MR. GATES: The original vision of Microsoft, a computer on every desk and in every home, will be achieved in the years ahead. The rate of change here is very different than in any previous revolution. If you wanted to adjust to the telephone or the automobile, you had many generations to do so. Here, in the course of a single lifetime, we'll go from the computer not being a tool at all, to it being a necessary tool in the majority of jobs in the economy. Nothing has really prepared us for this kind of change.

Certainly there will be significant political issues raised by this, issues of privacy, issues of "have" versus "have not," issues of regulation, and it's wonderful to see that politicians are focusing on these things and taking the time to learn not how the technology works, but rather to learn what it's like as a user, to get engaged, to even use electronic mail. I think only through that personal experience can someone appreciate what kind of policies are most appropriate.

Let me talk a little bit about businesses and where the winners and losers will be in this information age. I have no doubt the winners will be the ones who restructure the way that information moves inside their company to use these tools. I often refer to that as a digital nervous system, and electronic mail is simply the starting point for doing that well. A company that really goes after this will be different. For example, they won't use paper to communicate information internally.

I was totally stunned at my own company to ask for every paper form we had just over a year ago and find that we had over a thousand different forms. The personnel department alone had two hundred forms that you would fill out to change a job category, change job benefits, all these forms. People didn't know what they were, they didn't know how to use them. We had twenty people whose job it was to type the data into the computer from these forms. And that was at a company, it was very new company, very oriented towards information technology.

Well, I exercised the privilege of my job and banned all of those forms.

And in their place systems grew up that were far more accurate, far easier to work with and very, very empowering for people because they … they could see everything that was possible.

Likewise, consider sales data. Whenever you take sales data and print out a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper, it's really impossible, I claim, to do much with it. It's either too detailed or too summarized to really see any pattern. If you have sales data on a computer, you can look in, dive in and see it by time period, by geography, by product type. You can compare it to the past or to what a competitor's doing. And when you see the pattern that you think is actionable, then you can mail that information around to other people, see if they agree and collaborate, even if those people are in different locations.

So, the business of the future will be one that steps back and thinks how to use a digital approach, to have information flow inside the company.