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Remarks by Bill Gates
Windows 2000 Conference & Expo
February 17, 2000
San Francisco
MR. GATES: Good morning. It's very exciting to be here today. It's a huge milestone for Microsoft, and for the industry. I really like this portable computer they made for me. It's about the right size for my desk, but it is pretty tough to get into the overhead bin.
Well, Microsoft, for the last 25 years, has been coming out with software that's really made a difference. It's empowered people to do very exciting things. It goes back to our first work on Microsoft BASIC, MS-DOS Version 1.0, which was ushered in with the original IBM PC. And then the move to the graphics interface, the early versions of Windows that were not very popular. The breakthrough version, Windows 3.0. And then the last big milestone that we had, which was about four-and-a-half years ago, the introduction of Windows 95. That took the industry to a whole new level, 32-bit computing on the PC platform. And there were some amazing applications that came out around that. It was very exciting to see the industry backing and the impact that that created.
Well, since 1995, something very big happened. The Internet arrived and achieved critical mass. And so, for these last four-and-a-half years, it's been building in importance. It's now viewed as the future of communications, and the future of business. And the Internet hasn't been standing still. In fact, what we do on the Internet, what we use it for, is quite different than at the very beginning. When we started out, it was really just having a Web site. That's what people were interested in, just HTML, static Web pages, and people would say, wow, I got 10,000 hits a day, I got 100,000 hits a day. It was amazing that people are actually coming there and seeing it.
Then we moved into a stage where it was about transactions. You could go to Web sites, buy a book, close an order, and applications got more complicated than just HTML. We had scripting, we had ASPs, and people would talk about the great revenue that they were generating. But we believe that the Internet is now moving into an even more sophisticated stage, a stage at which you'll think about generic services that you can get across the Web, authentication, billing, shipping. The key technology won't be HTML. We'll still have HTML, but XML, the ability to have computers exchange data in this rich, structured form will be at the center of these new tools and applications.
Instead of just looking at gross revenue, we'll actually have people who look at the profitability that can be driven out of the Internet. And instead of simple transactions, we'll have rich business agreements done in digital form, and understanding about how you notify people when things change, what the contractual agreement looks like. And so, taking all of the richness of business in the pre-digital world, and moving that onto the Internet. So, this is the environment that we designed Windows 2000 for.
Over these years, we've been talking to customers, and really driving the priorities around the things that they're interested in. This is a very, very rich product. It's a broad product. In our opening today, we won't be able to get through all the neat things that are in it, but I think you'll be surprised to see how customers are already taking advantage of the things that are built in here.
And one of the challenges that the industry had is that, as the Internet moved up to very high volumes and became the central way that a company would present itself, was what kind of server platform should we use there? On the desktop, people understand, Windows has got the applications, it's got the critical mass. But there was always a question, should you grow up from that Windows base for these Internet servers, or should you take the mainframe approach, the very expensive single box running UNIX or running MDS, and that was a dilemma for people. Before today, people had a perception of more scale, better benchmarks, better perceived reliability on what we call the low volume systems. We're biased on that, but in fact they are low volume systems. The high volume systems, the PC server-type systems have the value, the choice, the ease of the very rich tools. And so there was simply no best solution.
And what we're going to show you today is that with Windows 2000 we feel this situation completely changes. What we're going to show you is that in terms of reliability and scale, we've taken a new approach here that not only matches, but goes beyond what you could ever do with a single expensive hardware box. We've taken a software approach for reliability and scale that allows you to take any number of PC servers and combine those together to get a level of transaction support that's never been seen before. Now, we do that without giving up the things that have been strong about the entire PC/Windows environment, the value, the choice, the time to market.
We're not just introducing one product today. Windows 2000 is three different products shipping right now, Windows 2000 Professional, which is for the desktop, it is the replacement for Windows 95 and Windows 98 on the business desktop. Windows 2000 Server, this is the product that will be used in IT infrastructure, Web servers, file servers, mail servers, and here we think the return on IT investment is what people look to, and so that's what we've optimized for. And then finally is the Windows Advanced Server product which is focused on driving competitive advantage, letting you get a richer site, a more reliable site, a faster site, and improving the applications we have on that site as rapidly as possible.
So, all three of those markets, all three of those products, are entering the marketplace today. Well, the desktop PC is where Windows 2000 will achieve its highest volume. At Microsoft, it was about nine months ago that we started to shift everybody onto Windows 2000. And today the entire company, over 70,000 desktops, is running on Windows 2000. This is one of these things where if you asked anybody to switch back to what they had before, they'd say absolutely no way. Today we are spoiled, spoiled by the reliability, the fact that we can run huge mix of applications and, at most, we shut one of the applications down, and everything else keeps on working.
The cost of ownership now is completely different because the IT department can take any of the state on our PC and mirror it up on the server, and so if we go to someone else's machine and log in, or if we get a new machine and plug it in, all of that state is automatically brought down to our machine. Using the directory, the rich directory we have, and doing what we call policy-based management, has a huge impact on cost of ownership. In fact, Gartner shows even people in their early deployment are getting over 25 percent reduction there. And that's driving a very, very short-term return on investment for using these systems.
For ease of use, for security, the manageability -- this is a broad set of benefits. The simplest way to summarize it is to say that everybody is going to want to move up to this on their desktop machine, whether it's by upgrading to a machine where it's preinstalled, or by working with the upgrade product.
Now, measuring reliability is always a tricky thing. We had ZD Labs take Windows 95 and Windows NT and throw a very extensive set of applications at it to try and simulate what a typical high-end work day would be like. So with Windows 95 they found that after a couple of days of running this load, they would typically have to reboot. With Windows NT, the situation was better, it was about a work week would go by before they had to do the reboot. We said to them, take Windows 2000 and run this same mix of things, and we were hoping that we'd be at least two, three, four times better, because this has been such a priority for us in terms of doing this work. Well, how did that go? Well, they ran it for --
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: They've only been able to do 90 work days, and the system has not gone down yet, so it's 90 and still counting. And this is confirmed by another set of tests that NSPL did. They actually took some real customers, people like Texaco and Schwab, and monitored the early deployment copies of Windows 2000 that were out there. And their results were very similar to this, they found over 18 times the level of reliability in terms of the system staying up for those customers. And, anecdotally, this is exactly what people are saying, is that you move up to this and it's a very, very different experience. And so, that's why we're so excited that this will become the standard on the business desktop.
Well, we've got a chance to see the system in action here.
PATRICK STEWART: I have been backstage, and I have been listening to you, and I've been watching all this stuff, and it sounds terrific. It's very exciting, and what is impressive to me, who came late to technology, is that the reliability seems so strong. So, I would like to suggest that now you take it for a spin.
MR. GATES: Okay, no problem. Windows 2000 was designed for the road.
MR. GRONCKI: Good morning, I'm Doug Groncki; I'm a product manager here at Microsoft. And I'm going to show you some of the new exciting things we're doing with Windows 2000 Professional.
Now, for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm just a guy who came up with a great idea for a new start-up company, and I'm preparing for a business trip, and I'm making the final touches, the edits here to my presentation here for CyberDoug.com. We're going to update my title to president and chief architect. It's in style these days. We're going to save the file, and we'll close PowerPoint here in just a second. And I need to take some data with me when I go out on the road.
And the way I do this is, you see I have two shortcuts here on my desktop, one to a public server and one to Capital Strategy. I open that folder and I find the content that I want to take with me, including that PowerPoint presentation you just saw, and some other files that I want to reference on my trip. So, I right click on that file and I choose make available offline. A copy of this is written to my local hard drive. So, when I make changes on the road, when I come back to the office, those changes are automatically synchronized for me. You can see that they're made available by the swirl that's been added to the icon here.
So, we're almost ready to go, but I know that I need to connect to the office while I'm on the road, so let me take my modem here and just plug that into the computer, and you'll notice that the new hardware wizard kicks off, and that the driver is installed automatically, and the modem is auto-configured to work with this PC, without asking me for any information. That's because Windows 2000 has complete plug and play support.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: Now, I'm almost ready to go, but I need to eject my PC. And you can see that when I go to the Start menu and do this, the system is automatically reconfigured to work only with the resources that I have available on the laptop. So it makes sure that I can keep working a little bit more effectively. And if we give this just a second here, we click okay; we're almost ready to go on our trip.
So, now I'm going to go to start, and I'm going to go to shut down, but rather than having to shut down my system and wait for myself to start back up, I have a couple of new options in advanced power management. I'm going to go into standby mode so that I can quickly save all of my data, go to a low power state to conserve that valuable battery life, and then quickly get back to work as well.
So, I think we're almost ready to go here. And we're going to head off to the airport. I need to find a rich venture capitalist to help fund CyberDoug.com, and I know from looking in the audience, there are a few of you out there, but unfortunately I don't have any time, I'm off to catch my plane.
Don't you wish it was always this easy to get to the airport. So, I'm back, I want to get back to work, Windows 2000 is going to start very quickly because I was in standby mode. It's in a secure state. So I type in my password, and I'm back working exactly where I left off.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: Now, I even have access to that offline content that I made available, and you'll see that just the strategy files are made available. And whether I'm at the network or I'm at 35,000 feet, Windows 2000 works the way I do.
MS. : Well, good morning, Mr. Groncki. Will you be traveling business or pleasure today?
MR. GRONCKI: Business. I just came up with a ground breaking idea for a new start-up, and I'm going to make billions. I just need to find a venture capitalist.
MR. WENTWORTH: Shop no further, my good man. You have parked yourself at the right port of call. William Wendell Wentworth, you can call me WWW, president and CEO of Wentworth World Wide. Although, between you and me I would prefer the title "hunter/gatherer," but you get what you get. I'm a very busy man. You've got five minutes to pitch me your idea.
MR. GRONCKI: Well, I can do it even quicker. That is if you're running Windows 2000.
MR. WENTWORTH: Running Windows 2000, you're sitting next to a veritable titan of the industry, of course.
MR. GRONCKI: Then you know with Windows 2000 we have support for an infrared file transfer, so we can wirelessly transfer data between the two computers.
MR. WENTWORTH: Really, amazing, 4 minutes, 30 seconds, 29, 28…
MR. GRONCKI: I simply line up the two computers and you'll see that the wireless link has been made available on my desktop. To send you the files, I simply right click, choose sent to infrared recipient. And you'll notice that you have to click okay to accept those files. And there's a little security built into this, so that I can't send data to his system without his permission. Three megabytes of content here, more than can fit on a single floppy drive, and we're sending it to his computer in under 15 seconds.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: And if you'll allow me I'll open up the strategy files here, and I want to show you my strategy presentation. And how about that?
MR. WENTWORTH: That's perfect. CyberDoug.com, my goodness, CyberDoug.com will be the newest jewel in the Wentworth crowd. Go ahead, young man, name your price.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: Well, Mr. Wentworth, I'll have my people call your people. I'm sure we can work something out.
MR. WENTWORTH: No, you call me WWW; you contact me at Wentworth Worldwide. My email is This calls for a celebration. Line attendants; cease operations, complimentary peanuts for everyone.
MS. : Peanuts… I brought champagne. Here you go.
MR. GRONCKI: This is great. I don't even need to go on my trip anymore. Thanks, WWW.
MR. WENTWORTH: The pleasure was mine. That boy is going places... unfortunately without his laptop.
MS. : Is everything okay, Mr. Wentworth?
MR. WENTWORTH: Everything couldn't be better. You know, I wanted to tell you that I'm very impressed with how smooth things run here at Continental Airlines. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 2000 had something to do with it.
(Video shown.)
MR. GRONCKI: So I'm back at the office. Unfortunately I left my laptop on the plane. Now, I'm not so worried about the files and the presentation. I used the encrypting file system to secure the contents on that laptop, so that should be okay. But, that's the third laptop I've lost this month. IT is going to kill me. Anyway, they sent me up here with my new E-Vectra. Now, in the past before Windows 2000 setting up a system like this would have taken me a few hours. I would have to install the operating system and the applications, and get my files again. But, this changes with Windows 2000. I just simply go to this machine, I type in my user name, I type in my password, and it goes out across the network and it takes all of my personal settings and my software settings, and applies it to this machine automatically. This is Windows 2000 and IntelliMirror.
You'll even notice when I come to my system that I even have those same shortcuts available on my desktop. And when I open the strategy file, and I take a look at the contents there, there you go, you can see my PowerPoint presentation. And when I double click on it, even though PowerPoint wasn't previously installed on this machine, just by opening up that PowerPoint presentation -- it installs it automatically. It's about 10 megabytes of content being written from an HP Server on the network here to my local system. It doesn't prompt me for any of that information, and I don't have to carry around any of those CD cases with me. And in just a couple of seconds here I'm going to be up and running.
So, you know, what this really means for me as a mobile user is that whether I'm researching my next dot com at the office, or I'm out at the beach researching Greatsuntan.com, Windows 2000 works the way I do.
Back to you, Bill.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: Thanks, Doug.
Here's some of the highlights from the customers who have been using Windows 2000. A number of them have gone and done return on investment studies. Giga worked with a number of these customers. And over 80 percent expect payback in less than 12 months. Another great achievement for us is the relationship we've had with the PC manufacturers. They're now pre-installing Windows on over 245 models. And so people can order today, and whether it's the server machines, desktop machines, or now of course a whole range of portables, those are available. I mentioned the Microsoft has all of our desktops on Windows 2000.
But, even excluding Microsoft, there's a huge number of people who have been willing to take this product and put it into production before the actual launch date. That's really never happened anywhere near this level with a software product before. And it shows the confidence and the kind of relationship we've build up with these customers. There's over 65,000 machines being used in production. And I just listed here the companies that have really deployed the most copies. People like Motorola and TELUS have over 7,000 desktops running Windows 2000.
So let's now move on to the second area that we talked about, which is taking Windows 2000 as a server product, and using it to beef up IT infrastructure. What do we have in here? What's the work that we've done that makes it far better? I put security at the top of the list. We've not only built in the Active Directory. But, that Active Directory is using very advanced encryption technology, Kerberos, and public key technology. The Windows 2000 system now has the ability to issue these certificates and allow you to verify where code came from, where drivers came from, so that all the things going on in your systems are fully secure. We're based on standards here, standards like IT sets, now interoperating with the network infrastructure to make sure that you can set policies for things like quality of service.
The deployments here can be incremental. It's important to point out that if you have a set of servers and you simply upgrade one of them to Windows 2000, you'll get the benefits and it will continue to work together with the other systems. So all of your protocols and security that we've had on Windows to date, all of those interoperate with Windows 2000. The clustering capability for advance reliability, that's been a key customer demand, to make that simpler to set up and simpler to work with and so we expect that to catch on dramatically more than ever before.
Another key point is that we're always doing performance tuning, as the hardware gets more and more processors, we have to work very closely with the hardware manufacturers to make sure that we're optimized for these very high end hardware designs. Of course, moving up from the 8-processor machines to 16 and 32 processor machines to deliver even more performance. And so Windows 2000 has been enhanced for those kinds of systems. So what kind of performance does this really map to in terms of real world scenarios? Well, the SAP SE benchmark is one of the most famous benchmarks around. And what we've been able to do on exactly the same hardware is take that benchmark from 4,500, which was a very impressive number, and increase it by over 60 percent to 6,700. So that means 6,700 simultaneous users running R3. Now, we thought, wow, that's a very big number. So we went to SAP and we checked, and we said, what percentage of enterprises would that cover? And their answer was very, very clear. SAP is convinced that SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2000 would now meet the needs of every R3 customer around the world.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: And so that's a real milestone in terms of our support for the enterprise.
MR. STEWART: I'm really sorry to interrupt. I don't mean to steal your thunder, or the thunder of Windows 2000, but you did mention "enterprise" several times.
MR. GATES: Well, that's because Windows 2000 enables enterprises in so many wonderful ways.
MR. STEWART: Yes, that's fine, that's fine. Enterprise is really my expertise.
MR. GATES: But, I'm the chief architect.
MR. STEWART: You're outranked, Bill, I'm the captain.
MR. GATES: Well, then you can handle all those alien attackers.
MR. STEWART: Set Phasers on stun.
MR. KAPLAN: Okay. I'll get started. My name is Rich Kaplan, and I'm the general manager of the IT professional marketing group here at Microsoft. And what I'd like to talk to you about today is how Active Directory and group policy allow you to manage not only file servers, and email servers, but for the first time even applications and things like routers and switches from companies like Cisco Systems.
What we're looking at here is something, a Web portal. And this Web portal is from FileNET; they're a Web-based content management company. And they have integrated their product into the active directory with group policy. And today I'm acting as administrator for that group. Now, in that capacity I'm going to show you some things that they've been able to do because of that tight integration.
I'm going to log on right now as one of our sales executives, Aaron Yang. And Aaron has access, because of the group policies in Active Directory, to view documents, sales contracts, sales proposals, and even videos. Now, let's go look at one of the documents. Based on the group policy he has been assigned to a number of things. He can see the large sales opportunities, Asia sales budgets, and the Asia semiconductor sales. And let's click on Asia semiconductor sales.
You'll see it rendered the graph right away in dynamic HTML, and if I click on it I can't edit it. And the reason that I can't edit it is because he has read only access. That is part of the group policy that was assigned to Aaron. Now, let's look at one other thing, because of Aaron's job he has access to videos. Now, these videos are stored on a server, but he doesn't have bandwidth necessarily available, I haven't guaranteed it to him. So those videos might run well, or maybe not, because of our network bandwidth. And I think our network is a little busy today, so let's click on it and see how this video plays.
MR. WENTWORTH: Stand aside everyone. I take large steps. Imagine the size of the carton that came in. I'm looking for the administrator of Pro-Electrons.
MR. KAPLAN: That's me.
MR. WENTWORTH: Is it me or are they getting younger every day? All right, young one, I've got news for you. You are now working for me.
MR. KAPLAN: Okay.
MR. WENTWORTH: I liked Pro-Electrons so much I decided to buy the company, along with two or three multi-nationals and a dozen different dot-coms, and I did it all before I finished my Wheaties. So this is what I would like you to do. I want you to move the Pro-Electrons sales team to the Asia Pacific sales region. And I want you to assign them the entire environment that we've set up for them over there. Okay. Then I want you to make them all part of the parent company, Wentworth Worldwide. Okay. And let's say we do that before the end of the day.
MR. KAPLAN: I can do better than that; I'll do it before lunch.
MR. WENTWORTH: Really? Can we get rid of the blue? I hate blue.
MR. KAPLAN: Okay. And I'll get rid of the blue.
MR. WENTWORTH: Okay. Go, you're on the clock.
MR. KAPLAN: Okay. First I'll log off of that machine. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to the Active Directory console. Now, the Active Directory console is where we can manage users, computers, their group policies, and the active directory. Now the sales executive that I was logged on as was Aaron Yang, and he is part of the sales executive group. Now, you asked me to move him to the Asia Pacific sales manager. So to do that I'll right click, I'll say move, I'll tell it I want to move to the Asia Pacific sales manager's group, and it was as easy as that to move them. Now, if I select that you can see the sales executives, including Aaron, are part of the Asia Pacific sales manager's group. And if I click on and select properties, and then select group policy, what you'll see is that whole organization got a bunch of new group policies.
For example, new FileNET privileges, which takes care of that thing that was bugging you, and new Cisco quality of service policy, which means the video will run great, Microsoft Office 2000, the multi-language version, and SAP. So now just by doing that they have access to all those things, and historically that would have taken multiple people and multiple tools, and I did it with one click.
MR. WENTWORTH: Wow.
MR. KAPLAN: Okay, let's go back --
(Applause.)
MR. KAPLAN: Now, we're going to go back and log on, and what you'll see right after we log on is, all of those things took effect.
Okay. So, first of all, I took care of that color. Part of Wentworth World Wide. Now, the reason it knew how to do that is because it read that out of the group policy that was in Active Directory. Now, notice that the menus at the bottom say edit documents, not read documents, and that's because, based on your request, I changed those people's responsibilities to have write access to all the documents.
And so, if I click on edit documents, and go back up to the same document again, and edit it, you'll notice that it loads Microsoft Excel, and now I have the ability to change things. You'll also notice it loaded in Chinese, the native language of Aaron that was stored within the active directory.
(Applause.)
MR. KAPLAN: Okay. Now, let's go back and take a look at that video. I have access to the same videos, but now because of the quality of service -- remember when you first came in, that video was kind of poor quality, there were no guarantees, and then on the console we changed it to give a guarantee on the Cisco routers, and so now, when we play that video, it will play full screen and high quality.
So, group policies and Active Directory allow you to do the things that took multiple people to do before with multiple tools, and now you can do it easier and quicker, and I did what you asked, Mr. Wentworth, in less than five minutes.
MR. WENTWORTH: You did, indeed. I tell you, young one, Windows 2000 can handle this all beautifully. But here is my dilemma. My empire is expanding, even faster than my ego. What are the chances that Windows 2000 will be able to keep pace with our growth?
MR. KAPLAN: Windows 2000 Data Center Server, which I'm going to show, scales to meet the largest needs, and it will meet yours, Mr. Wentworth.
MR. WENTWORTH: Really. All right, go, you've got five minutes. Whoops, no, I'm late for a meeting. You'll have to explain it to them, and you'll all have to take notes. You're doing a good job, by the way type yourself in for a promotion.
MR. KAPLAN: Thank you. Stock options?
MR. WENTWORTH: No, parking space.
MR. KAPLAN: Okay.
What I'd like to show you now is the Windows 2000, how it can scale, and I'm going to show you Windows 2000 Data Center Server, and I'm going to use a real company with real data.
Now, for the first time ever, I'm going to show you a Unisys ES-7000, 16-processor mainframe, running a beta copy of Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.
(Applause.)
MR. KAPLAN: This is mainframe class performance and, in fact, it's going to ship in a 32-processor version later this year.
Now, on your left and right screens here, what you see is a map of the world. And I'm running an application from Amadeus ITA software. And what that application does is, it calculates the lowest cost fare for anywhere in the world. So, say you wanted to fly from here to New York, and you wanted the cheapest fare, and you didn't care how many stops it took, this would calculate the cheapest way to get between here and New York.
Now, to do that, it would have to calculate tens of thousands of segments, and that's what this application does. In fact, on the bottom of the screen, you can see how segment calculations it's doing per day. Right now, it's doing 4.37 billion. And you can see the system output from it.
Now, up on the center screen is Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, and at the very top is the performance monitor. And this is a 16-CPU system. And so you can see from left to right we're running across 16 CPUs. Now, on the right-hand side, the CPUs aren't too busy yet, and that's because I haven't allocated these processors using the job object manager. And so they're just running system processes.
But, you know what, we should give this application a little more headroom. So, I'm going to go to what's called the job object manager, and I'm going to use the job object manager to allocate more CPUs to this process, and it's very simple to do. I can just add four more processors, one, two, three, four, hit apply, and right away what you'll see is four more processors came online.
(Applause.)
MR. KAPLAN: And it balanced the workload for that specific application now across some 12 processors. Well, as you know, in the airline industry at times like the holidays, for example, things really get busy for travel agencies. And so I'm going to increase the number of segments being analyzed for low cost fares to 6.4 billion segments analyzed per day. You'll see the screens on the right and left start painting faster and doing more red lines, and you'll see the system output getting up a little higher. Near linear scale to meet the most demanding needs of scalability.
Okay, but there's still headroom left in this system. So I am going to apply four more processors, one, two, three, four, for a total of 16 processors now, and the load is balanced across all 16 processors. And there's one word the airline industry hates, and that's airfare war, and when that happens it means great low fares and it means a lot of work for the travel agents. So, I'm going to increase the load to 8.5 billion segments analyzed per day. And what you'll see is Windows 2000 Data Center Server has breakthrough performance and scales to meet the most demanding needs in a both manageable and scalable way, and at one-third the cost of the leading UNIX system. How about that?
(Applause.)
MR. KAPLAN: But we're not the only ones, Amadeus ITA is not the only one having a great experience. Credits, please. First Boston is also having a great experience with Windows 2000. Let's check this out.
(Video shown.)
MR. GATES: Well, probably the best-known benchmark at all is the TPCC. This is a benchmark that's handled in a very professional way. There's third party auditing, and the results are very rigorous. Now, in one area, Windows NT has always been very, very strong. That's in the price performance. If you look at the top 40 price performance systems for this transaction capability, every single one of them is Windows NT running SQL Server. We've been able to take with Windows 2000 our single system performance and increase it more than 20 percent. We're able to get on an eight-processor system over 50,000 transactions per minute. And that's the best result on an eight-processor system.
We also stepped back and said, well, what can we do to go even beyond that. And the technique of great importance here is partitioning. In fact, most e-commerce customers today are partitioning their problems across multiple systems. We added some very key capabilities into Windows and SQL Server to make sure that we could support partitioning where you can have a common view of all of the data.
So, let's not look at price performance, let's go to another way of looking at this data, which is the absolute performance. And you can see that you move up with these systems that are mostly partitioned systems to 135,000 transactions per minute. Now, a few months ago, Microsoft was not on this top 10 list whatsoever. But over the last few months, a number of systems were tested using Windows NT and Oracle that got through partition to 99 or 100,000. So we challenged the Windows 2000/SQL Server 2000 team to say, what can you do with your combination? Where can you get on this chart? You know, can you beat one of those Sun systems? Let's really get in the game on this.
And so they put together an eight-system benchmark, and actually just in the last few days, they were able to audit that benchmark. And so where are the results.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: The number one performing system using eight nodes, 150,000 transactions a minute. Well, then we said to them, come on, this is software scale, just add in some boxes and get more performance. And they had done this eight-system benchmark just a few days ago, so they said, okay, we've been up pretty late, but okay we'll keep working on this, we'll add four more nodes and see what we can do. And so, just yesterday, they were able to audit a 12-node benchmark. And so, here's the latest results.
So, now we have a system doing over 227,000 transactions per minute. That's enough to handle all the e-commerce done on the Web last year in two days. And so there's a lot of headroom in that performance capability. It's also fascinating, even on this very, very high performance system to look at the price performance. You know, that number one system is a $4.3 million system, but it's actually cheaper by far than all the other systems in the top ten, in most cases more than a factor of two cheaper. And so people can add capacity and get exactly the performance level they want without running out of headroom.
So, that is breaking news today. We were able to make sure that nobody heard that we were doing this. And I think the competition and the customers will be amazed by this. In fact, we have a number of our Web site customers that are already doing the work to take advantage of this to make sure they get the best performance.
So e-commerce and line of business applications are a very, very key scenario for us. Performance is very critical for those people, ease of management, making sure that you can set up the right security, that you can monitor all the different servers that are running different things and get a console that reports the different results. Managing storage in very rich ways. Having hierarchical storage, having automatic backup capabilities, those were areas where they put a lot of demands on Windows, and we had to add a deep set of capabilities there.
We built into this operating system the application server capability. That's one place where when people do comparisons they have to be careful, because we define Windows 2000 to be a totally complete platform. If you want to take and build a Web site around it, all the things you need to run that Web site are in the operating system.
We're also very excited in the leadership role we're playing with XML. The thing that are going to allow systems to interoperate and do electronic business are all now based on XML. And that's going to reach into the entire system, the tools, the database, the operating system itself, the way that you manage these systems will be based on XML records, XML self-description. With Windows 2000 we've really started that process of building strong support for XML deep into the operating system.
We're very proud of this software scale approach, but it's important to point out that this basic approach is not new. Even in the past, when people wanted a system that would run 24 hours a day, they didn't turn to a single big box. They turned to systems like Tandem that were designed around being able to spread the problem across many systems. The beauty of that is pretty clear; you can upgrade the different systems, just take one down and let the others continue to handle the load. And if there is any type of hardware or software failure, all the other systems continue to run.
We really started down this path towards having software scale over a year ago when we built transaction support into Windows, because that native transaction support is fundamental so that if a system is taken down or anything fails, the customer who connected up to that system won't even notice that it's happened. The work that's being done for them can be transferred automatically over to another system without any loss of integrity in the data. And so there are fundamental design changes having to do with the transactions being built in that allow us to say that Windows 2000 is really the first platform that supports this arbitrary software scale.
Now, what we're really talking about here is the next generation of e-commerce.
MR. STEWART: Oh, Bill, Bill, I'm really sorry, but did I hear "The Next Generation?"
MR. GATES: Well, Patrick, it's the next generation in e-commerce, which is about businesses working with businesses.
MR. STEWART: So, we're talking about cyber space, not outer space.
MR. GATES: Exactly. So, with your permission.
MR. STEWART:Engaged.
MR. GATES: Make it so.
MR. GRONCKI: Hi, it's me, Doug Groncki, again, product manager at Microsoft.
Now, I want to show you how Windows 2000 is a leading platform for e-commerce, particularly business-to-business e-commerce. What you're looking at on the screen is GM Trade Exchange. This is General Motors Enterprise Portal, which they used to manage their supply chain, and their interactions with their business partners. And we're going to highlight a couple of key areas here. We're going to focus on design, procurement and production, and I'm going to show you three demos.
First, an ASP hosted CAD design application from Alibre, online auction services from Commerce One, and then an e-business solution from Pivotal Corporation.
Let's start by taking a look at Alibre. Now, Alibre allows CAD design engineers to collaborate in real time over the Web, even if they're in different locations. This is because the server is being run on the network, in this case a data return, so that the Web designers can be in any location.
Now, we're working on the Chevy Avalanche here, and I have a prototype for the new high-performance seat hinge that we're designing. Now, if you take a look at my screen, you can see that I'm using the Alibre application, but I need to collaborate with my designer, Russ, who happens to be on stage two, but he could just as easily be in Detroit or Milan.
Hey, Russ, what's going on in design?
MR. : It's going pretty good, Doug. Hey, I have the parts up on my screen, what's going on?
MR. GRONCKI: Okay. Let me show you. As you all can see, Russ' screen is the one with the green background on the outside screen. Mine is the one in the center. And as I make changes to the design, I'm going to assemble the parts here; you'll notice that the changes also appear on Russ' screen at the same time. And if you give me just a second here, we'll align the part, and I'll show you what I think seems to be the problem. And we'll just rotate this around here. It's pretty cool, isn't it? We'll zoom in. And, Russ, I'll synchronize views with you here, I'll reorient your view, so you can see what's going on, and it looks like the cotter pin hole isn't quite exposed. So let me pass you control, and see if you can help me out with this.
MR. : Great. I see the problem; I definitely think this is something I can help you with. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to open up the hinge pin design. Now, as you all saw, we need to take that cotter pin hole, and we need to move it up. So, let me make that quick change. Now, I'm going to enter the change. Now, as I update this design, take a look at Doug's machine, and you'll notice that his machine will also be updated in real time.
MR. GRONCKI: That's great, Russ, thank you very much.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: A great new application, ASP hosted on the web, and it's really going to change the way people work. So now I'm going to go back to the GM TradeXchange. We finished the design of the high performance T-hinge, but now I need to find a supplier in order to fabricate this part. And the way I do this is by launching a reverse auction.
Now, you can see all the information about the part that's been introduced on the screen, but this site is being powered by Commerce One today. We're running the auction services from Commerce One; it's running live with Windows 2000 at GM TradeXchange. And we set up our time frames to be 2 days, so we're going to launch the reverse auction, and you can see the administrative screen here, with the new update, with the high performance T-hinge open, it will be open for two days. And with applications like the one from Commerce One, these auction services, General Motors is going to be able to take processes that used to take months and convert it to a matter of days.
Now, back to General Motors, and GM TradeXchange, we're going to fast-forward in time. We've designed the part, and we found a supplier, but now I need to submit an order for all of the production plans at General Motors so we can send this off to our supplier. And in this case I go to procurement, and I type in 25,000, the initial quantity that I want to order. And when I choose release order, the data is sent in XML format over the Web to update Pressfield Systems. And if you look at the screen, the outside screen, you'll see that that order was just updated automatically into Pressfield systems, which is running Pivotal's e-business systems. So I'm changing hats right now.
We've left GM Trade Exchange, and now I'm at the supplier's system. And XML was the common standard that facilitated this complex business transaction, where we could take data from GM, from General Motors and transfer it to Pivotal. This is because Pivotal is a Windows 2000 certified application. It has complete XML support, and is built from the ground up on COM+, to make the application scalable and load-balanced, and when I open up the site here you're going to see that the same information that was presented in General Motors -- you can see it there on the middle screen, is now presented here appropriately in Pivotal's e-business system, with the appropriate quantity and the description for the part, and the appropriate part number for this system.
So if we switch back here and we go back to GM Trade Exchange, what I've just shown you is how Windows 2000, to power their business to business commerce site, they're able to take processes that used to take months or weeks, and convert it to a matter of days, without a single piece of paper.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: Now, General Motors is one of our leading companies already deploying Windows 2000 breakthrough technology worldwide. To help us with a better understanding of how they're doing it, please welcome group vice president and chief information officer of General Motors, Ralph Szygenda.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: Good to have you here, Ralph.
MR. SZYGENDA: I'm even dressed for the business enterprise look today, with my tie.
MR. GATES: Good deal. Now, General Motors is a world leader in all the different aspects of digital business. Tell us about some of the things you're doing.
MR. SZYGENDA: Well, it's an extremely exciting time at General Motors. The automotive industry is going through a transformation that it hasn't seen in the last 80 years. We have built an electronic business across our corporation. This includes business development, production, the ordering environment, supply chain, and the retail experience. Our extended enterprise is approaching 100,000 suppliers, 12,000 dealers throughout the world, many other ventures that we have and relationships. We clearly are a big company, but we're a big company that is becoming very fast, moving at Internet speed. It's very important, then, that we have leading edge technology tools, such as the Windows 2000 suite.
MR. GATES: Tell us a little bit about some of the things you've been doing with Windows 2000?
MR. SZYGENDA: Last July we formulated a team with Microsoft, and also with seven other IT providers to General Motors, most of them have been part of this launch over the last number of days. The goal was to determine how to transform GM using this capability. You see Trade Exchange running production today in that particular environment; also you see the other areas that we have where we're addressing all the different areas of the knowledge worker. We have four major pilots in place in GM China, and our financial services business, GMAC, our research and development, who always wants new capability, and our Saab automotive unit in place already.
MR. GATES:And what kind of plans do you have for Windows 2000 looking forward?
MR. SZYGENDA: Well, over the next year and a half we plan to deploy Windows 2000 to all of our knowledge workers, 125,000 seats throughout our business. There's many more electronic commerce applications that we need to run on. Clearly, the Windows 2000 environment is a key part of our business strategy, our electronic business strategy, and I'd like to really congratulate the Windows 2000 team.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: Well, thanks. It's been great working together and we'll help you with all those challenges.
MR. SZYGENDA: Thanks, Bill, I appreciate it.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: Now, let's go back to Doug and see software scale out in action.
MR. GRONCKI: That's right, Bill. You know, doing business-to-business e-commerce and leading the way on that front is really important, but we want to make sure that Windows 2000 can really scale to the largest sites on the Web. So let's take a look at a financial news site, CBS Marketwatch.com. And you can see it's powered by a Windows 2000 Server here, it's running that live. They chose it because of its reliability and its increased performance as a Web server. Now, as much as we wanted to run this site live and do this demonstration live today, with the help of our partners we're running a subset of the site here on stage, in San Francisco, with the help of Dell, Cisco, and APC. So I've got 35 Dell PowerEdge Servers, running Windows 2000 advanced server. The latest gigabit Ethernet switches from Cisco, and seven UPS systems from APC.
Now, hosting the site here is one thing, but we wanted to generate some demand against this site, to compare it to what Marketwatch.com gets on a typical trading day. So if we can take a look here, of the 35 Dell Power Edge servers 24 are Web servers. We have 100 clients here, and you can see the activity on the monitor. They're generating multiple transactions and requests to those Web servers, to the tune of 320 million hits per day. That's over twice what Marketwatch.com experiences on a typical trading day. And you know what, that's not all. We wanted to push the limits here. We have 400 more Dell workstations here that are generating multiple connections against this Web site.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: And we're running traffic against this site over 10 times what Marketwatch experiences on a typical trading day, to the tune of 1.6 billion hits per day, in this system right here on stage. Now, as you take a look at the screen behind me you can see that we're going to turn to a new product that's coming out in the next year, Microsoft Application Center 2000, that's going to help manage comprehensive Web sites like the one you see there. Now, you're looking at the left at a graphical representation of all of those Web servers, and on the right you can see what's going on, the activity on those servers. And in this case each one is handling more than 600 requests per second, and if I take a look at that in terms of processor they're running at between 80 to 90 percent of their total utilization. That's pretty hot.
Now, to manage this site you want to be able to grow the site very easily, to just add a new Dell server, and make it join the site. And to do this Kevin is going to help me out by plugging in a new server that we have there, and I'm going to right click and choose add to cluster. And following this simple wizard I'm going to type in the new server name, Web 24, and I'll type in the admin, and I'll type next, and it's grabbing all the correct information and what it's doing now is it's taking that information, the HTML, the ASP files, the security and permissions and registry settings and it's writing it to that new system. So it's taking it and interrogating all the Web servers, placing it on the new system and it's going to quickly bring it on line so that it can start handling its share of the capacity of the Web site. We'll give it just a second to communicate to the server. It does take a little while to grab all the application data. If this was easy nobody would need a product like this. And you can see it's been brought online, it's handling its share of the load now.
Now, adding one server is interesting, but suppose I was out to dinner with Alan Greenspan last night, and I heard him mention that he might be raising the interest rates again, I'd expect that with a financial news site like this we'd experience a significant increase in traffic, and you saw that we were already pretty busy. So for just this sort of occasion, we walked through that process that I just showed you with seven additional servers. And Kevin, if you can plug those in, let's see if we can get those online.
You'll see when I take a look at these servers right now that these servers that are waiting in hot standby are not currently available, but when I refresh the cluster, and take a look at those servers again, you can see that they're all being brought on, and they're beginning to handle their share of the capacity of the Web site. And when I take a look at those first servers that we were looking at, you can see that the load on the site is going to change. We were previously running at about 80 percent of capacity, and now you can see that we're shifting down now. The load is redistributed across those new boxes, so that we're only running at about 60 percent of the capacity of these boxes, and they're going to be able to handle that increased demand tomorrow.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: Now, being able to grow your site is very important for Internet sites today, but you also need to make sure that it's available and reliable for your customers. So I'm going to switch to the end-user view right now. And we're going to look at some historical data at Marketwatch. And for the purpose of this demonstration we've highlighted the page here, we've augmented it to include the Web server that served us this content, in this case Web 25. And Kevin, if you'd help me out here, let's get rid of Web 25. Why don't we just get rid of that rack of servers? I think that did it, I don't know about you. But, I think he successfully removed those servers from the rack, probably not the way I would have done it, but the point is what happens to my experience as an end user right now. I want to make sure that even if there's a failure I still have access to the Web pages. And when I refresh the site you're going to see that the next available Web server is going to be able to pick up this request, and there we go, Web 8 picked this up. There's no impact to me as an end user. One-fourth of the capacity of the server just failed, but I as an end user didn't know anything about it, and you know what, that's the way I like it.
(Applause.)
MR. GRONCKI: In business, keeping your customers happy is important. Take a look at this video from Nordstrom, a company famous for that, to see how Windows 2000 works for them.
(Video shown.)
MR. GATES: Well, so where are we on e-commerce? We already have 20,000 dot com sites that are running on Windows 2000 today. And Aberdeen went out and used an automatic tool to measure the up time of those sites and it found that it's over 99.95 percent availability. Now, a lot of these sites are very high-volume sites. I think if you look at the names here, you'll see a lot you recognize, Dell, Microsoft, Nordstrom, NASDAQ, all of these sites have been working with us, and it's been great that they've been able to get up and running, and really verify that we've got a strong foundation for e-commerce.
Well, now we want to show you some of the incredible innovations we've got that are enabled by the new hardware.
MR. STEWART: And, Bill, it's clear that Windows 2000 is a tremendous platform for commerce, and yet the core of any great business is innovation and empowerment.
MR. GATES: That's right. Windows is the platform for creativity.
MR. STEWART: And I have to tell you, this is the section that I've really been waiting for.
MR. GATES: Why don't we take a look at some of these great innovations.
MR. STEWART: No, this is where we segue into a demo without any Star Trek references.
MR. GATES: Great.
MS. LEFKO: Hi, my name is Sarah Lefko; I'm a Windows 2000 product manager. What we've just seen in the past demos is all the heavy lifting Windows 2000 can do. But what I want to show you is how the Windows 2000 platform is cool. I'm going to show that to you in a couple of ways, the hardware, the devices, and the software solutions that we have.
So, first, a lot of time was spent with Windows 2000 making sure that we can both support and enable the next generation of PC systems. Now, we've seen Windows 2000 server running on these very large multi-processor systems. But Windows 2000 Server also runs on this very small IBM NetFinity Server. Windows 2000 also runs on these small notebooks, but also these new devices that are coming out, in particular, this Compaq iPaq machine with the latest USB technology built into it. So, Windows 2000 runs on all of these systems.
However, you also need to have devices, again, in Windows 2000 we have a lot of device support. We had a USB Zip Drive. It's simple, you plug it in and it works on Windows 2000. We have a wireless network card. You plug it in, you can walk around your office and still be connected to the network. Again, all the device support.
Now, media is becoming very important in many, many situations. Windows 2000, we support a number of media devices. In particular, I have this Canon GL-1 digital video camcorder that we support with Windows 2000. I actually am going to run this with my workstation here now. This is the kind of workstation I think everybody wants. It's a 733 megahertz dual processor IBM IntelliStation system. That's the kind of workstation. So, this video camcorder is actually connected to this workstation via an IEEE 1394 high-speed bus connection.
But, what it does is amazing. I'm going to go into a technology preview of the next version of Adobe Premiere. I'm going to go to file, capture, movie capture, and what you'll see here is that the camera is automatically pulling down all the video directly from the camera down to the workstation. And all I needed to do here was plug in the IEEE 1394 right in my workstation, and I can do it.
Not only is Premiere capable of capturing video, but it can also control the device, stop, start, rewind this actual camcorder, and that's because Windows 2000 ships with a standard digital video control, so you can allow it to do that. Now, that's cool.
One of my responsibilities here this week was to actually put together some promotional materials for tonight's Equal Access charity event. So I had an opportunity last night to actually capture with my camcorder a chance meeting between some people. I created a project for this, and I put it into Adobe Premiere, put some creative touches on it, so we can go ahead and preview, and you can see some of those nice fade-ins, fade-outs kinds of stuff. We'll just leave that on me now for the moment.
Anyway, so the file I created it actually very large. It's about 450 megabytes. Now, in order for me to create my Web site, I wanted to make sure it is optimized for that. So, I went ahead and converted that file, I went ahead and exported that clip out to a Windows Media File. You know what it's 1 megabyte now. That's amazing.
So, I took that file, put it on the Windows 2000 server where I enabled Windows Media Services to allow the video to be streamed down to everybody's desktop. I then used Adobe's Go Live product to create a Web site, and used the upcoming release technology to put some cool effects on it. So we can look here at it.
(Video shown.)
MS. LEFKO: So, I then actually wanted to take that audio file with me, I'm a big Santana fan. And so I created a Windows Media file and pulled out the audio. I'm going to take that file and drag it over to my Compaq Flash memory card, drag it over and copy it over. Now, this Compaq Flash reader is actually USB based. Again, it's simple, plug it into the machine, the drivers are loaded, it looks like another drive on my system for me.
Okay. Let me take out the card, and I'm going to place this into my pocket PC device, go ahead and stick that in here. And all I need to do is go here and click on play, and we can hear the audio. Now, that's smooth.
So, the hardware, the devices, and the software solutions I just showed demonstrate to you how the Windows 2000 platform is both simple and cool.
Now, one last note, customers ask us to support DVD in Windows 2000, well, we did it. But, you know what, we went a step further. What I have over here is actually a new DVD player, it's a QPS DVD RAM Drive, it plays just like your DVD player today; however, it does more than that. It actually allows you to read and write to it many times. Not only that, you can also store up to 5.2 gigabytes, that's about 10 CDs, worth of data on it as well. Again, Windows supports it today.
I want to show you how one of our customers, ESPN, is using Windows 2000 in some very innovative ways.
(Video shown.)
MR. GATES: Windows 2000 was a very ambitious project. I think it's fair to say it was the most ambitious software project ever done. It represents over a $2 billion engineering investment, a 5000-person team, with massive testing going into the product. We had to invent new ways to do testing to make sure we get this reliability. We're also very pleased with the incredible industry involvement that goes way beyond Microsoft. The partners have gone out and made the investment to train their people, the services are available now for people who want to do Windows 2000 deployment. The new devices have been tested. The new systems are there.
We're also very pleased with the great support we've had from customers here. The over 750,000 beta testers, and the people who participated in some special programs we've put together, our joint development customers, and our rapid deployment customers. The product wouldn't be nearly as good as it is without their great involvement.
I also want to make it clear that Windows 2000 is the kickoff for a whole new generation of products that we're building. We're taking everything we do, whether it's SQL Server or Exchange, our BizTalk work, and putting that on Windows 2000. And so everything you see listed here comes out this year. The Data Center Server, which is the highest end incarnation Windows 2000, the 64-bit versions of Windows 2000, and we're very pleased with the great progress Intel is making on the Itanium, and the way that Windows fits together with that, and then the whole host of products that you see there. And it's really with these that we're orchestrating the momentum that you'll see around the Windows 2000 generation.
So, first, let me say thank you to the development team. We've got a lot of them here, and I want to thank them for their incredible work. They've been fantastic.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: I want to also say thank you for all the industry support, the partners and the customers and the great work they've done.
(Applause.)
MR. GATES: And finally, I want to thank Patrick Stewart for joining us and helping launch Windows 2000.
(Applause.)
MR. STEWART: Bill, it has been my pleasure and a real privilege to be part of what you have created. It's clear that Windows 2000 is the platform that will take us into the future, and I'll be waiting for you there.
MR. GATES: Okay. I've got one last little demo I want to show you. This is going to prove to you how smooth Windows 2000 is. So, we can just click on one last media file, and this one is so good it will almost look like it's real. It's called Santana Live.
(Video shown and end of event.)
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