with Barnes and Noble, and it just came out in paperback last month. So I'm very happy about it. It's been picked up by a number of school systems as supplemental reading for the history courses, and I'm very proud and happy about that.

MR. GATES: That's a great accomplishment.

(Applause.)

MR. JABBAR:And last, personal activities I've been involved in. I'm a historian and, as I mentioned about my history book, you can see some of the things that are important to me in my collection. I've got them illuminated here. These are artifacts and equipment from the black buffalo soldiers that helped tame the American West. I have uniforms, equipment, paperwork, you name it. And I was very happy to have these items, and they're very special to me.

MR. GATES: Well, that's great you can share them with the students everywhere out on the Web. One of the things I noticed is, down in your personal interest section it talked about you're a big jazz fan.

MR. JABBAR:Absolutely.

MR. GATES: And it's kind of interesting, I guess more and more we can go out and find jazz things out on the Web.

MR. JABBAR:Yeah, actually you can sample stuff from different CDs, you can download it and record it.

MR. GATES: Yeah, I've seen -- let's go off to Liquid Audio and show people what that looks like there. Great, which is that -- Hancock?

MR. JABBAR:Yeah, Herbie Hancock, yes.

MR. GATES: Okay. I'll get that down here, try one of these.

Of course, you're already able to listen to these things, but one of the neat new things is that instead of buying a CD and having somebody send it to you, now people are setting up so you can just download it right away. That's a big new thing that I think is going to be a lot of fun.

And we have an example of that hooked up here. You can just go out to Liquid Audio and do the download of one of Kareem's favorites here, and when you see it up here, it remembers that you've been here before, and so you can just click, and it processes the order. We're actually not going to do the download because it takes a few minutes to do, but we actually have the CD here that was downloaded earlier, and they're going ahead and playing it.

But one of the great things is, once you record the CD, it's actually ready to be used in your boom box, any normal sort of CD player is ready to go. And there it is at very high quality.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: One thing I was curious about, Kareem, what kind of things as a new user have you found frustrating?

MR. JABBAR:For me, the only frustrating thing is that I can't get the information quick enough. When you find something that you're interested in, it takes a moment. But also is involved, as a new user, for me, is learning the logic of how things are dispersed, and that's a big stumbling block. You don't understand every logical sequence because logic for me is not logic for you sometimes.

(Laughter.)

MR. GATES: Well, I think your logic is the one that we should conform to. And we have a lot of work to do, both to make it faster and make it simpler, but we'll work on that and make it even better.

MR. JABBAR:Great.

MR. GATES: Well, thanks a lot for coming.

MR. JABBAR:My pleasure. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: Kareem mentioned the problem of connectivity speeds, and there's a lot happening there, putting high speed links into the home. Even now, moving from just the PC being connected to the interactive network to having many of your devices in the home, having a TV with a next generation set-top box, having handheld devices you can carry around the home that all your information is easily accessible on, the Internet, your schedule, sending messages around. It's kind of wild how all these devices are rolling out for the home.

MR. GATES: Microsoft has three big initiatives that span all of our products. The first continues to be the Internet, and advancing the standards there. The second is scalability, making sure we have all the pieces, not just performance, but all the tools, the applications, to move up and take on the most demanding applications. Finally, and I'd say the most important is the initiative we call simplicity. That's got a lot of aspects. We're really going back and thinking through the scenarios, and how can we hide some of what is underneath the system more, using the power of the system.

One really interesting exercise we did recently is this: we took all the error messages you can get in Windows NT, and we thought, hmmm, do people understand these. Here's a good one: "The DHCP client could not obtain an IP address; if you want to see the DHCP message in the future choose yes, otherwise choose no." Now, that could be confusing to somebody.

(Laughter.)

MR. GATES: They might not know what to click or whether something really serious went wrong. So, we need to take each one of those and make sure that they don't happen. And in the cases where they need to, make sure it's clear what comes next.

Now, the next major upgrade of Windows NT 5 will be a very major milestone for us. It's not just the application architecture, the directory architecture, the security architecture, but, most important, it's the things that we've done in driving forward lower cost of ownership. That's a big part of the simplicity campaign.

Part of it is a breakthrough we call IntelliMirror, of taking all the states that you've got on your PC and making sure that it's also replicated up to the server. It's really the best of both worlds, the best of the world where the data is in the center and is backed up, can be administered very well; and the best of the PC world where the data is rapidly available, totally compatible with what you've done in the past, and you can go mobile. You're not dependent on the network. But whenever you connect up, that replication takes place.

It has a lot of implication for roaming, for new machines. In fact, I thought I'd real quickly give you a little NT 5 demo. This is new software, so we'll see how it goes. But I'm going to ask Chris Capossela to come on up and help us take a look at this.

MR. CAPOSSELA:We have two demos to take a look at tonight to show you some of the benefits of IntelliMirror in NT 5. The first one is how easy IntelliMirror makes it to replace your PC if it's broken or you're ready to upgrade. So we're looking at a Windows NT 5.0 Workstation, which is my machine, and we also have a Windows NT 5.0 server down here that this is connected up to. I obviously use my PC all the time, so it's really customized to my liking.

I'm going to quickly customize this machine. I'll right click and choose to view my desktop as a Web page. And, of course, IE 4 is included in NT 5.0, and we'll see that the desktop is going to change for us to show us the Web page in a moment.

I'm going to go ahead and click on my documents here, and up comes an empty my documents window, so let's go ahead and right click, choose new, and choose to create a new text file. And I'll just type in Comdex, and I'll click on that to launch notepad, and I'll say "leaving Las Vegas." And I'll go ahead and save that, close it down, save the changes, yes. And I'll close my document.

So what I've done here is to quickly customize the desktop, and I've just changed it from that other background to this one, and I added a document to my documents. I'm done for the day. I've done a lot of work here. So, I'm going to go ahead and shut the machine down.

And when I go home and come in the next day, I realize that my IT administrator has decided it's time for me to get a brand new machine. It's pretty exciting for me. So, I'm going to reach down here and pick up our brand new machine. This is a NetPC. Actually, it doesn't look like I have a brand-new machine. It looks like my old machine crashed. So, it's time for me get a brand new on here. So, let's go ahead and unplug the power. And we're just going to swap these machines out. I'm going to replace the net card.

MR. GATES: So this machine has a completely empty hard disk. There's nothing that's been installed in here. It's just a totally new machine.

MR. CAPOSSELA:That is exactly right. We're taking a brand new machine, and we're going to just switch all the cables. And your screen obviously has gone dead. But, once I get these plugged back in, which can be a tricky proposition -- there we go. I'll plug the power back in. And now let's power this up, right there.

In a few moments, we should see that this machine starts to boot up. It's a NetPC, so it's a completely sealed case design. There's no floppy disk, there's no CD at all. It's got a built-in net card that supports a remote boot. Which means that now, when I turn this on, it can go out over the network and the administrator has changed this computer's unique ID, the old one, and remapped it to this new one in the Active Directory for Windows NT 5. So this machine is going to broadcast that unique ID. The active directory is going to be able to see what operating system I want to run.

So you can see on the screen, hopefully, that it's starting to load NT 5.0 Workstation on my new machine. So, we're going to let this sort of cook for a little while. We're going to do the Julia Child thing --

And we're going to head over to this side, give that some time to download the OS, and now we're going to take a look at how NT 5 and IntelliMirror makes it very easy for administrators to administer applications. Now, Bill, let me know if this gets a little to technical for you, and I can try to bring things down a little.

What we're looking at right here on our screens is my Windows NT client. I'm running NT 5.0 Workstation on this machine. And, again, we have a separate machine that's running Window NT Server. I’m going to go ahead and switch over to the server. There it is, you can see it on all your screens. And here we're looking at the Microsoft management console, which is a common user interface to manage all your different administrative tasks in Windows NT 5. So, you'll see in my app domain of my company, I've been able to structure our app domain in the same hierarchy that our organization exists in.

So, we've got a marketing folder right here, and below that we have Windows marketing, we can have Office marketing, et cetera, et cetera. This means that the administrator can really control the things that they roll out to just the set of people that they want, everyone in marketing, or people just in a particular area.

So, let's take a look at what this looks at. I'm going to come down to our marketing policy. We use our policies to roll things out to our users. I'm going to right click and choose "add." And here I can go ahead and add this new application, which is named "Red." Now, this is going to go through building this distribution server up on the server so we can do a server-side install. So, it's taking this application, be it Excel or in this case just a very simple little one, "Red," and it's putting it out in this policy.

The default here is to just publish this to users, so that it shows up in their control panel as something that they can add if they wish. But, if I am a little more aggressive as an IT manager, I can come in here and change this deployment option to assign. I'll go ahead and hit okay.

MR. GATES: So publish means it's easily available, they see it on the list of programs. But assign, it just gets put on their machine automatically?

MR. CAPOSSELA:Exactly. So, let's see that. I'm going to switch back over to the client. There it is. And now, if I go to the start menu and choose program, you'll see that "Red" is not in here. That's because we need to log off. I'm going to log off. And in a moment here, I'll hit control-alt-delete, and I'll log back on. Now, when I log back on, this machine goes out to the Windows NT Server Active Directory and pulls down all the information that we need to build that start menu. And when we're done logging on, and I go to start, programs, sure enough, there's "Red."

Now, what's interesting about this, of course, is that when I do this for the first time, it's going to see that "Red" isn't installed on this machine. So, it's going to go up to the distribution server, run that install, and run "Red" for us. The admin set this up so that I don't have to answer a single question. I don't answer where I want this application to live. I don't answer anything. It just figures out that the bits aren't there, puts them there, and runs the app for me.

MR. GATES: It's a great application.

MR. CAPOSSELA:It's pretty high-powered.

(Applause.)

MR. CAPOSSELA:Now, it’s kind of hard to show that I'm installing this on this machine, but this will follow me no matter where I go in the organization. So, if you're out giving a speech and sneak into your office and I log on to your machine as me, again, I'm going to see "Red" right there, and as soon as I choose this for the first time, "Red" gets installed. So it really follows me around.

MR. GATES: What about the case where we want to upgrade that product?

MR. CAPOSSELA:Let's switch back over to the server. Now, we've got a new version of this application. It's not enough to just manage the rolling out of it. We want to manage removing it, upgrading it, every piece of it. I'm going to right click and choose upgrade. And let's now point to the Version 2 folder, choose "Red" once again, and again we'll go through the process of building the distribution server and creating that site up on the server to install this application from.

Now I, as a user, on my machine, don't really have to do anything. The administrator has upgraded this for me. And if I switch back over to the client, let's close "Red" down. When I go ahead and choose program "Red," I'm going to close that down, it runs the old one because it hasn't gone out to the server to see that there's a new one yet. Let's log off. … And when I log back on, try that again, it goes out to active directory, figures out there are new bits there for us. I click on Start, Programs, and I'll choose "Red." Again, it sees that there are new bits out there. It just does the install for me seamlessly. And it's going to run this high-powered new version of it.

Now, one of the things that we find users do often without meaning to is to delete files on their machine, because they're trying to, let's say, free up some disk space. So I'm going to open up program files, and this colorful folder contains those red files. I'm going to choose to right click on that and choose delete. I'm going to send that all to the recycle bin. Okay. It's running, let's close it down. It's hard to delete those files when they're being executed.

Okay. Now, that's gone, and if I come back down here to the start menu, I'll choose "Red" again, and rather than giving us a series of dialogues saying we're missing some DLLs or whatever, it realizes and it heals itself. It goes out, gets the new bits, and "Red" is running again.

MR. GATES: Looks good.

I hope this other machine didn't overcook here.

MR. CAPOSSELA:Yes, we left it for a while, didn't we? Well, now here we are, Windows NT 5 has come down on this machine, it's asking us to log in. So I'm going to log in. We have the operating system on here, but now it sees who I am, and it's going to go out and it should get my data, and it should get all my customized settings. One of the things that's really hard today is when you upgrade to a new machine you lose all those little tiny settings that you've made, things like the words you've added to a spell checker, or your home page, or how you reply to email. Those all go away, and it's not until you're back up and running that you realize, oh, I've got to reset this again, I've got to reset this again.

So let's take a look here, you'll see that we're done logging in. And there's the background that we had changed to. I'm going to open up my document, and sure enough, there's the Comdex file, and in just a few minutes we've gone from a completely blank machine, to back up and running with all our data and all our settings.

MR. GATES: That's very nice. IntelliMirror really is something we're very enthusiastic about. In fact, we'll have it out in hands for beta testing early next year, to make sure we get the feedback for the final shipment of Windows NT 5. The concept here is that the greatest ally we have in simplifying computing is to use the network, to make sure the support, the advice, the right files, the updates--that those just come automatically across the network.

And so you don't have to think about upgrading your operating system, or upgrading your applications. And if you're ever confused, you just have the network out there to help you out. It's a concept of managing things so that they're always up and running, just like you would think of a utility being there with extremely high reliability. We need high-speed connectivity to do this.

Now, in the enterprise base we have it today, because there are already very good, high-speed local area networks. We're also extending this concept out to other devices, products like WebTV. Every few months when you dial in, it will ask you if you want to upgrade to the latest software. And if you say yes, and give it a few minutes, you'll have new features available to you on that device.

Part of the beauty of it is that it logs everything that you have a problem with. So when you dial in we have a complete record, and so we can make sure we're very active in helping out with any concerns that come up there. And that's partly why the support costs of that device are very, very low. And the same will be true on this future PC.

I talked about some recent advances that really have me excited. Here are some that are literally within the next few years. Speech recognition. A big, big breakthrough. The ability to dial in and get your electronic mail, to give commands verbally, to do dictation, we're just now getting enough processor speed and enough memory, along with the right software, to start bringing this into the mainstream interface. Now, we're starting to get handheld devices that have that wireless connection, so they can be part of our information activity.

We're starting to see digital TVs, which won't just be higher resolution and more channels. It will also be interactive. If you're watching an educational show and you want to download some things, it will be right there. If you want more information on something on the screen, whether it's sports or a music album, or even an advertisement that intrigues you, you'll be able to get that simply by clicking on your remote control.

The advances here are all moving us towards the vision of digital nervous system and Web lifestyle. And these are profound changes. These are important changes that bring a lot of issues with them. My belief is that the PC industry is not just an industry that's fast moving and full of opportunities. It's one that's bringing many, many positive changes.

And everyone who participates in the PC industry, including all of you here, should be very proud what we're building here. The most amazing thing of all is, we're just at the beginning. So there are a lot more great things to come.

Thank you.

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