MICROSOFT Office 97 Launch Event
Remarks by Bill Gates
Thursday, January 16, 1997

Bill Gates: Office 97 brings an impact even beyond what simply being the most popular PC software product of all time would suggest. Office is a centerpiece of Microsoft's Internet strategy. Over a year ago we talked about embracing and extending the Internet. In 1996, we really delivered on that. We built in the viewers, we built in the protocols, we got the browser out there. But this year the theme is to go beyond embracing -- to take leadership through innovation.

And Office is the centerpiece of that. In Office people will build more documents than in any other product. They'll go beyond having to learn specialized tools and draw on all the expertise they've had in doing word processing and spreadsheets over many, many years. So we brought the best of those two worlds together. In fact, I think we'll start to move to a point where more documents are read on-line than are read on paper. And so with our tools, what we're doing is make it easy to author once and target both paper output and the screen as well.

Now, with Office, we have a lot of key partners who we've involved. These are the training organizations around the world, these are the people who build software on top of Office, these are the resellers. And over a period of many, many years, we've figured out how to take our strengths and their strengths and put those together to make the transition to the product very straightforward.

Office is a platform. In any industry, in any kind of specialized situation where you're dealing with information, people build on top of what we've done with Office. And although we've had that vision for a long, long time, this is the first time that the object model and Visual Basic are present in every one of the modules in a uniform fashion. And so it really allows that dream to come true.

For customers this is about better workplace communication. And there are a lot of customers. Over 55 million users worldwide. In the business area, this is the primary application people use their PCs for. So the majority of people sitting in front of the PC are running Microsoft Office. The business benefit that comes out of this is planning better, making better business decisions, shortening customer support cycles, knowing what's going on with projects. All of those things can be done using Office.

If you think of all that corporate information, there are many different steps you take as you create it and use it. The part that Office was always very good at was building the documents, letting you edit those, having rich views, annotating those views ... and distribution meant putting it up on a file-sharing server or printing it out. With Office 97 the bulk of our work has been on the other parts of the cycle. How do you make it easy to find this document? if you put it up on a server does it automatically get indexed, so it's easy to see? Can you make it so that annotating and seeing different versions is very straightforward? Can you make it so that collaborating together, when multiple people are involved in the creation of the document, that this is very, very simple? And so the rich ideas from the Web -- the links, the worldwide connectivity of the Internet -- come in and make all of this possible. The impact on the workplace is to deal with information in a much, much better fashion than ever before.

Now, Office is a foundation where we're going to keep investing those hundreds of millions in R&D on an ongoing basis. With the user interface, we are moving to the idea of letting you just simply type in what you're interested in and we go and find that for you. We've taken hundreds of thousands of copies of the product and set it up so that those users can tell us when they type something in and they don't get exactly what they want. We've got a very efficient feedback using the Internet to get feedback to us, to keep refining and refining it, until 99 percent of the time when you type in a query or question, we tell you exactly what you're interested in knowing.

With the Internet, there's a lot more that can be done. Some of the things that are complex today include taking parts of the Internet off-line. So if you want to go with your portable machine which links do you bring down? Which documents do you bring down? Links today are all the same. They're not typed in a way that it makes it easy to work with these documents. And so we can go further using Office to make the Internet richer.

The concept of components is very important in what we've done here. Office is structured as a set of components. Rather than forcing the customer to buy them individually and do the testing and integration and support on their own, we've taken these components and done all of that for them. So you buy it and immediately it works. You still get the flexibility and the extensibility that come with components. You don't have to download all of Office on your machine. You can use the bulk of it running up on a server. That's something we'll go even further with in future versions.

In collaboration applications, we do have the basics here, but we'll go even further in making it easy to set up things for lots of different people not only within a company, but across company boundaries.

A major initiative for Microsoft this year is what we call Zero Administration. Making it so that you never have to visit a PC to update the software, help solve the problem. And Office participates in that in a major way because we're going to make it so that you don't have to think about installing the application. If somebody sends you a document and you just want to see it, the right things should happen. You shouldn't have to go through a long process. Also, if you go to a new computer and log in, we should immediately take all the information including your preferences for how you use the Office applications and make sure that those, through the network, get brought over to you. And so Office will be leading the way in that easy administration.

In the long run, our research groups are building technology that will allow Office to understand documents. This is natural language technology. We're building technology that will let you interact with Office, not just using the keyboard and the mouse, but also by talking to Office. So if you're on the road and you want to call in and get your Outlook messages, that will be possible. As you walk in front of your computer, you have a little camera which will be quite inexpensive, Office will notice who's there and immediately bring up the things that that you're interested in on that machine.

Now, these things won't happen overnight. But the kind of long-term investments it takes to solve these tough problems, Microsoft's in a perfect position to drive that forward. And so over the last five years we've been hiring the leading people in these fields, and we're continuing to expand that investment.

For me, personally, Office 97 is a fantastic thing. The application I use the most is electronic mail. And being able to filter and organize that mail makes me far more efficient. You know, in Outlook, the ability to see a little bit of the message right there in the view, the ability to have these different views, and rules so that I see what's important first, not just what hundreds of people are sending to me from all over the world -- these make me productive. And so Outlook is at the center of my workday.

On-line viewing is one of these features that I can't believe we didn't have in the past. Word was designed to do “what you see is what you get” on the printer. And so you'd often find that when you look on the screen you had to do horizontal scrolling and you'd find these page breaks, and dealing with footnotes was awkward. I like to read a reasonable percentage of the word documents I get on the screen. And I want it formatted to use exactly that screen and have easy navigation. If there's a footnote reference I want to click on that and see the footnote. And so on-line viewing is a ... a major step forward for me. Lots of things that I would have printed out, now I'm viewing on the screen. And yet we've been able to add that without giving up any of the richness we have for printing.

The Intellimouse seems like a pretty small thing, just a little roller there. But that ability to scroll backwards and forwards and then use the shift key and zoom in and out -- I use that in everything. It's in Internet Explorer, it's in the shell. It means I can sit there and review things very easily. In the past you had to move the mouse over, find the scroll bar to go down and then go find the little arrow and get on that, to go back up. It just wasn't convenient working with a document. In making it so that it's interesting to read documents on line, that's a very important part of the Internet revolution.

Links and documents are equally important. I now send people lots of mail messages where they're interested in a topic, and I just put the links in there and say, "Look, go ... here's where the in-depth information is." And so you end up with a lot less duplication, recreating information.

The programming, as I mentioned, is the fulfillment of the vision from long ago. I wanted it to be easy for me to sit down and customize Word or customize Excel. And now I can finally do that because the programming language is just Basic. It's the richest form of Basic we've ever shipped. And a very powerful forms editor with that.

Pivot tables are a feature of Excel that Microsoft uses to run its business. When we sit down and have a conversation about what's going on in the country or with a product, we all bring up the pivot table. And so we can look by time period, compare the budget. You know, how are the units? How are the dollars per unit? And it's very, very straightforward. You can now format things your own way and when the new data comes down, that formatting's all preserved. I think any company that sees what we're doing would want their data to be in this same very rich and flexible format, where Excel is the tool that lets you get in and explore, see it at a summary level, see it at a detail level. Exactly what you need to work with.

A final favorite is the Office Assistant. The part I use is that ability to type in a request. If there's something you want to do, you don't want to go back to the manual. That natural language approach is quite incredible. Because immediately it takes you to what you're interested in.

And so I think a lot of the richness and innovation in Office comes from the fact that the people at Microsoft who are involved in this care a lot about it. We use it a lot, and we spend a lot of time with users.