Remarks by Bill Gates
Tuesday, March 18, 1997
Seattle, WA

Announcer: From Seattle Washington, it's Microsoft Developer Days, the largest software developer event in history. Microsoft welcomes over 45,000 attendees from 90 locations representing 46 countries around the world. Developer Days features the latest information on key Microsoft developer tools and technologies collectively in your local area. Now to kick off this day-long event, the chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates.

[Applause.]

BILL GATES:

Good morning. It's very exciting for us, not only to have the biggest group of developers gathered that we've ever had, but also to be introducing the most exciting advance in developer tools that Microsoft has ever made. Our commitment to developers goes back to the very beginning of the company. One of our key strategies has always been to provide tools that allow developers to take full advantage of the latest computing platform.

In the beginning, that was the Altair microcomputer. A very limited machine by today's standards, but Paul Allen and I saw that with the magic of Moore's law [the doubling of computing power every 18 months], this machine would turn into something quite incredible. A tool that would redefine the way that people think about information. And so our slogan from the very beginning was "a computer on every desk and in every home." We knew that to achieve that, we needed lots and lots of applications. And our Basic interpreter was the first product that let people build on the machine.

A major milestone was the transition to 16-bit computing, kicked off by the introduction of the IBM PC. This was the first machine with Microsoft® MS-DOS®. We also brought out a wide range of tools that allowed thousands of developers to get into business.

Up until this time the software industry had been quite small. There simply were not enough machines out there to justify writing a wide range of applications. But as the PC took off, it made sense for lots and lots of new startups to come into business, and the variety of applications was soon quite amazing, even to us.

The next big milestone was the move to the Windows graphical interface. And this required developers to make a lot of changes in their applications--the sort of mode-less interface, including the mouse and rich graphics -- was a huge opportunity to redefine the way that people interacted with the machine. And this changed applications of all types. But the key to it was building tools that would make that easy.

We moved from our Quick tools, our Quick languages that had been very, very popular, to the Visual tools to herald the arrival of the graphical interface. Well, today the products that we're introducing, which we call Visual Studio™, a family of products, is aimed at making it very, very easy to take advantage of the Internet…to take advantage of the fact that computers are now connected together. This is ushering in new opportunities. In fact businesses of all types are seeing that they can move information inside their company in a very different way and also reach out to their customers and suppliers in a new way.

It's not an exaggeration to say that companies that take advantage of this would get the lead and have a huge competitive edge over companies that continue to do business the way it’s done today. Our tools are being provided to allow application developers to help those companies seize that opportunity. If you go back five years ago, people were talking a lot about connecting machines together. They were talking about how the computer was more than just computation. But it wasn't clear when we would get a critical mass of standards to really let all these machines work together. So the arrival of the Internet is nothing but good news.

It's now very clear how local networks and wide-area networks will use a common protocol and how security standards and process control standards will be built on top of that. For everyone in the software business this means we have to step back and take the work we've done already and change it to apply to the Internet. And so this has become a major theme for all Microsoft activities, whether it's Windows® or Microsoft Office or Windows NT® or BackOffice™. The majority of the enhancements we're making are to build in new Internet capabilities. For developers this means increasing demand for new applications and more powerful versions of existing applications.

A key product for Microsoft is Windows NT. This product was based on a vision of giving people the best of UNIX, with its rich power; the best of Windows, with its wide range of applications and graphical interface; and the best of NetWare, with its high-speed file sharing. It was the only new commercial operating system written from scratch in the last decade. Because of that, we were able to do some very, very rich things in building the technology. And it's been very gratifying to see how this technology has caught on. The support we've had from hardware developers and from application developers has been really key to Windows NT now being the mainstream product for server applications. It has been adopted very, very widely for building new applications in every country around the world and in every industry.

The applications that are available are quite wide ranging: integrated messaging, applications that deal with distributed data, applications that build on the graphical foundation that Windows has always been known for. Now, one of the big things we're doing is driving up the scalability of this system. It's a major priority for us, and we've made incredible progress. For example, on database benchmarks we've gone from 600 transactions up to over 6,000 transactions a minute in the last few years. We expect that rate of improvement, which is pretty amazing, to continue over to the next several years. Part of this, of course, is the faster chips with the much higher clock speeds. Another major factor is the adopting of multiprocessor machines for the server. It's very typical now to have two or even four processors in a server machine, and many of the PC manufacturers provide those machines on an off-the-shelf basis. So they're very, very attractively priced. We see during the next year that that will move up to even an eight-processor level, and you'll get the full power of all those processors--linear improvement based on adding those extra processors.

Another major technique that we're applying with Windows NT is the idea of clustering. Now, clustering gives you two huge benefits. One is the fault tolerance of having multiple servers available, so that if one of those servers goes down, the other server is there to continue on without the users noticing any problem whatsoever. Another benefit with clustering is scalability, the ability to harness the multiple machines and split the problem so that all of those machines are contributing to incredible performance.

And with this capability we'll be able to take on the most demanding applications in the world. In fact, Windows NT is already the highest performance platform for file sharing and Web sharing, and it's only in database applications that we need clustering to move to the front in absolute performance.

Now, one of the great partners that Microsoft has had in working with Windows NT and taking advantage of it has been SAP. And this was a major thing for us, because SAP previously had done all of their work up on the mainframe. I've asked Gerhard Rodé, who is a board member at SAP, to join us today and talk with me a little bit about the experience they've had with Windows NT.

[Applause.]

BILL GATES: Welcome, Gerhard.

BILL GATES: We've been working together since 1993 to get R/3 onto Windows NT. I'm curious how you feel that that work together has gone?

BILL GATES: That's incredible. I understand we've got a tape that shows a customer who actually takes advantage of R/3.

GERHARD RODE:Yes, in fact it is now one of 2,500 customers who have chosen Windows NT as a platform. What is even more important if you look back at the last 12 months -- there are more than 40 percent of the new customers have chosen Windows NT.

BILL GATES: That's fantastic. Let's see what the customer’s experience is like.

GERHARD RODE:Okay, let's see the video.

[Customer video shows a furniture manufacturer that uses Microsoft and SAP technology to deliver specialized furniture for technology markets overnight rather than in six to eight weeks.]

Video: Anthro Furniture manufactures technology furniture targeted to users of computers, instrumentation, video production, and biomedical equipment.

When a customer calls and places an order, it will immediately be entered into the system, and as people both outside and inside the organization are collecting that data they immediately want to react on that--they want to manufacture the components that are necessary. We'll do that overnight so that in the morning time we can have the product ready to be put in a box and shipped to that customer.

It's real fast-paced. It's not wait six to eight weeks for delivery; it's tomorrow. So you've got to keep communication real fast and our processes have to happen now.

SAP, even though it was much larger than our company normally might need, came up as one that we definitely ought to investigate. The more we looked at it, the more we liked it. It had the flexibility and especially the integration that was going to really help us out. As we got into the process, we said that we had certain pricing objectives we had to meet. We had to look at alternatives, and at that time there were a hugely increasing number of Windows NT installations with SAP, and it was very difficult for us to ignore.

We wanted only one operating system to support. We didn't want to support UNIX in the back and Windows NT on the front, and it made sense that, for a small company, we needed just one operating system. With the SAP Mail, they're going to run their workflow through that mail system, but we had already standardized on Microsoft Exchange mail. While SAP Mail works great for workflow, and because we intend to use SAP workflow a lot, that made it a very natural fit for us to say, "Well, Windows NT is the way to go because then we could run Microsoft Exchange and we'll have all the integration that we think we would need in the future."

[End of video.]

BILL GATES: Interesting that that was a small business that was using SAP. I know you've done super well with the large customers. Are you also seeing a lot of success now with large ones?

GERHARD RODE:Yes, we have a wide range of sizes with the customers, and especially smaller and medium-sized companies tend to choose Windows NT as their operating system.

BILL GATES: Well, that's excellent. One thing I wanted to have the audience hear about is that R/3 is a system with lots of published APIs, and I'm curious: are there opportunities for software developers to add extensions to R/3 using our Visual tools?

GERHARD RODE:Yes. I think that's an important point. Since you have to observe that R/3 is a large, complex business engine--it's complex and complicated, since business is complicated. APIs added to this engine shouldn't be complicated, and they should be easy on the technological layer. This is now really achieved with the integration of the interfaces to Visual Basic®, to Visual C++® as COM objects. The interface works with any environment that is able to deal with COM objects. So it's easy on the technological layer, and on the other hand what's perhaps even more important is that the business rules layer is easy as well. Since SAP published lots of interfaces to this engine, we published all the business objects--they are on the Internet--and we published the methods as so-called BAPI, Business APIs, and you just can call these BAPIs with Basic or other languages. We can really say that this complex business engine, its business objects, can be reached by our fingertips.

BILL GATES: That's great. I'm sure there's lots of people here who will take advantage of that.

GERHARD RODE:I hope so.

BILL GATES: Thank you.

[Applause.]

BILL GATES: Well, you're going to see a lot of fascinating demonstrations today. And it's all aimed at what we think is a big, big opportunity, and that is to take your skills and the work you've already done and apply those to this world of the Internet. All the training that people have had and the work they've done around client/server applies very, very directly to what these new applications should look like. And so we're very pleased to be able to bring together all the investments that are going on in the corporate network and what people are expecting on the Internet and give people the best of both worlds.

Today is the launch of Visual Studio. The reason this is our biggest announcement in tools ever is partly because of the breadth. It's an update to every one of our languages. It's the introduction of a number of new tools, but it's also the depth--what we've done with the integration of these tools. We get great feedback from developers, and what we've done in this product is based on that feedback from you, which we really, really appreciate.

Now I'm going to ask Bob Muglia, who is the Microsoft vice-president in charge of the development of Visual Studio, to come on up. He's going to give you a little bit more in-depth view of exactly what we've got here.

[Applause.]

BOB MUGLIA: Thanks, Bill. Now, a key part of Microsoft's developer message is really focused on choice, providing choice for the developer. We see choice of language as being critical, and choice of deployment environment is also critical. When you look at the different types of applications that developers are trying to put together, they span everything from applications where users are really resident in the app to more occasional use. A resident app is one where users live there all day. And in that kind of scenario you need to be able to build an application that takes advantage of every possible capability that the operating system provides. So a combination of everything Windows and Windows dialogues as well as Office, you need to be able to build the richest possible user experience for your user. That's one dimension.

Another key dimension is trying to reach out and touch the broadest set of customers possible. In this case you're developing an application that is really used occasionally within your corporation, or is reaching out and working with your end users in a business-to-consumer sort of way. In this case, basing your app on Internet standards is a very critical thing, so you can get that broad reach. Well, a core part of Microsoft's strategy is to provide developers with that choice, with a set of tools that span from the resident user to the more occasional user, and can reach out and work with all these types of applications.

Now, as we start thinking about how these applications are built, moving forward, we're not in a client-centric world anymore. The combination of client/server and the Internet really leads ourselves into a world where applications span from the desktop to a middle-tier server all the way up to a database server. The apps that are being created are really built of multiple components that need to integrate and work together. Now, in order to make this possible there needs to be some glue, a common object model standard to make this all work And that's why Microsoft has based Visual Studio, and in fact really all the products at Microsoft, on a common standard known as Common Object Model, COM. It provides the glue or integration piece that allows the integrated solutions on the desktop or server. Now, the important thing we're doing here with COM is taking it and extending it so that it's not just a Microsoft thing, it doesn't work only in Microsoft environments. We're working very closely with the Open Group to make COM an open, supported industry standard and make it available on platforms of all types -- the Macintosh as well as a wide variety of UNIX. So you can be sure as you start building these applications that run well and are integrated perfectly in the Windows and Windows NT Server environment that they'll also reach out and work with UNIX-based solutions and even up onto the mainframe.

Now, in terms of actually building these apps, a key thing that we've anticipated and understood from the things you've told us is to be able to make it easy to write server-side code. In the past a lot of logic in a client/server app was put on the client. Now there's a desire to move more and more of that code and centralize it up on the server. But this was very difficult to do in the past. It was very hard to write these business rules on the server. You really had to write them in C++ and have very experienced developers putting that together.

Well, we've introduced a couple of products recently that work hand in hand with Visual Studio to make that much, much easier. These products are the Microsoft Internet Information Server and the Microsoft Transaction Server, and with these products it becomes possible to easily write business-rule components which run on the server using the same programming skills that a Visual Basic or Java™ programmer has. It makes the job of building server-side logic infinitely easier than was ever possible before, and allows you to focus on solving your business problem rather than on fighting the environment that your app has to run in.

Now, a key part of COM, again, is choice. COM objects can be written in any language: Visual Basic, Java, FoxPro®, C++. It doesn't make any difference. COM components are language-independent. And any tool can take and leverage the components that are written. So controls can run inside Visual Basic. They can run inside the browser. They can work with business objects that are running on the server. And they can be used within Office. This is a key benefit of ActiveX™ and it's real and here today.

We've had a set of development tools for a long, long time, and they were relatively independent things. A key part of the vision of Visual Studio was this realization that the client/server and the Internet worlds were coming together and merging. In the process of that you need tools that make it easy for you to span those two worlds and to build components which run on the desktop and in an Internet browser that work with business logic on the server, and that talk with a relational database. The scalability of the solution has to span from a portable or desktop all the way to enterprise solutions. Scaling to thousands of transactions a second is key to making this vision a reality.

Now, in terms of putting these together, the problems have been hard. The problems that you face as a developer in terms of trying to work in an integrated environment to create these applications which span multiple tiers has been very difficult. So our focus with Visual Studio, and certainly the vision that we project moving forward, is to provide you with a common, integrated environment which allows you to build applications out of components that run on the desktop, that run on the server, and that work with the database.

You know, our vision is to make this as easy as possible for you to build these applications out of multiple languages and to use common techniques to put them together. To allow you to take an application that's written by a developer, deploy it on the desktop or on the server, and debug that application step by step, from the desktop, through to the business logic running on the server, and down into the database and into the stored procedures that are up there. That's the vision. That's certainly where we're going with Visual Studio.

And I'm pleased to announce today the introduction of Visual Studio 97, which is the first iteration of that vision. Visual Studio 97 brings together today a set of best-of-breed tools which all independently solve critical problems for developers building business applications. It takes:

• Visual Basic 5.0, really the culmination of many years of Visual Basic development.
• Visual C++, a much more productive, much, much higher performance version of C++.
• Visual FoxPro™ 5.0, a great version of FoxPro for Fox developers that really makes it easy to build database applications.
• Visual InterDev™, a new tool that makes it possible to build Internet or Intranet-based applications, based on Web pages.
• It's a great new introduction of Visual J++™, which is a best-of-breed Java product for the very important emerging Java marketplace. All of these tools come together, they're all best of breed, and with Visual Studio 97 we start on the process of integrating them into a common suite.

Now, in addition to the Professional Edition of Visual Studio 97, we're also introducing an Enterprise Edition for building client/server enterprise-class applications. Now, of course, Enterprise Edition builds upon all the features on the Professional Edition so it supersedes that in its capabilities. In addition to the language tools, Enterprise Edition adds a Visual Modeler tool to make it possible for you to visualize applications, multi-tier applications, and understand how the components fit together. It includes a repository for the metadata of that modeler and works in operation with a set of CASE tools that might be used within your enterprise. SourceSafe® is included to make it easy to work in teams and have all of these tools work together to build in a team perspective.

And on the server side really there's a set of key new things. There's a set of very important database tools to make it easy to design and deploy relational database objects. Makes it much more straightforward to lay those tables out and implement queries. There's the first iteration of the Microsoft Transaction Server--a developer version of that is included in the Enterprise Edition. The Transaction Server is the key component which makes it very easy to implement these business objects on the server, so it dramatically reduces your development time and allows you to focus on the problems that you, as a developer, really need to solve, that of automating your business.

And finally we include a developer version of SQL Server to make it easy for you to write an application that works with a relational database that then can be deployed later in a production environment.

So those are all the features that come together in the Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio 97.

But one of the key things of Visual Studio is really that it's been designed to work with other Microsoft tools and other product offerings aimed at developers. First and foremost on the list is the Developer Edition of Microsoft Office 97. With the Developer Edition of Office, it's possible to take really any of the features that are in Office, including the Office Assistant character that's there -- you can take any of the features and automate those and build applications for your customers that take and build upon the great features that are within Office 97. And, of course, Office 97, the developer part of that, is based on Visual Basic for Applications, which is a mirror image of the developer environment that's within Visual Studio and Visual Basic. So there's a lot of developer training and leverage that you can get there.

On top of Office and Visual Studio we also have a Mastering series, a set of CDs that are designed to train developers with these new tools and really let them master them. It takes them to the next step. It takes a good Visual Basic developer and it teaches them the things they know to be a really great Visual Basic developer, and it does that in an automated CD-ROM-based process.

And finally there's the Microsoft Developer Network, which is really an overall network designed to keep you up to date on all the things that are happening within Microsoft from a developer perspective. There are multiple levels of MSDN. This is basically a subscription service where you subscribe and can get all the latest information updated for you on a regular basis. There's a Web site that you can visit. What might be most interesting is there's a Universal Edition of MSDN which allows to you make sure that every single tool Microsoft ever ships that's targeted at the developer--Visual Studio, Office 97, the whole set of BackOffice tools, all of the SDKs, all of the documentation--you'll get that as soon as it's available through the Universal Edition.

So those are the features that collectively provide Microsoft's developer offering.

For the last year I've been working on Visual Studio and making sure that all of these pieces come together in an integrated way. Well, now I'm moving on and focusing on the server side and am responsible for the BackOffice products. Now I'd like to introduce Paul Gross. We're very fortunate within the last few months to be able to hire Paul, and he's taking over as the vice-president of developer tools. We'll be working very closely together to make sure that the server applications and the tools work hand in hand. Paul?

[Applause.]