Remarks by Bill Gates
Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Infrastructure Summit
December 11, 1997
Beijing, China

MR. GATES:

Good afternoon. It’s an exciting time in the world of technology. Things are moving very quickly and the big question is how can people take advantage of this? How can they make their organizations more effective? Well, the pieces, the building blocks here, are quite amazing -- the lower cost PCs, the power of these PCs, the networks that connect them together to share information, the screen technology and storage technology. All moving so rapidly that you could almost step back and imagine how you would like information to be available, and actually put together a system that delivers on that vision.

The PC is at the center of this. The open PC architecture has given people choices of hardware and software like never before. And even the most difficult tasks are being handled by that PC technology as we take the faster processors, combine more of them together, and use advanced techniques like clustering. And so the PC is the place to be. It’s truly the tool of the information age.

But another way to look at these opportunities is to consider the customers - consider the users. What do they want? The vision for information being always available is to define an organization that has a great Digital Nervous System. By Nervous System I mean all of the ways that information moves in a company -- the meetings, the paperwork, the discussions -- and the most effective part is the move to digital tools.

Where is this used? Well, it’s used for all the activities and processes of an organization -- the planned events, like deciding who to hire, how to evaluate the work that’s being done, how to keep track of the customers and revenues. Perhaps more importantly, though, is dealing with unplanned events -- changes in the environment, a customer who has a special request. All of these things, when done in a way that people in many locations can collaborate together, come together to create an advantage for the organization that does them well. A great Digital Nervous System provides immense value, without the cost being overwhelming.

So what are the building blocks? The personal computer, the connection to the Internet, electronic mail, productivity software, and finally, special applications - vertical line of business applications that relate to your particular activities. Integrating these together creates a great solution. In order to make this work, top management has to be involved, because everybody has to use the system to make it worthwhile. For example, if people don’t read their electronic mail, then you still have to use older systems to get in touch with those people. If people don’t have all of the information easily available on their computer, then the investment in that hardware is not taken full advantage of. Now Microsoft’s role is providing some of the key software pieces here, but we work in partnership with some of the PC companies, with the vertical software companies, and the communications companies, to make sure that it’s easy to have all of these things connected together with great support.

What are some of the top requirements? Well, you have to be able to deal with growth and flexibility. This is scalability, so that you never run out of power. Second, you want to be able to fit in with what computer systems organizations already have. Although PC technology today makes up the majority of all purchases, even when people shift over to buy all new PC systems, they’ll still want to keep using their older systems. And so the interconnection capabilities and interoperability, is a big priority for Microsoft. We spend lots of our R&D in making sure that we connect up - with the mainframes, Unix systems, and everything else that’s out there. It makes it easier for people to simply use more and more Windows PCs.

Availability, the reliability of the system, is key. You won’t use the mail system unless it’s always delivered. You won’t put your order system on the computer unless it can make sure the data’s there, no matter what happens with the network or even the hardware. And finally, making it low cost to manage the software and the PCs is very key. This is something Microsoft has learned a lot about by talking with customers and so it’s the highest priority in the improvements we’re making to all the Microsoft software.

A lot of tough requirements. Fortunately, we spend a lot on R&D to be able to fulfill all of these, and because of all the volume software we sell, we can do all of this while continuing to bring down the software prices.

I think the Internet has to be a central part of any good plan for sharing information. Because the Internet makes it easy to share to any location in the world. It’s a very big development. This is the future communication system for all business. Finding what products are available, working with partners, eliminating paperwork, the Internet is the answer. And so Internet standards are built into all Microsoft software. There’s a very high level of investment taking place in the Internet. That’s to bring up to speed the quality of the experience.

There’s a lot of innovation in the software. Products like our Internet Explorer, our NetMeeting, our collaboration with Microsoft Exchange, all of these things wouldn’t be possible without the Internet. More and more people connect up every day. In fact, in 5 to 10 years, I think everybody you work with will have an electronic mail address, and give that out on their business cards. And so it will be even more popular than the fax machine is today, almost like the telephone, as a standard way of doing business.

The Internet standards can be used across a wide area or simply inside a company. Sharing information inside the company is referred to as an Intranet. But the value here can be very big, making it so that instead of filling out a paper form, somebody simply goes to the company’s Intranet site, and gets the information they care about. It’s far more accurate, it’s far quicker, and it can even save cost. And so at Microsoft we eliminated all the paper forms. And for things like human resource work, it’s all there on our Intranet. In fact I’m showing a page from the Microsoft Intranet site here that just shows how easy it is to click on various things, search for different things, and get the answers you want. And so you don’t have to call anyone, you don’t have to dig through a printed manual. It’s always there, up to date, very interactive.

The kinds of information on a corporate Intranet include everything about the product, the customers, the sales, and it’s far better than having it on paper because you can examine it in an interactive way. If you want to look at sales in different locations, if you want to look at sales in different time periods, or in different products, immediately your computer can pull that information together. And if you see something that you think is surprising, you can simply mail that view of the information around to your colleagues, and discuss what it means that you found this information. And so instead of people being in the dark about what’s going on, all the data is there, and it makes jobs not only more interesting but much better decisions. When a customer calls in, you call up a page and see everything that’s gone on with that person very easily.

Well I think the requirements to use technology are really driven by the business environment. Increasingly, these markets will be quite competitive. Competitors inside the country and competitors coming in from outside the country, will obviate the need to coordinate the rapidly growing infrastructure. All the work that has to be done, and the kind of cooperation it requires from many organizations -- working with the government, working with financial institutions, different suppliers -- this is the perfect kind of problem for information technology. Being able to look at data and analyze that data, it’s really a new thing because there’s a lot of choices that can be made. This will help make sure the right ones are there, and make sure that those decisions can be made in time so that every opportunity is seized at the moment it becomes available.

While I’m talking about the general business needs, one of those specific needs is project management. Coordinating different people. Not just what individuals do, but what the organization does together, making sure everything comes together at the right time. Also, when you’re tracking a project, you need lots of numeric data, and you need to integrate the numeric data with the project information. So you can understand where the cost’s high. What things are ahead of schedule? What the impact of the results are? Finally, companies have ways of managing their processes, and good project management tools can fit into that: taking in information and delivering information. So this concept of integration is particularly strong with project management.

Now Microsoft has had a long commitment to this field of software. We are by far the world leader, and part of that is the way that we tie into Windows and Office, and create an open interface for any other products to connect up to.

Some of the key components for information sharing are shown here. Two pieces of individual software that run on the PC -- Microsoft Project which, as it was mentioned, a great new version that will be coming out in China this month -- that’s a very new thing for us -- and the latest browser, Internet Explorer 4.0, which has been reviewed very highly. Actually that’s a very unique product, because it’s a free product, so that everybody can have its rich capabilities. Intranet, that’s the concept of tying the screens together. And at the bottom we show the servers, with the shared information managed by a rich relational database. Microsoft’s relational database is called SQL Server, and it runs on Windows NT. It’s a key member of the BackOffice family. And Microsoft Project has been designed to take advantage of SQL Server when it’s there to both deposit information and pull out the information so all the richness and flexibility of the database is available.

What are some of the key features? Project planning made easy. I can sit down and literally in a couple hours lay out a very complex project. Project management in the past didn’t have that. Only an expert could sit down and work with the software. One of our goals is that anyone can be involved in not only seeing the results but also putting in the information. This new version is a big step forward in using Intranet support in allowing people to share information. If you want to be notified about a change, we make that very easy. If you want to publish the change and make sure a lot of people have access to that, we make that very easy.

I mentioned that it connects up to our database, our SQL Server. In fact it can connect up to any database, we particularly tuned it with SQL Server, but any database with a driver called an ODBC driver can be hooked up. And finally, although we’ve always had a lot of customizability, we now let you program new capabilities with our built-in support for Visual Basic in the system. That’s not the only language you can use, but it’s the only one that comes built-in, and it makes it easy to tie in to Microsoft Office.

So we’re simply taking all the feedback we’ve had from customers of Microsoft Project, and we’ve really made a big investment to deliver on those requests. This isn’t the final version, so as we get out in the Chinese market we’ll look forward to your feedback, and you can expect major new versions of the project software every couple of years.

I mentioned that we’ve done very well in this category, by far leading the category. Some of the sample customers are shown here: AT&T, Ford, IBM, Boeing and Motorola. Here in China we’ve already had some good customers, working with the previous versions, and you’ll see those listed and very significant projects being managed with this software. But having the localized version, we think, will increase the market quite a bit.

I feel very lucky that we have a user of the product here, and really the best way to appreciate what we’ve done is to see it in action. So one of our great users, Miss Zhou has agreed to show us how she’s taking advantage of the rich new features. So I’d like to invite her to give us a look.

(Demo)

That looks good. Project is a very exciting product by itself, but more importantly it illustrates how far we’ve come in making these tools very flexible and very powerful. And as we make the PC easier to use by incorporating handwriting recognition, speech recognition, and even visual recognition, it will play an even more central role. I think the opportunity to use technology for greater efficiency is a very timely one. And certainly we appreciate your being here today, and we look forward to working with you to see how you can use the latest technology to build the kind of Digital Nervous System that works best for your organization.

Thank you.