Thank you. Good morning. It's a great pleasure to have an opportunity to talk to you today about the new work going on between Microsoft and NEC.

Microsoft and NEC have had a very strong relationship going back to the very beginning of the PC industry. It's fair to say that our work together has really made a big difference in this incredible success that the personal computer has achieved. I think NEC's slogan, "computers and communications," really captures what is happening today. PCs are not only more popular but they have been connected together. They have been tied into enterprise systems. In fact, companies are asking for the expertise that has always been associated with their large computers to now be applied to the PC technology. One of the reasons for this is the incredible success of Windows NT.

Working with NEC's PC group, we have been offering Windows NT not only in Japan but in other markets around the world to a very strong reaction. The applications that customers want to put on Windows NT now include applications that are very, very demanding and need to run 24 hours a day. And so we've been planning with NEC groups how we can take their enterprise expertise and apply that to Windows NT. The announcement today is a major milestone in that collaboration.

It's not just the specific products that we are talking about today, but it's the partnership to really take Windows NT into many, many new markets, to ride the wave of success and work with great NEC systems that work so well with Windows NT to really take care of all the computing needs that customers have, including working together with their existing systems.

Coexistence is a key part of what we are working on here. Making sure that the systems that NEC has sold and other people have sold, and tie into these Windows NT systems. Microsoft's world, of course, it to provide the base system software, and that's not only Windows NT, but it's also Microsoft BackOffice products. That includes the messaging system, Microsoft Exchange, and the database system, Microsoft SQL Server, as well as many other elements.

The feedback that NEC and Microsoft have had from customers is simple. They are asking us to make these systems even easier to manage. This is often called the Total Cost of Ownership issue. We have some great plans, including and involving Windows NT version 5, that will make incredible progress in reducing the cost of ownership.

We have also been asked by mutual customers to increase the performance of the system, to provide very high-power scalability. And that's partly why we are announcing the collaboration to move Windows NT up to not only 8-processor systems but also to 16-processor systems. I'm sure in years ahead we will go even further to use the most advanced techniques from large computer systems such as clustering, in order to provide performance that will serve even the most demanding applications.

As we've sat down with NEC's engineers, and we've been able to draw on their experience, it's been a great partnership that helping us to determine exactly what we should do in Windows NT as well as building value out of software that runs on top of Windows NT.

The Internet in its incredible growth really proves the original NEC vision. Customers want to use computer systems to redefine how their business works. Microsoft describes this as the digital nervous system of business, allowing people to move away from using paper so much and more and more using electronic mail, and other digital information to collaborate not only within the company but with customers and suppliers outside the company.

And so it's brain, computers, and communications together. The demand for these systems in making them even more reliable is quite incredible, and it's really through a combination of the best skills of Microsoft and the best skills of NEC that we think we can take the leadership role in servicing this incredible market.

It's fair to say that every business will be adapting this digital nervous system, not only to deal with their regular routine events like budgeting, or sales analysis, or project management, but also to improve their quality to be able to track everything that's happening with the customer, and to be able to quickly respond when the competitor does something new.

The world of business is moving faster and faster and it's increasingly global. Using these digital systems to keep everybody in touch and analyze information in a rich way will be critical to the success of businesses in the future. These systems will use PC technology as a key element and Windows NT as an increasingly powerful building block on top of that.

Really what we have here is quite simple, it's Microsoft and NEC, once again, taking our experience to lead the way in responding to customer demands. So I think you can see this milestone as a significant expansion of what we do, and the one we have been working on for quite some time, and very proud to be announcing today. With that, let me go ahead and in turn things back over to the program in Japan.