Remarks by Bill Gates
Enterprise Solutions Conference
Miami, March 21, 2000

MR. GATES: I'm really excited to be here this morning and talk about the incredible opportunity we all have as the Internet is revolutionizing business and the way people communicate. Over the last 25 years, Microsoft has been sending out a message about empowerment and the PC as the fundamental tool. But, I'd say in the last year the recognition of the importance of these tools and how they'll change things has been greater than ever before. I was talking with Mauricio about the great group we have here this year, and he and I were reflecting on the fact that it really represents the idea that people see an opportunity to invest, people see a chance to change their strategy and get out in front in this new era. I titled my comments today "Business Without Barriers," because the digital environment really is going to allow people to work in a way that eliminates a lot of the barriers of the past.

The Internet, of course, is nothing new. In fact, the original Internet was being used in universities in the United States over 25 years ago. It was about five years ago when it started to explode outside of that university environment and move out into the world of business, really achieving a critical mass of content to draw more people in. Now, part of this was the invention of the technology, the viewing technology, the browser and HTML. I think equally, or even more important, was the fact that communications costs had dropped so rapidly that it became economic to do these connections, not just inside the United States, but on a global basis.

And so the origin of the Internet is just this idea of going to a Web site and viewing the information. And in those days when a company would say, "do we have a Web site?" it was simply asking, can you go and see some information about the company. Well, a few years ago the level of sophistication moved up very substantially. And so then the question wasn't just having a Web site where people could gain some information, but rather having a Web site where people could go and do transactions, where people could go and buy and sell and see the status of what was going on. So those Web sites, in terms of their sophistication and complexity, moved up to a new level. We came up with technologies like scripting to allow people to build those Web sites. So people started to measure the volume of business, the revenue of business that they had there.

What we're seeing now is that we're really in the third phase of the Internet. And it's a phase that is somewhat different than what came before. It's in this phase that we're using the term Business Internet. This is the idea that even complex business can be done through digital Internet connections, things like agreeing on a delivery contract, or an overall business arrangement, not just the transaction itself but all the collaboration and ongoing exchange of information that's necessary around a business relationship.

Now, part of this, again, is an advance in the underlying technology. The technical term here of importance is XML. This means that instead of just exchanging screens of information you can actually take the data itself. So if you want to view information from many different things, you want to see the economic forecast, you want to see internal sales data, have those brought together in a very rich view, the Internet is there to help you do that. So this is a generation of the Internet that can fulfill all the dreams out there about its transformation capabilities. It does mean that in terms of companies building Web sites they have to step up to a new level, and the demand of course for doing this, for the expertise around these things is very, very high.

That's why Microsoft sees its role as making it easy with the building blocks to do this, making it so that it doesn't require as much complex coding as in the past. In fact, we want to take Web sites that would have taken 10 man-years to build in the past and make it take less than a man-year to build, because of the tools that automate what needs to be done. So we're very excited about the contribution we can make as a dedicated software provider in pulling this all together.

Focusing on Latin America, there's no doubt that every country in the region is very awake to the opportunity of the Internet. If you look at the stock market valuations, if you look at what's going on with the communications and wireless there, you look at the companies making investments, it's very exciting to see that everybody believes that Latin America will move very strongly in this area. I just took a few of the statistics that I think show this. Over a billion dollars of advertising on line. Of all the regions the growth in information technology spending is number two, spending on Web commerce is predicted to be, just within three years, at over $10 billion, and that's the growth rate of the Web services business of over 40 percent a year. So it's a very exciting picture. In fact, it's one where everybody has to think, how do we get to the forefront when everybody is moving so quickly and doing these things.

This is a revolution that's not just about business, but it also embraces people at home. It embraces education; it embraces that way that government relates to its citizens, and the way it gets information out there. When the PC first came along, we knew it was revolutionary, but no one was paying attention. So we had to go around and say, please, pay attention. This time, the press is there every day, in fact, the amount of coverage is unbelievable. Even the TV shows, you have people using their Internet PCs to meet new people and wonderful things like that.

What I've done is I've pulled together a video that captures some of the idea of these neat things that are going on, where people are talking about the Internet. So let's go ahead and take a look at that.

(Video shown.)

MR. GATES: So technology is in the mainstream, and there's a lot we can do to make it easier to use and more reliable. Now, over the last 25 years, Microsoft's vision has stayed the same. Our vision statement talked about the PC and how we'd make it pervasive in every home and on every business desktop. Now, that vision remains as true today as it's ever been. In fact, the usage level of PCs is breaking records all the time. In the United States, we have about 60 percent of the homes with a PC, and that's expected to grow over the next three years to 75 percent. And although there will be a lag for that in other countries, I don't think in the long run the usage will be any different. And so and our old vision statement was doing just fine. However, we decided we needed to take on something more revolutionary, bolder statement that talked about the use of these tools in a broader way. And so now we talk about empowering people through great software at any time, and any place, on any device. And so the idea here is that although the PC remains at the center of activity in terms of creating documents, annotating documents, that your TV, your cell phone, and a variety of new devices will also let you get at your information.

And software is at the center of this, making sure that the information is there when you need it, making sure you can view it exactly in the form that makes sense on that device, and so, in the same way that our vision statement was revolutionary in terms of a belief in PCs 25 year ago, now this statement is also revolutionary, and will take most of the next decade to fulfill the whole promise of what can be done here.

So, when we talk about the PC, where is the PC going? The PC has always been a fast changing device, whether it's the graphics, the storage, the performance, the memory, all of those things are on a very, very fast improvement rate. What we're seeing now is that as we get the screen to be better, even things like reading can be done off of the PC. Today you still think of long documents, printing them out, and reading magazines strictly off of paper. When you go to meetings, you take notes on paper. And so we have a paper world and a digital world that are mixed together. As we improve the PC screen and the software, you'll be able to do that reading off of the screen.

Things like photography are now moving more and more into digital form. Music is moving into digital form. Video editing is being done in digital form. We have new ways that people will share and collaborate, being able to annotate Web sites, send them around to each other, being able to have mail boxes that include their voice mail and their fax, as well as their electronic mail. Being able to control their communications, pick which messages are important to them, and so they get notified only about the things that really count.

So, the range of applications for the PC from games to deep analysis and business forecasting, all of those things will use this extra power. The price of the PC will continue to come down. The popularity of the portable machines will continue to go up. They will go to over a third of all new PCs because people want that mobility. Those new mobile PCs will often be connected over the wireless network and so even when you're traveling, you'll still be able to get the latest information.

There's no end in sight in terms of rate of improvement, the chip improvement, the disk storage, and so the capability to connect these devices up to the PC -- and to the Internet at high speed -- really gives them more utility than they've ever had before. We'll have PCs, we'll have the high-end servers that use PC technology, and I'll talk about the new kind of performance and reliability we're delivering on those servers. We also have these new devices, the device in the pocket, whether you call that a phone or a personal digital assistant. You'll be able to see things on your little color screen so that whenever you're talking with somebody, whether it's about a schedule or a document, you'll have that screen to help out with that dialogue.

Every TV set will eventually have an interactive connection. That's a long ways away because most TVs today are simply receiving a broadcast signal. But through technologies like the digital cable networks, or the phone networking upgraded, the so-called DSL capability, all the different services, video, voice, and data can be delivered across a common network using the standards of the Internet. And so, the variety of devices will be much greater. The need for rich applications, the need for ease of use, will be stronger than ever before, and that's where software standards, if anything, are more important in this era than they've ever been before.

This is my most technical slide. Since I'm the chief software architect now, I had to put at least one very technical slide in here. But it's actually making a point of great importance. You hear this term "XML" being used a lot, XML schema, self-descriptions, and the question is, what does that really mean? Is it really something quite different than what we've had before?

And my answer is that it does. The use of XML doesn't immediately solve tough problems, but it gives us an opportunity for the first time to allow systems to interoperate in a way that's never been possible before. In the past, when we've talked about computer systems interoperating, it was always about, can you simply get the bits from one computer system to move over to the other. Now, what we're interested in is the meaning of the information. If I have a purchase order that I want to send, does the other company understand all that information? And with XML we have a chance to have that high level information automatically be understood. And so what this can mean is that instead of spending millions of dollars to glue your computer systems together, they can automatically understand the information that the different systems are offering up. This is very, very important if you want to have buyers and sellers out on the Internet and you want the buyer to be able to say who is offering this product for sale to me. We don't want to have to visit all the different Web sites. We want that search command to bring you the things you care about, and that can only be done using this XML approach.

As we represent the data in XML, we give ourselves some flexibility to view it in different forms, to customize the view, to combine data on the screen into the things that we care about, and to view it on different devices. People who build Web sites shouldn't have to author the Web sites multiple times, once for the TV, once for the phone, once for the PC. They should simply build the information in this new form that all of our tools are being designed around, and then simply take that data and map it to all of the different devices with a very, very simple piece of code.

And so the importance of XML is something you're seeing throughout our products and throughout the industry, XML standards, XML tools, making Microsoft Office deal with this. It's a pretty fundamental transformation of all of the pieces of software, but the payoff for this is going to be very, very dramatic. When we think about this business Internet, we know that our building blocks need to be extremely powerful. Part of this is a new level of reliability and scalability that has been demanded of us for reliability and scalability even beyond what people expected out of the mainframe. Two or three years ago, we started to hear about this, people really saying to us that their cost of ownership was too high, that the reliability issues really hadn't been given the right priorities. And so, throughout the Windows 2000 development project, our top priority was this scalability and reliability effort. Those servers, when you're doing business with them, they have to be up 24 hours a day. Now, when you look back at the history of computing and say, who has had these ultra-reliable systems, the answer is that they've, in the past, been specialized systems. They were systems from people like Tandem who built in a level of redundancy at the software layer.

Any solution where you have one hardware box, that's a single point of failure. Even if it's a very expensive, very well designed piece of hardware, it's not going to be reliable enough for things like a stock exchange or business on the Internet. And so the solution is quite simple, it's to have many, many different hardware boxes using this layer of software so that if any one of those boxes fails that the users of that Internet site don't notice. That it automatically takes the work and sends it to the other boxes.

The beauty of this approach is that not only do you get the incredible reliability, but depending on how much performance you want, you just add in those new boxes. And so this level of scale and reliability is a requirement for the Business Internet. And that's why it was so critical that we make what we call the software scale breakthrough with Windows 2000. And so, it's fundamental to having the right infrastructure for running internal applications, but particularly for the electronic commerce.

Now, if you just have those great servers, that's one element to the equation, but a point that I often make is that just having a great Web site is only one step in a company thinking of itself as an Internet company. You also have to change all the processes inside your company to be digital. The people at the desk, what we call the knowledge workers, need to work in a different way. They need to work with no paper forms. We've talked about that before, good progress there. They need to have whatever meetings they have be far more effective, not just sitting and listening to a presentation, but based around collaboration. They need to be able to retrieve the memories of the work done in the past. They need to be able to customize how they view things. And so, once a request from a customer comes in on your Web site, it should move through the company in this purely digital form in order for the greatest efficiency.

Many of you are faced with competitors who are startup companies who have got very high valuations by saying they will start from the beginning with the Internet as a given, and if you look inside those companies their processes are very, very digital, very, very efficient, and so that's the level of capability that you're being compared to.

We have a lot of customers who are pioneering this and doing fantastic work. The one example I wanted to highlight of this type of anytime anywhere knowledge work is Bansud. Of course, that's the leading Argentine bank, they've got a great digital dashboard, where they take all the messages and they tie that together with their business indicators, so somebody knows immediately if there's some issue of concern. If the business indicators deviate from what's expected, that person just sits down at the desktop, sees that that's happened, they simply click and immediately see the detailed information. And they can get as much information as they want, mail it to their colleagues, and take very quick action to make sure that whatever the issue is, if the customer is unhappy, or the product is not doing well, the responsiveness is there. And this needs to be very responsive, very efficient really characterizes business in the era of the Internet.

I wanted to show you some of the advances that we're making in this digital dashboard approach. Now, we talked a little bit about the digital dashboard last year, but we've come a long way since we sat down with the customers and found out what do they want to see on their digital dashboard. And I also want to show some research work we're doing that will take this to a new level. I'd like to ask Steve VanRoekel from our future technologies group to come out and help me show where we expect the digital dashboard to be headed.

Hi, Steve.

MR. VanRoekel: Well, there's a common theme that I'm going to show through all the demonstrations, the three demonstrations here, and that is the challenges that knowledge workers face with information overload, and what Microsoft is doing to help out with that. Now, the first one, as you mentioned in the Bansud case study is the digital dashboard. I'm going to show a sample digital dashboard that we have, and talk a little bit about what the digital dashboard will do for knowledge workers.

You know, in the old days of communications, in the era before PCs and email, all of us sent messages around with paper. We'd write out a memo, I'd stick it in an envelope and send it to you. You'd get that memo, maybe make comments, put it back in an envelope and put it back. And corporations were running for years and years using this method. Well, I don't know about all of you but I typically in a typical week get about 1,200 email messages. And so prioritizing those, looking at the email messages and then figuring out what's important to me, is really hard to do nowadays. So we're doing some things to help out.

One of those is the digital dashboard. In a corporation, one of the challenges for knowledge workers is finding the right information, the right tools. If I want to get sales data I might have to go out and run Excel, go out and attach it to a database, run a pivot table and look at the data. If I wanted to get some other information about the corporation I have to go to a different place, maybe a different Web site. What the digital dashboard does is brings all that information to one place, brings all the important information essential to the knowledge worker and puts it in one central place.

Digital dashboards are built using Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft technologies, and these tools kits to build digital dashboards are actually available on the Microsoft Web site. So corporations like BANCUD or other corporations, or yourself could go out and download the toolkit to do it. So this is a typical looking digital dashboard here, your digital dashboard. And I can get all kinds of information in one central place, so maybe all the critical messages where I have a filter set up on my email in box, so all the very important messages that are marked urgent or need replies within a certain time frame show up on my digital dashboard, and it's prioritized really well. I can also get a nice view of my calendar, so I can see what meetings are coming up, I can prioritize the meetings based on messages I have coming in, and look at additional information.

Now, on the Microsoft digital dashboard, we have all kinds of digital dashboards running around the company, one important thing in the Seattle area is the traffic. I live in the west side of town, and the Microsoft campus is on the east side, across Lake Washington. The 520 bridge is often busy, so I can actually go out to a cam and look at the bridge, and see how the span looks for my commute in the morning, or the way home. I often see that it's very congested and I just stay at work longer, and keep working. I also can look at things like weather information, and pull in weather information. I can go in and look at rain building up over the mountains there, or get a nice view of the U.S. satellite weather, and see what the weather is going to look like for business travel, et cetera.

Now, the real power of digital dashboard is being able to go in and dive into real knowledge worker information. I've got a nice view here on the right hand side of some important information, contacts in a company that we work with, and some vital information about a customer. So I could dive into the customer, get some important information, get different views of it. So maybe I want to look at it that information a pivot table, and then pivot the data to get a better view. So if I dive into the center region maybe I want to look at the desktop applications, something like Microsoft Office sales revenues that are being produced around the company. And I might even want to take that data and map the data, so I get more information and can really dive in and look at it in a really rich way.

Now, we envisioned the digital dashboard. Today the corporations can build them, put in elements that are important to workers, but in the future we envision the digital dashboard to be a place where users can actually customize their experience. So if certain things are important to the user, I should be able to grab that information and drag it and drop it into my digital dashboard and have that customized experience. In an XML world I think that would be very possible.

So the next two demonstrations I'm going to show you are research demos done by Microsoft Research. The first one is a priorities demo. So I've got my Outlook inbox here, you can see a snippet of what my Outlook inbox looks like, and as I get messages, in a lot of corporations most of the communication is done through email, some corporations, including Microsoft, are now integrating voice mail into the inbox. So voice messages will show up in my email inbox. And I've got a hard time often to go in and look at that information and prioritize what's most important, what do I need to look at in my inbox, what do I need to prioritize. So those 1,200 messages that I get in a week -- some of those are very important, some of those are maybe not so important. I really have no good way today to dive into it.

So our research group is working on a new tool called Priorities. And what this does, Priorities basically does two things. One of those is as an email comes into my inbox, it will go out and look at the email message very closely, and figure out the priority and assign a number to that message. So you can see I've got some messages in here with some priorities assigned. How does it do that? Well, it looks at who the person that's sending it is, so if it's high up in the organizational chart, it looks at the Windows 2000 Active Directory and looks at our org chart, if it's from you assign it a high priority, if it's from someone else, my wife or someone, assign it a not so high priority. You can customize the priorities list, so I can bump her up. It looks at that, it looks at if it's time sensitive information, if the person has marked the message urgent, if there's actionable items inside, if I've sent someone a message and they reply back it applies a higher priority to it. So it's a nice interaction.

I then can get a view of that information right here in my Outlook inbox. So I've actually set up a column here, it's very easy to do in Outlook; I can then sort by that. So if I want to look at the high priority items, and have Outlook put this automatic formatting and assign a color to it, so I can instantly see in my in box, what are all those high priority messages and color those red. Now the other thing Priorities does is decides how to notify you of the information. So if I go into options for my Priorities app, it says on the desktop how should I assign the priorities? Something with a low priority should be given a certain number, medium and high. And then if the priorities are over a certain level, let's say it's over 75, how do I want to handle that? Do I want the Priorities application to page me automatically? Do I want it to send someone else email on my behalf, so they can take action on a high priority message?

Also the Priorities app is built with incredible intelligence, so it will go in and look at my calendar to see if it senses I'm out of the office and know how to handle messages. So if it sees that I'm in a meeting in a different room than my office, it will maybe then send a message off to someone else, to handle or page me, or call me on the cell phone or something like that. The other thing Priorities will do is listen to your office. So with a microphone that's built into your desktop it will actually listen to your office. If it hears people mingling around in your office it will assume your busy, if it hears silence and your calendar is free it will assume you're there working. So it will take action based on that.

And I can go beyond the desktop, if I put in my pager, cell phone, email message, I can set up all kinds of notifications. One my favorites here is to actually have it page me with my daily schedule. So it actually sends me my schedule each morning, and I can look at that on my pager. So this will be integrated into Microsoft applications very soon.

Now, the third demonstration -- I'm going to take this funny looking microphone and I'm going to put it on my head here -- the third demonstration is a demonstration also by Microsoft research, and this is called MiPad. This is actually the first time this has ever been seen at a demonstration. We wanted to unveil it for the Latin American community, to show it off. MiPad will be a future form factor of a wireless device. It will look maybe something like this, with about that size, about the size of or normal palm sized or pocket PCs, it will nicely fit in my hand. What MiPad will do is integrate the ability of email, calendar, contacts, all the things Windows CE does, with a high speed wireless connection, so I can do voice over it, I can do phone calling, I can anything I would normally want to do with a PDE. It sort of integrates everything we want to have. And the nice thing about MiPad is it will be voice activated. So I'll actually grab the MiPad device and talk to the device and have it interact with me through voice. So let's try this out here. Remember, this is a research project, so it doesn't always work.

Show mail. I just got my in box. Pull up a message here, so Jon Bromberg send me a message saying he'd like to meet about the ESC keynote and discuss it afterwards. You'll notice down here there's a little do box. And what do is letting me do is when I click in there, I'm actually tapping -- if I had a wireless I'd actually tap with my pen, instead of my mouse here, and talking and telling it to do something. So when I click it and tell it to do something, the system is intelligent enough to listen to what I'm saying and figure out intelligently how to handle that. So I can do things like schedule a meeting or PIM. And it pulled up a new meeting with Jon Bromberg, discuss the keynote, your office. So you can see it's actually filing in all those blanks. And it's context sensitive, so where I click it knows how to handle that. And it's also very intelligent so start time I might say, tomorrow, and it picked out Wednesday, 3:00 p.m., so it picks that up.

So the do box is actually very sensitive, so I can go in here and do things like, "Am I free tomorrow?" It will actually pull up tomorrow's calendar to do things. So it's even beyond the normal kind of commands, where you would naturally speak to it as if you were speaking to any other system. Send email to Bill Gates, I can CC some people, or put some other people. Orlando Ayala. It does make mistakes. Orlando Ayala, Orlando Ayala, there it is. My promotion, this is where you get to say forget it.

The last thing I'll show you is also with the integrated phone ability it should be able to look at my contact list. It's got phone numbers and all the other information in it, and I should be able to pick up the device and simply talk to it, say things like call Bill Gates at work, and it will pull up my contact manager with the integrated phone, with your phone number ready to go, simply dial it and call from there. So it will be very, very easy. So to summarize this, all of these tools will really be extended in new and interested ways into Microsoft applications. You'll see this coming out in future form factors, even expanded digital dashboards with XML ability, and the Priorities application integrated into many of the applications, including Outlook, very, very soon. This is really kind of extending our vision of anytime anywhere access to information, really making it easy for all that inundated information I get in a week to be prioritized and taken care of in the best way possible.

MR. GATES: Thanks, Steve. That's super.

MR. VanRoekel: Thank you.

MR. GATES: One of the things we were trying to illustrate there is this idea of it being a multi-device world. All of the contacts, the calendar were set up on the PC, but then when he got to the My Pad device, the information was there. And any changes he made on that MiPad device automatically go back through the Internet and show up on the PC, as well. So when we think about our software now, we have to think about a much broader environment that we're going to make it easy for people to deal with information.

Well, we talked about the knowledge worker, let's focus in on this IT infrastructure. A lot of requirements here, as Microsoft servers have grown in volume, being used not only for file servers, but mail servers and applications servers, the demands on these things to really take everything that was good about the mainframe and really go beyond that has been very, very clear. Whether it's the security, the ease of deployment, the ongoing support capabilities we offer, the centralized management, a lot of requirements here were very important to us in building Windows 2000. The timing of this conference is great, because just a month ago we did the official launch of Windows 2000, and we're really excited about the reception that product has received, both within the industry in terms of the hardware that is being built around it, and with the customers who have it now and have rolled it out.

We worked with a number of customers early on, and so even on the launch date we were able to announce some people who had done very aggressive roll outs. A good example of this is a popular Internet site; this is a leading provider of online auctions for the Hispanic market, which is Dave Grimote. Dave agreed to put Windows 2000 into their production environment right as the product came out. And so it took them one week, they were able to move over with no programming, and they're a great example of a customer saying, wow, the improvement is a lot more significant than I would have expected. The manageability, the flexibility, and the kind of performance that they're getting out of these boxes. Particularly with this approach, of being able to combine the different servers together, businesses like this one don't need to worry about being able to serve any demand that they can generate coming out to their Web site.

So the e-commerce Web site in some ways is the most demanding application of all. The ability to make sure that on single transaction gets dropped, that you can keep updating these applications, and that these applications are easier to build and monitor than they have been. The Web kind of exploded, and people are using fairly simplistic approaches, scripting and things like, that to build the applications. It's only this year that we'll be able to come out with a set of tools that really address the scenario. And as I said earlier, allow people to build Web sites in dramatically less, a tenth as much effort as they've had to.

The performance issue I think we're really going to be able to, this year, as people absorb what we've done with Windows 2000 -- we're going to put this issue to bed. It's not going to be an issue that people are going to have a lot of concern about. We really have two things going on at once. We have the additional power of the hardware, and it's not just the individual processor speed, although certainly Intel continues to do a good job there, it's how it gets pulled into the system. Now, we've moved up to where eight processor systems are very common. And you get amazing performance out of those systems. Even above that there will be 16 and 32 processor systems that are now becoming available, that move up to that next level. That's hardware scaling, hardware scaling is a great thing to have as one of the elements of performance, particularly now with software, to be able to take these applications and spread them across the different servers. We have automatic load bouncing built into Windows, and we have this new add-on product that lets you manage those single systems.

So, this kind of software scale is a pretty incredible approach. In fact, we had a really exciting milestone in proving how far we could go with this at the Windows 2000 launch, and that is together with Compaq we benchmarked on the latest servers, actually in this case an eight-processor server, TPCC benchmarks that went way beyond previous systems. Previous records had been like 135,000 transactions, and we went to over 230,000 transactions a minute. And so, both on a relative basis and an absolute basis, that's a piece of breakthrough work and really illustrates the principle that I'm talking about, a very important requirement for the Internet applications.

Another great showcase here that I'll mention is a piece of work we're doing in Brazil with Bradesco that is, of course, the largest retail bank, private bank there, and they're building an integrated e-commerce portal. They're focused on investors. It's a real range of products, over 500 different products, and the ability to pay in a very integrated way. In fact, this site received the Smithsonian Award recently for the pioneering work that's being done there. This is an example of a site that really needed the advanced work that we've done in Windows 2000, and so we're pleased to have it as an incredible showcase.

So, what am I saying? I'm saying there's a lot of opportunities not just at the technical level, but at the business level, to do things a new way. Digital Dashboard is one example of that, making your people more effective. Bringing in wireless access, both in your business so that people can carry their portals around to meetings, and to take them out as they did with customers, wireless will be very, very important there. The platform capabilities here now allow us to say to you that for all your new applications that the modern tools and the kind of performance you want are available on a single platform. We understand you'll continue to have a variety of systems. And we're going to use XML to provide a level of interoperability never seen before.

But for the new work, the Windows platform really has the ability to take all the new applications. It's not the case that you have a tough choice between the price performance leader and the absolute performance leader. Now those two have been brought together with the Windows 2000 advancements. The partners we've got here sponsoring this event are very key partners for us. Hewlett-Packard is doing, of course, a great range of products around Windows; Compaq, who we're doing an amazing number of new, advanced research things with; and then on the services side Pivotal and KPMG and the partnership they've created there. So that, again, represents the idea that they're going to be consultants who really understand the pioneering examples and can help you put these things together. Microsoft has the commitment to make sure that the understanding of our latest technology that trained people are available through the leaders in the service business so that there isn't a bottleneck in terms of pulling these things together.

If you just look at what we're coming out with this year, it's really in response to this new era. In June, we'll have a Datacenter release of Windows 2000. Late in the year, as Intel brings out the Itanium, which is their 64-bit processor, we'll have the version of Windows that's adapted to that. We have a version of Windows that's for special devices. We've got the new releases of SQL and Exchange. I won't go through all of them, but every one of these is designed around this XML vision. SQL Server 2000 is a big showcase there. BizTalk, which is about business contracts over the Internet, is XML from top to bottom. And so, this year, we're shipping more new platform products than we have any year in our history. And that's because we see this demand and we see that we've got to have an integrated set of products.

Our commitment to grow our capacity in Latin America is stronger than ever. We're seeing the demand, and so we're moving as quickly as we can to make sure that our consulting services, our support services, move up to the new level that's really demanded there. So, it's really quite exciting what the possibilities are, and we look forward to working with you to realize those possibilities.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

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