Remarks by Bill Gates
WinHEC 2000
New Orleans, Apr. 25, 2000

MR. GATES: Good morning. It's exciting to talk about the growth path of the PC in the future, because the PC has always been a fast-changing device. I mean, I think everybody involved with the PC is proud of how it's become the most empowering tool of all time. Whether it's in the world of business, improving the economy, making jobs more effective, or perhaps even more interestingly, out in the hands of students, or people at home, opening up new frontiers of communications and entertainment. And this show plays a very important role in the evolution of the PC. It's a chance for us all to come together and talk about the new horizons. And there are more new horizons and opportunities, for us today than there ever have been before. And that's why I've entitled my comments this morning The Best Is Yet To Come.

The PC derives a lot of its incredible capability from the huge number of companies that work around the PC, whether it's hardware, software, services, training, consulting, there's never been anything like the breadth of the PC industry. And so the choices that customers have are really quite phenomenal.

We actually see the PC architecture extending its reach. Moving so that we're taking advantage of PC architecture in devices that you wouldn't even think of as being part of the traditional PC definitions. Things like the X-Box gaming environment. And then moving up on the high end to create the hardware complexes with multiple systems that deliver more performance than any computer on the entire planet. So that range of capabilities is also going to be matched by a range of form factors far greater than what we've had today.

People are really used to the PC changing. The fact that it's going to get smaller. The fact that we're going to interact with it in new ways. Voice, annotations, speech recognition, handwriting on tablet-sized form factors, and I think people in the PC world know that those things are coming. It's actually the people in the other world that we're impacting in a revolutionary way, the world of the phone and the TV that aren't used to this dynamic PC architecture. And yet a lot of the work that will be done on those devices will be an outgrowth of the PC architecture.

What are the things that we want to tackle on the PC? Of course, the price has come down constantly over the years. It's become a very affordable device. But at this point the thing that people would really like to see us prioritize, particularly in the software arena, is the complexity. Making sure that whether it's setting up a Web site, or sharing photos, communicating in new ways, transmitting documents out to friends, that we do that in a way that's even simpler. And, fortunately, we have that opportunity. By taking the Internet and using it to keep the software always up-to-date, an effort that we started with Windows Update, and by making sure that any issues that are coming up with drivers, or interaction of applications. We're constantly improving those on the PC. We can make the PC experience even better. We took a huge step forward in addressing reliability and this constant updating capability with the release of Windows 2000. And, as you'll hear later, our road map has that technology moving down onto all PC offerings in the work that we're doing in the next calendar year.

Another key point is to expand the form factors, to let these new forms come alive by software enablement. Now, our vision is very broad here. It really goes back to the core roots of what Microsoft is great at. You know, we're a software company. We hire great software engineers. We work with software developers to create opportunities for them in building applications. And we see that software, as it runs on the Internet, really turning the Internet into something very new. Of course, it will be a place where you can go out and get presentations of information, but more and more the information you see on your screen won't just be from a single Web site, it will be all the data that you care about in a rich view that's customized not only to the device that you're on, but also to the things that you're interested in.

And so this, you could say, is the second phase of the Internet. The first phase, from 1995 and the five years after that, was about HTML and presentations, and that coexisted alongside the traditional PC applications and programming model. With this second phase that really is starting now, we take standards like XML, we take the rich data-view separation, and we bring the Internet world and the PC applications world together. So, it's not just about reading screens, it's about your creativity, your creating documents, your annotations, and your finding information from different sources all brought together.

The PC, which is the full screen device with the storage and software power to run these applications, will be at the center of that. There will be an incredible number of other devices. In fact, some of them, because they'll be incredibly low cost, may even be in unit volumes at the same level of the PC itself. And so we need to make sure that the information sharing, the security, the user interface integrates in with those other devices to make it a completely seamless experience. And that's why last year Microsoft took its slogan that talks about its vision and updated it for the first time in our 25-year history. And so we now talk about this broader world, empowering people through great software anytime, anyplace, on any device.

That means we have to keep the PC getting better and better. Making it more natural, more powerful, and there are so many great things going on there. We see the PC really being part of mainstream culture. You see it on sitcoms, talk shows -- you know, this is a very mainstream device. And some of the ways it's portrayed remind us there's a lot more we can do to make it better.

Let's go ahead and take a look at a video that captures some of this exposure that the PC is getting.

(Video shown.)

MR. GATES: Still some work to do on the PC. So what will the PC of tomorrow look like? Well, certainly it will continue to build on the world we've done to date. We can build a machine that has these new capabilities, without giving up the incredible compatibility with the applications and the learning that people have around this machine. We can continue to use the model, an incredibly open model that involves literally tens of thousands of companies contributing their best work to this machine. So it's really the product of broad industry efforts, meetings like this one, and lots and lots of standards that pull it together. The pace of change will not slow down. So what will be new?

Of course, the technology, the speed, the form factors will be new. But, also, through software improvements, and by this constant connection to the Internet, we can create appliance like simplicity and reliability, while at the same time supporting the new and exciting form factors. One of the biggest impacts is that most of these PCs, over time, will be broadband connected. So the idea of real time communications with voice and video, or simply getting your entertainment in a new way that is very interactive in a deep sense, all of those will come to the PC, and come to the PC first. And so the PC of tomorrow will be quite different than what we have today.

Let's look at some of the new applications that are driving PC priorities. The digital world I'd say is very key here, whether it's creating rich animation and content for the Web, or simply experiencing those things. Digital music has grown to be one of the top three applications running on the PC. The fact that you can manage all your music, organize it the way you care about, find the latest things that are out there, and either play it off the PC, transmitting it to other devices in the home, or downloading it to the smaller devices, that's a phenomenal change. Digital pictures, those are becoming mainstream, and it will take a few years before we pass film sales in terms of the number of digital images made, but that will certainly happen.

And we've got to do a lot in the platform to make that easy. Even video editing, which a few years ago would have been thought of as out of reach of the typical PC user, will be a built-in capability as these digital video cameras and interconnect techniques advance. And we've actually built that in to the Windows Millennium product, and we'll have that in future versions of Windows, as well.

The PC as a leading interactive game platform is clear-cut. PCs improve every year, whereas the classic games platform, whether it's PlayStation, or X-Box or the others, because of the business model, they pick a design, and they stay with that design for about a four-year period. So what that means is the PC, which is already quite a bit ahead of all those boxes, over the next four years will soar in terms of its richness. And all the pioneering activities in games, the use of speed, the use of multi-player, those things will be coming out on the PC first and foremost. Real time communications, we've got NetMeeting, we've got voice chat, but taking those and making them just a standard capability, so that you can share your documents, add it together, share photos, share music, that's also something we've got to build into the PC.

Moving to the business world, the kind of data analysis people are going to be doing as they think of the Web as a data source, and take out all XML data and view it in rich ways, that's what the knowledge worker of the future will really spend their time on, whether it's planning a new product, reviewing investments, reviewing sales, it's data analysis where their creativity and multiple sources on the Web come together. Design and engineering are great examples of desktop things that push the PC to its limits, and the industry has really responded.

At the server level it's about the new scalability and reliability. And the new architecture where we can make multiple systems come together to run a single application, and make that easy to set up, that's the way that the ultimate in scale and reliability is delivered, through what we call software scale.

Let's just check our progress on what has been the most demanding desktop application of all time. Workstation design applications, particularly Catia, which is a very, very high end application, used to design Boeing planes, lots of car manufacturers use it, this is a very, very demanding application. The Catia Solutions Magazine from the company that makes Catia went out and benchmarked the PC architecture versus the classic UNIX workstation architecture. And in both overall system performance and graphics performance they found all the different Windows based offerings beat the classic workstation, and this is just absolute graphics and system performance. If they'd actually factored in price performance, the difference, the advantage would have been even more stark here.

One of the issues that is particularly important to us is fast boot. If you're going to make the PC something where you just turn to it to look at the latest weather, the latest news, you're going to have to be able to either have it on all the time, or coming out of hibernate or boot very rapidly. Now, in Windows Millennium we've made incredible progress here, we've made them hibernate very fast. We've gotten rid of the real mode processing that slowed down boot. We took a TCP/IP stack in Windows 2000 that had quick initialization and put that in. And we created a tool so that anybody who is building device drivers, or looking at a BIOS, will be able to tell what are the delays that contribute to their boot time, because device enumeration is a key element of that time frame.

With Windows Millennium we get the boot time down to 25 seconds, and that's a real milestone. We can do better than that, and in fact with the next release of Windows based on Windows 2000 we're working very hard on that. It is interesting to compare other devices, other consumer devices. Sony PlayStation, which of course is not a hard disk based device, but rather boots off of the CD ROM drive, it has a 33 second boot time. So we're already underneath that, but as I said, we're not going to stop there. The Apple iMac boots in a minute ten seconds, and we could have demonstrated that, but we just didn't have the time for it. So there's a real issue here where we have to come up with technology that literally gets boot time down into the ten second range, I would say, in order to fulfill all the scenarios that we're interested in. So there's a lot of hard work ahead that we have to mutually focus on.

Another key thing about the PC is that we're going to start to see the microphone built into every PC. The camera will also start to be popular, but I would say that's probably a year or two later before it becomes pervasive on every PC. Why am I saying the microphone will be everywhere? Well, voice chat will be an explosive application. It's something that we release with MSN in the next few months, and you're going to see that pervasively from the different online services. We're also going to start to build in the voice annotation on document capability, and voice mail capabilities in a very rich way.

And so having this microphone, where we have a fairly demanding specification about how it does noise elimination, how it can tell what's going on in the room, that will be critical to these new software scenarios. The camera also can be incredibly useful here in terms of seeing whether the user is paying attention, seeing who is there, what distance are they from the machine, and interacting with them in an appropriate way. And the cost of those cameras has come down dramatically, and we'll be showing some amazing things we can do in software that use that.

The PC is going to connect to all the different standards; it is the essentially the point at which all your connections bring the data together. So it's a point of integration. We do want to simplify these connection techniques. Of course, universal plug and play is transport independent, and will play across every one of these connection types that I'm showing here. USB is a fantastic success. We're pleased to see that the USB Consortium is taking that to a version two that will bring even more bandwidth capabilities, 1394, although it's on a fairly low percentage of PCs, we see that going up quite a bit, particularly with the interconnect to consumer electronic devices, such as the digital video cameras.

In the wireless area, we'll probably make the transition from infrared to Bluetooth that can connect up peripherals, and is a short cable replacement. We don't see it as much as a competitor to the wireless networking standards, which we think will coalesce around the wireless 802.11b. So wired Ethernet and the wireless are really going to be the standard LAN type connectivity capability. That wireless LAN in the home, if we define it right, it can be the distribution mechanism for video and audio. And really making sure that we get the collision algorithms right, we get the cards right, the security right, so that it can be that pervasive connection approach for the home, there is still some work that needs to be done on that.

Well, the best way to appreciate some of these neat new things, I think, is to take an actual prototype PC, and take a look at how this might work. So I'd like to ask Chad Magendanz to come up and show us what some of the future PC activities will look like.

MR. MAGENDANZ: Thanks, Bill.

First I want to assure you all that Microsoft is not starting its own brand of PC. I know you've been eyeballing us over here, and really the concept PC is all about what you guys have done. All the innovation in the hardware industry, particularly in the home sector, and what we can do as Microsoft to integrate it better with our operating systems and our applications. All we've done is taken a PC, stuck it in a pretty box, and included the components, your components that enable key new roles for the PC in the home. We're also hoping to generate a little discussion in the industry, work with OEM partners and be sure we can refine these concepts, improve this design, take it back to the users through focus groups and usability testing, and confirm that we've added real value, and we're solving real user problems.

So what have we built here? Basically we had three weeks, so we took totally off-the-shelf components, we started with a Legacy 3 design, just to keep it simple. We added an RS networking card, 8211 that enables Universal Plug and Play, and also clever devices like this little wireless mouse. We also threw in a high definition TV card, just because we figured for $200 you couldn't find a better TV out there. At the top you'll notice we've got an integrated video camera, integrated mike. We didn't have a chance to put an array mike in there, like what you saw on Bill's slides, but we really think these are where the future is going. People are going to get sick of wearing head sets very quickly, especially when it comes to speech dictation, and interactive gaming. Array mikes are fantastic, and in the next version we hope to include one.

On the front you'll notice we've got a combination DVD ROM/CDRW storage device, eliminating the need for floppies. In addition, in Whistler we've added support for CDR and CDRW into the operating system so you can drag files over to a CDR, just like you would any floppy, and burn them for your friends. Of course, you have USB, IAAA 1394 ports right here on the front. And you'll notice this new device right here. You've probably seen these on PCs before, usually they've been proprietary LCD devices, indicating the machine's speed. Well, we've expanded on that concept a little bit, based on what we saw in the homes when people were using their PCs.

In the homes people use their PCs like they do a telephone book, or a calendar, or a telephone, they want instant gratification, they don't sit in front of it for hours at a time, so they usually don't have the patience to sit down at the keyboard and start typing. They want quick, easy input. While the PC is great for configuration, most of the time you're just recalling data or starting the next song in your play list, something like that, that you don't need all that extra UI. So what we've done is introduced the concept of a hardware digital dashboard. This digital dashboard is a new HID class that we're defining, and it not only supports the basic LCD display, but it supports things like volume control and soft buttons. And we're defining those usage tables right now, and we hope to work with the industry to improve on that. We also have included a notification light, that lets you know when you've got outstanding messages.

So let's talk a little about the basics, it's important we address the basics, and Bill kind of touched on this. First of all, it's got to be quiet, if you have this machine in your kitchen, if you have this machine in your bedroom, the last thing you want to do is hear it. So our line in the sand is 30 decibels. We're trying to get our machines down to 30 decibels. We know that's aggressive. We got pretty close; we're not there yet. But, we think you can do it.

It needs to be fast, not just processor speed but start up, like Bill said. We're improving on start up, but more importantly, our new operating system for the consumer, Whistler, which is based on Windows NT, doesn't require restarts all the time. So we don't even have to shut down when we're done, we just go into hibernation and in 10 seconds we're back up and running from a fully powered down state. Of course, most of the time you're not going to be fully powered down, so when you actually just put the machine to sleep we have a proximity detector that will allow you to basically wake up as soon as you walk right back up to the machine.

So I've talked a little bit about what we're supporting in the hardware side, but Whistler is more than just hardware. We're actually taking an operating system that was developed for business and applying it to the consumer market, which is dramatically different. We realize that what makes Windows 2000 a great professional system doesn't make it a great system for a mom. And we're taking that challenge very seriously. Now, we're still in the early stages of development here, so I can't show you everything about Whistler, but I can't stand up here and not show you anything.

So you've already seen the user friendly logon screen. And I'm going to take some chances here and show you one more feature, even though this is a prototype unit and we're running pre-Office software. As you can see, you've got an entry for every single person in the family. Now, we went to users and found out that everyone is sharing their machines. Well, Windows 98 really didn't support that, and in Windows 2000 there was a capability but it was very user-unfriendly. So we made it friendly, plus we added the capability of logging off without quitting all your applications. So when you log off your applications can still be in the background running exactly where you left them, and someone else can log on. This allows people to simultaneously use the same computer.

Let me show you. So I'm going to pop right in here, and go to my son's desktop, it's got his custom desktop, there's no Barney creeping onto your desktop, and if any of you have three year olds you know they can do a lot of damage to your desktop. So he's just running Creative Writer, it's right where he left off. If I log out I can pop in as my self, and it pops in right where I left off. Yesterday I was checking the financial news, and there are some great buy opportunities right now out there.

Now earlier we got the message light. You can see I have a message pending from my friend Manlitho, and I'm going to accept his NetMeeting invitation here, and it's going to launch NetMeeting. And now I have my integrated camera, we can start a conversation live. No phone bills, everything is simple. There he is.

Hi, Mano, can you hold on? I've got to finish this demo.

So what do we see here? We have a concept PC that's sexy, but it's not finished. We need your help. We have a lot of great ideas, but we need to work with the industry, and particularly work with our OEM partners to make sure that we're addressing real consumer needs, and take this back to the consumer as a value add. But, more than that we need to get the PC out from under the desktop, and out into the home where it can be more useful. That means we have to have style as well as power. And more importantly, the PC has to be approachable. It has to be friendly. We have to reduce a lot of the complexity of the PC that's a barrier in the home today. Basically, together we have to create machines that just work.

Thank you.

MR. GATES: Well, let's talk a little bit about the high end of PC architecture. The demands here are really quite phenomenal, because the number of transactions done in the world will soar by many orders of magnitude because of Internet e-commerce. And all of that will be extremely demanding in terms of reliability. Any transaction that isn't handled well is lost business. Also, the ability to predict transaction loads will be far lower than it's been in the traditional business world. So you really need this ability to add capacity very rapidly. You can't have a design that's dependent on just having a certain number of systems deployed.

But, managing those large systems should be like managing one system. And adding storage should be just like adding storage to one system. So this is the idea of combining the incredible advances in hardware scale, and layering on top of that the ability to run the multiple systems. We've talked about this, we have a product coming out this summer called AppServer Center that really addresses this through extensions to Windows. So it's the combination, the individual systems, with more processors, better processors, speeds getting faster, and then this overlay on top of it that allows you to combine the multiple systems for any application, including a Web site-like application.

A big milestone in this hardware capability will be the move from 32 bit to 64 bit systems. Now Intel and Microsoft are among the companies who have been investing very, very heavily in this. We're quite enthused about the work that's been done on the Intel Merced, that large address space is going to give us a lot of flexibility to do new algorithms that, particularly in the database area, will lead to incredible performance. We've done a lot now with our tools to make the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit very, very smooth. It's just Visual Studio. It can even look at the code you have today and point out to you areas where automatic compilation won't work, and that you need to look at the code and make some small changes. So, easy transition to take care of, 64-bit, but also the compatibility with the 32-bit should allow us to usher in the 64-bit era without any discontinuity. And over the next year there's a lot of milestones as Itanium finds its way out into the marketplace.

Well, speaking about performance, you know, where are we? What do these PC servers deliver compared to the classic and much more expensive, and we would say single point of failure type systems. I mean, in particular, the very high priced UNIX servers, and the classic mainframes. Well, a year ago, there was a huge gap between what a PC server could deliver and what those other systems could provide. And so people had a dilemma. They could go with something that had the most tools, the best price performance, or they could get more head room by going with the lower volume systems. Just like it used to be on the desktop, when you had to make a choice between a UNIX workstation and a PC, and that was a very tough choice. We've eliminated that dilemma. We are now eliminating the dilemma at the server level.

And there's no greater proof of this than the most watched benchmark, which is the transaction performance shown by TPC-c. At the Windows 2000 launch, you'll probably remember, we announced that we had certified results that not only put us in the top 10 at 100,000 transactions, but we'd also gone way beyond any previous system. So, we'd gone to 150,000 and 227,000 transactions. Because of our software scale approach, we could add systems and put these numbers up even higher. There is not a hardware limit here because the software scale approach is the only approach that gives you that open-ended kind of capability.

Now, to complement that, we're announcing today a program called Windows 2000 data center program. This is a partnership between us and ten different OEMs that signed up for this, where the combination of their hardware design and both companies' support can guarantee that the kind of support you need for these truly mission critical databases that it's there. There are many elements that go into it, very tough certification for the hardware and the drivers, uptime guarantees, remote monitoring, the common support labs, and the kind of support turnaround, all the elements that you, in the past, would have only associated with a mainframe type environment. But that's what customers have asked for to give them the ability to jump on this new platform and get the best of all worlds, the best tools, the best price performance, but also the scalability and reliability.

I would like to ask Valerie See to come out and show us some of the things that we're doing in this enterprise area that are really changing the rules of the game.

Welcome, Valerie.

MS. SEE: Hi, Bill. Thank you.

I want to start out this morning by describing some of the equipment we've got in our little mini datacenter here. Let me go ahead and open this rack door up, and we'll give you a shot, working from the bottom of the rack up, of all of this equipment Compaq was kind enough to loan us today. At the bottom, we've got a ProLiant 8500, and I'm going to go ahead and show you the desktop for that system. We've got this ProLiant running Data Center Server. It helps if I hit the right button so you can see that there in our start menu we brand it a little differently.

This system also is populated fully with eight processors, it can hold up to 16 gigabytes of memory. And it was ProLiant 8500, in fact, that we used 12 nodes of and that Compaq managed to get that incredible number at the top of the TPC-c list in February.

Above that server in the rack, we've got, this one is only seven units high for eight processors, that's an awful lot in a small space, but this server is only 1 U high, tiny. It almost doesn't look like a server. It's got two processors in it. This is a Compaq Photon 1 U server. It can hold two processors and up to 4 gigabytes of memory. Let's take a look at its desktop just to show you, we're sitting here cranking along. We've got both processors populated in this platform.

And then, at the top of the rack is a Compaq design four-way capable Itanium server that they're calling their code name Blazer. And, as I say, Compaq design. And let's take a look at what it's up to. And you can see that we've got it running a build of Windows 2000 64-bit. Just to prove the point, let's go take a look at what it says the processor is, sure enough, an Itanium. And we've also got it running a 64-bit version of SQL.

So that kind of tells you what we've got here in the rack. So, you're probably wondering, well, what am I going to show you with this? Well, we've got a huge range of software and hardware that we can build all kind of really cool end-to-end solutions with. So, I'm going to share one of my pet hobbies. I happen to love maps, and I love satellite imagery. And our SQL team and the TerraServer folks were kind enough to build us a special WinHEC 2000 TerraServer Web site, which we're running on that equipment. So, we've got a hot link to New Orleans that seems pretty topical, so let's go take a look here. And, in fact, well, everybody wave. That's us. There's the Super Dome. And, in fact, if we wanted to take a look at the relief map surrounding us, well, we're in Louisiana.

So we get some other kind of neat imagery that I happen to particularly like. We've get some color imagery of London, and I've got a sister in London, so I'm going to go look and see where she's at. And so this works pretty much like TerraServer, you know, everything you're used to seeing. And you're all sitting there probably going, well, you know, this is cool, but I've seen TerraServer, I've played with it, so what's so different about this. Well, let me tell you what's really going on here, let me show you an architecture slide, and kind of talk you through what's happening. Remember over there I said we had those three servers in the rack. We've got a Data Center Server, we've got a Compaq Photon Server along with that ProLiant 8500, and then we've got the Compaq 64-bit Blazer Server.

So, what we're doing with those is, we're using the 32-bit server, the Photon, a server running Windows 2000 and running 32-bit IIS server as our Internet front end. And this is something people do all the time, right, in fact, that particular server is very compact. You can get up to 42 of them in a rack, so you might see a lot of ISPs and ASPs deploying loads of those, perhaps with the Windows Network Load Balancing Service, in a clustered front end kind of very typical scale out front-end scenario.

On the back end, we're running 64-bit SQL Server 2000, and Windows 2000 64-bit version to serve up what we carved out as a fairly selectively chosen chunk of the overall TerraServer database. Now, the TerraServer databases have gotten quite large. Taken altogether, they're three terabytes worth of data. And that's a lot of disks. So we didn't take all three terabytes worth of data. We judiciously chose about a gigabyte of data, which were running purely in memory in that 64-bit server, so you could see how fast and responsive that was.

So, we got pretty typical two-tiered solution, and then I've got a 32-bit Compaq client system here that I was browsing this with. Now, this is a lot like the Terra Server that's been up in production for some period of time. The difference, the production Terra Server has six ProLiant 5500 four-way systems as the IIS front end, and it has two systems running SQL in the back, and one of which is a Compaq ProLiant 8500 running SQL 2000, Windows 2000 Data Center, and it's been up in that configuration since January 5th. It's handling an average of about 30,000 users a day, about 750,000 different Web pages served, three terabytes of data. And it hasn't been down once with the exception of somebody screwed up, they accidentally mapped the IP address of the system to a different system, but that's the only down time it's had, operator error.

So, what's so different here? Well, the difference is, we chose our architectures a little differently. In this case, we have 32-bits in the front end and 64-bits in the back end. What did I just say? Okay, that's what's different. Here, we deliberately chose for reasons of scalability and so because it's kind of nice to show the progress that the industry is making with 64-bit platforms and Windows, we chose to put 64-bits in the back end. So, we've got a 64-bit back end, a 32-bit front end, a 32-bit client, and it just works. End to end solution, all displayed together, no problems.

It's, you know, an amazing amount of additional choice that you can achieve with end to end solutions to scale the system needs of what you want to build for your customers with Windows and all kinds of hardware, ranging all the way from tiny little appliances to Web blades like that Compaq Photon, all the way up the four-way Compaq Blazer platform, and eight-way ProLiant 8500.

So, I had gone over there in front of the rack, you know, typical IT guy on roller skates, sitting there and showing you the desktops on each of those servers. I could have done that a different way. Let me go back to this system again for a moment and show you something that we added to really help the manageability of Windows 2000. You'll notice I've got three terminal services client windows open, same client, 32-bit client. And I happen to be managing all three of those servers over there. I can go and take a look, for example, at the processes that this terminal server session is running. I can also look at the console processes. We can take a look at our 64-bit SQL Server again. You can see that I've got PerfMon up; we're watching some activity there. And, I can watch the Data Center Server -- excuse me, this is the Photon, and take a look at it as well.

Single point management, one 32-bit client managing a range of 32-bit servers, and 64-bit servers, remote manageability is so much easier with Windows 2000, and we're continuing to focus on that looking forward. If you come to the enterprise forum today, we're going to be talking about some of the other enhancements we're going to be doing for remote management in Windows, headless server capabilities, we're going to talk some about EFI technologies as they apply to 64-bit systems, and a lot of the other advances that we're working on in the enterprise level platform. So, there's a lot of things we can do with the addition of 64-bit as an additional solution point within the enterprise.

Let's talk about the other half of our data center over here. And here what we've got is, we've got a Cisco IP telephony solution running on Windows 2000. If we get this architecture slide up, I'll tell you some of the things that are going on with this particular demo.

In this demo, we've got a Cisco Call Manager Server, based on Windows 2000, also running SQL 7.0, and it's IP telephony. We've got this really cool IP based telephone here, and your standard IP network infrastructure. Now, what does this mean? Basically what this provides is a way to converge the world of voice telephony with data and video so that you've got a common network, this whole new world of convergence of these three types of data movement on a common infrastructure. This is something that Cisco calls their added technology, their architecture for voice, video and integrated data, and they've been working very hard with a lot of folks in the industry, and we're pleased to say they've been working real hard with us on this.

So, why did Cisco choose Windows 2000 for this product? They chose it for a lot of reasons. One is that it's scalable; it prevents them from having to maintain and continue to support a proprietary voice/data system that you would normally use on a PBX. What does this give the customer, it give them a PBX that for people that know how to use Windows, you don't have to have a specially trained network operator, or PBX operator, to run your telephone systems. You can use people that understand Windows-based architectures for management.

They also get the transaction services, the Microsoft transaction services that come with Windows 2000, which they use for all of their distributed call management. This kept them from having to write it themselves.

Another couple of things, they're using what I had just showed you over there, they are using terminal services for remote management of these call servers, so they don't have to send the guy to every little call server or IP system to configure their telephones. They also get the replication capabilities of SQL 7.0 so they can get single point management. You can change, say, for example, maybe some call configuration set-ups on one server, and through replication replicate it throughout your enterprise network.

So, this is an incredibly cool system. IP telephony, integrated voice/video/data networking on a single IP network background, open standards. This is really neat.

Now, let's look at the other end of this, where here we've got a PC deployed on a desktop, and since we've got the PC on the desktop, we can take advantage of some of the intelligence in that PC to drive a rather simpler telephone handset. This is a USB-based phone, it's using standard USB protocols, in fact, it uses the HID mechanisms for the buttons, and it uses USB audio for the audio stream to the telephone, but it's fully interoperable because it's using USB based standards here, it's interoperating with the IAPS and the IP standards on the Cisco telephone. What this is based on is essentially, this is a concept, the technology concept here, Windows 2000 Professional on the desktop, TAPI 3.0 plus some enhancements, there's an ASA 323 TAPI 3.0 service provider, and then a client application that's a phone dialer.

We'd certainly urge anyone who is interested in this type of device to take a look at the Web page there. There's a white paper that describes just exactly this type of telephone instrument, and you've also gotten it on your WinHEC CDs. So you can see we have the makings here of some pretty neat end to end telephone handling scenario.

And I'm going to ask Bill to come back out on stage and join me, and we're going to play around, and see if we can maybe place a few calls. So, basically, what we're going to do is take a look at -- were you expecting a call?

MR. GATES: Let's see who it is?

MS. SEE: Hello? Anyone out there? Well, I don't know what that call was, but it didn't seem to go through. That's okay.

What I'm going to do is go over here and I'm going to try calling that handset, seeing if I can get that to pick up. Well, you know, there's always one thing that has to go wrong, right? For some reason that call isn't going through, and I have a feeling it may be because, I had mentioned, this is a technology concept demo, there's always a possibility that something could go a little bit awry, which it seems to have done. But you can see what happens when a call comes in. Basically, our call application had a ring indication come in, and essentially you would ordinarily pick up the phone and be able to just pick up the call and have the call go through. Alternatively, if you're placing a call from your PC, we'd pick it up, we'd get a dial tone, and we would just place the call.

So, very cool, end-to-end, different protocols, but different standard protocols that interoperate very smoothly with one another, and give you a whole range of opportunities with PC based architectures to converge voice, video and data networking on a single IP backbone.

MR. GATES: That looks great, Valerie. Thank you very much.

MS. SEE: Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: Well, we know the phone could ring any time during my speech. We'll see who might be calling in.

Well, the range of devices that are going to be part of this scenario that you get your data, your messages very easily, really are quite hard to predict. The form factors are going to be quite varied: some extremely small; some voice only; screens on lots and lots of the phones; pocket-sized devices. And some of them will actually simply tie back in through the wireless network rather than have to have any explicit work on the part of the user to connect things up.

We think Universal Plug and Play is a very key element of this today. It lets things roam, it lets devices identify themselves in a rich way, so that if you want a color printer, if you want a nearby printer, all of those things can happen across all the different topologies, whether it's the wireless or wired topology. And so, working with all of you, we need to make universal plug and play a reality in not only the PC through Windows, but in all the rich peripherals as well.

This is a very exciting effort. We're pleased with the range of companies who are signed up to it, not just PC and consumer electronics companies, but even some of the classic light goods companies like General Electric are now involved in thinking how they can get this into all the things they get into the home environment.

One of the elements we're going to bring to this is the ability to take some of the software we've done on the PC and put them into these devices that are more single purpose devices. And here we have an offering of two different products. We have Windows CE and we have a version of Windows NT technology that we call NTE for NT-embedded. Now, both of these go after a broad range of market segments. They're modular. They run, of course, on cost effective hardware. But they're different in terms of exactly what level of hardware capabilities they need in a system.

Fundamentally, the NT product is focused on devices that have a disk. And so the advanced capabilities there including the page memory are available to the device, whereas, Windows CE can run on very, very small devices. We've been spending a lot of time looking to how we can make these products more approachable, get the tools out there, make sure it's very easy to get going with these things. We've got a great milestone for Windows CE coming up in June, which is the 3.0 release with the platform builder capability and the special version of the visual tools that work there.

Now, part of what we're doing is giving people more and more information so they can take this product and configure it exactly the way they want. You know, this is an area that we think will be quite explosive, and we've got a new group that's very focused in on what can happen in the embedded space. So, I think the key theme here is the complementarity of these new devices with the PC, and to talk about some of that, what does it all look like in the PC-plus era, I would like to ask David Williams, director of our Windows Hardware Platforms, to come up and show us some of these things.

Welcome, David.

MR. WILLIAMS: Thanks, Bill.

So, Bill has talked about and covered quite a bit of territory. Now, what I would like to do is step you through several demos. I'm going to focus on some user scenarios that we've talked about and we care about. What I want to focus on is how the personal computer can take relatively advanced, relatively complex user scenarios, and make them simple and usable for the user.

We also want to look at and see how Windows supports natively some of these ancillary devices, stand-alone devices, and brings the simplicity of device-like usage to the PC.

One of the first demos I want to talk about is the challenges there are in taking pictures. And you're probably thinking, there's not much challenge in taking pictures, you simply point the camera, push the button, and the camera takes care of the stuff. And that's probably the easiest part of taking pictures. But how do you get pictures? You have to take a roll of film out, take it down to the developer, get it developed. In a digital world, you have to have some software that connects to the PC and download them and edit them.

So what we want to try to do is say, how can we make taking pictures out of the camera and publishing them as easy as it is to take them, and this is the one thing that we want to talk about.

What I've got here is a digital camera, Kodak; this is a USB camera that's supported natively with the Windows image acquisition architecture. And what you're seeing on this desktop is a build of Windows Whistler, which will be the -- this is the consumer version. What I want to say is, I've taken some pictures with this camera last night, and what I'm going to do is plug the camera into my USB port, and I'm going to turn it on, and just let Whistler find it.

So, through Plug and Play what's happened here is, just by plugging the camera into the PC, the PC finds the camera and will bring up the Windows imaging acquisition wizard. Now, this is the same wizard that's in Windows Millennium Edition. However, we're modifying it and extending it in Whistler to provide some new functionality. So, you may be familiar with Windows imaging acquisition. If not, the imaging session that we have should be of great interest to you.

So, I just click next on the wizard, and this WIA supported camera will actually be looking at the pictures that are in the camera right now. And what we found in many cases, most users, once they get a picture, what they may want to do before they publish it or do anything with it is actually manipulate it. So you'll notice in a couple of these pictures, we had turned them sideways. So, while I'm looking at the pictures in the camera, I'm actually going to go down and select the ones that I had the camera sideways, and I'm going to rotate them. I'll just select these two together.

Now, what I want to do is pick the pictures that I want to publish. So, there's a nice House of Blues. Here's an interesting house here, and some type of critter there. So, I'm going to go next.

Now, the next step in publishing your pictures is deciding how are you going to store them and organize them. So, I'm going to give these a simple name, so we did these as WinHEC 2000. What the system will do is store these pictures on your system under this directory. There's no more archaic names about what the pictures are, JPEG1, JPEG2. They'll be stored as WinHEC 2000, this entire collection of pictures, and then they'll be numbered sequentially 1, 2, 3, 4, so I know what subject they are.

Now, the added value here that we're doing, though, is the ability for Whistler to push these pictures and publish them directly to my Web site on the Internet. Now, we have a method that's embedded in Whistler that will be exposing. So this is going to work right now with the MSN Community, and have a Web page on there. But it can also work with any other Web site provider that wants to support this service.

So, in this drop down box, I would have the opportunity to pick other locations to also publish my pictures. So, I'm going to click finish, and the first thing you're going to see is the wizard taking the three pictures out of the camera, and storing them locally. Then I know I can use them in the future. And now what you're seeing here is we're now on Picture 1 of 3, and we're pushing these and uploading them to the Internet. So, you see here is the upload case.

So, what I've done here to take some pictures and publish them is as simple as it was to take the pictures in the first place. All I do is connect the camera, make some minor adjustments to those pictures that I want, rotate them if necessary, give them a name that makes sense to me, and click next, and Windows will automatically push these up to my Web site.

Now, this is probably typical with normal upload speeds that a user would see over a slow link. So we're going to let this run for a minute, and when this Web site comes back, we'll switch back over to this system.

What I would like to do is step over to my next scenario, if we can bring this system up, so another scenario that we want to think about, and everyone has heard about, and probably most of you are doing some type of music management. Everyone is familiar with the concept of ripping CDs, or downloading MP3 files off the Internet, and how do you transfer those over to your portable music players, and how do you get access to that music.

Well, the first thing I want to introduce you to is the Windows Media Player. This is the new version; it's currently available on the Windows Millennium Edition beta. You can also download this off the Web site and run it on Windows 2000 if you want to. What we've done here is create a media player that integrates all the functionality that you may have around creating, storing, managing your music. And right now what it shows me at first is my Web site that I would use to go to download, browse, and look for new music format files.

This also has the CD audio player, and I have a CD in there called Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals that's already in there. And here I can play my CD audio, or I can actually rip these songs off the CD and store them in my media library. Media library, of course, is the place where you're going to store all of your individual songs. It's also the place where you're going to create play lists, where if you have a list of favorites, or a list of styles or artists or things you're going to play.

Also embedded in here, however, is an Internet radio tuner. So through the PC, through the Internet, I can bring up all my Internet radio stations.

So, I have a spot where I can use, manage, store, create all my music content that I care about. But also one of the usage scenarios we have is to take the music, and take it with me in a portable player. Inside Windows Media Player, I have the ability to click on a song that I pick and tell it to copy the music.

What this will do is copy this to my Compact Flash device. We'll give it a couple of minutes here as it goes through.

So, as you think about the songs that you want to pick, I've only had three songs in this particular music library, and as they transfer over, I probably shouldn't have picked that third one. They transfer over, then it's a simple matter to take your Compact Flash out of your reader, and take it over to your portable music player, and carry it with you.

Now, this is the most common music scenario. So, what you've seen here is how the PC can take a relatively complex set of functions, simply trying to rip music, or download music, and using multiple different programs, having them all in one center is greatly advantageous. The rich interface and navigation capabilities of the PC are what makes this a much more compelling scenario on the PC than other places.

But then you want to think about you have a simple playback method. Mostly you just want to get a few songs, and all you want to do is put them in a player and have the music play. This is a standard scenario whether you're working out, jogging, so we should get this guy to start playing, and this should come through here in a second. But one of the questions that you want to ask yourself, though, is, you've got all this rich content, and this great store, and this great organization of music on the PC, but how do you satisfy one of the most common scenarios of listening to music, and how do you go listen to music in your home? And that would be in your home stereo rack.

So the next step of the demo is, how do we get the music out of the PC and into our stereo rack? And what I'd like to show here is a camera shot of this device here is the Turtle Beach Audiotron. What this device is, and this is a Windows CE based device, that lives in your audio stereo component. It could be in the same room, simply connected to your PC by a cable. It could be connected over your home network. And as we take a look at this up here, let's get a shot in front of this panel right here, all you see here is a simple play device. On the screen you see here is the list of the songs that are available. This knob here will simply select the play lists and the different songs that are available. I'm pulling these off the PC, and I have a simple play, pause, stop, review, rewind. I press play and the music will play through the stereo.

So, what we see here in this demo is the ability for the PC to take a relatively complex set of advanced scenarios, make them simple, make them easier to manage, integrate some capabilities, and support other devices natively such that we can distribute out music, or take our music other places.

Now, let's jump back quick to my Internet publishing and we're going to bring up my web site over here. It finished the upload, and what it's done is out here on content.communities.msn.com, you can go to the Big Easy 2000 Web site, and here's some pictures that we uploaded when we were testing the demo, and down at the bottom you'll see the three pictures that I uploaded just now.

And we click on one to bring it up. So, we've actually done live taken these and posted these up on the Internet, and there is that House of Blues. So, again, we have a complex scenario. Can you imagine trying to tell your mother to take a digital camera, take some pictures, and publish them to the Internet today, telling her to go get the software to download the image from the camera to the PC, and download the upload software to get it to the Web site. It would be far too confusing. Built into Windows Whistler will be the ability just to plug your camera in and export them straight to your Web site.

MR. WILLIAMS: Now, some others that we want to talk about as it comes to the PCs and different ways people are going to use PCs and interactive PCs, how are we going to make them simpler, how are we going to make it easier for people to accomplish complex tasks. And some of the most complex tasks, some examples we talk about are things like navigation and game navigation. So what we're going to talk about is how we're going integrate, and where we see speech recognition in PCs.

So I'd like to introduce Rolland Waters, who is our speech program manager in our business productivity group.

Roland.

MR. WATERS: Hi, David. How are you?

MR. WILLIAMS: All right.

MR. WATERS: I'm glad to be here today. Do you know why I'm glad to be here today?

MR. WILLIAMS: Why?

MR. WATERS: Because I've finally found something to do with speech, and it works. And as you know, speech, there are a lot of different things you can do with it, but most scenarios require Star Trek, you have to do natural language, and really understand what people are saying, and speech isn't constrained, and so speech recognition doesn't work very well. But, if you go look at the game market there are a lot of things that you can do, or you want to do in a game that you can't do without speech.

For instance, we have Flight Simulator here, and this Flight Simulator 2000 is a great game, I bought it myself, learn to fly. But, the problem is here I am at Mick's Field and I've got my plane, and there's a lot of stuff that happens at an airport. Planes come in, planes go out, and I need to take off, you know, I went to Chicago to get some pizza, and I want to go back home to get some coffee. But, I don't know if I can take off. Wouldn't it be cool if I could talk to the tower and get permission to take off?

MR. WILLIAMS: Normally in this game you just have to guess, right?

MR. WATERS: You have to guess.

MR. WILLIAMS: And someone might hit you on the runway or something.

MR. WATERS: Right, yes.

MR. WILLIAMS: Now, talking to the tower through the keyboard or a drop down box of menus, first it's not natural. You don't have a keyboard in the plane you're actually trying to simulate. So in a virtual environment there are situations where a natural type of input are far superior, but this is not what we would call natural speech, this is simple speech recognition.

MR. WATERS: Right. It's constrained. It knows where I want to go, it knows who I am. If I say, hi, this is Disneyland; it's going to go, huh? Which is what it's supposed to do.

MR. WILLIAMS: Show us how this works.

MR. WATERS: Mick's Tower, this is Microsoft 2000, IFR to Seattle, IF delta. Now, if I go taxi to runway 36, I still need to know if I can take off or not, right. It just told me to taxi there. So I'll go taxi over. And it knows I'm getting right to the runway, so I stop. And I've overshot a little bit, because I'm a little excited with the throttle, but I learned to drive in Boston. So I know I can take off now. And that's the situation that you won't see with the keyboard.

MR. WILLIAMS: So we think we're going to see in the next year a greater demand for this type of input device, because the technology has advanced far enough that you can put this level of speech recognition into a product, and it actually adds value to some complicated scenarios, whether it just be a game or a productivity app., there are complicated scenarios where a keyboard is just not a normal or a rapid way to do the input. But, because of the constraints we have in this program we could put some limited speech recognition in there and make it a very valuable app.

MR. WATERS: That's exactly right. We expect to see three or four games shipping not this Christmas, but next Christmas, using speech, either of something like this where they want to interact with the tower, or to take away from having the arcane key clicks in Quake so you can bring up the rocket launcher, you just say rocket launcher. And it's so much more nice to be able to just say rocket launcher than to remember that's an eight, or a two, or a four.

MR. WILLIAMS: Special keys. What special things do PC manufacturers and device manufacturers have to do to get ready for -- to make sure their systems and their components are ready for voice recognition?

MR. WATERS: Well, it mainly comes down to sound cards and handsets, or sound cards and head sets. This is okay; actually in the flight simulator demo it makes a lot of sense, because you'd wear a head set. But, if I'm playing Doom, this screws up my hair, I like my hair, and that's just not fun. You have to adjust this exactly right every time you put it on. It's much better if you had an array mike that sat out here, but the problem is that the engine that recognizes speech really wants to know what kind of microphone it's done in, and if I just plug it into an analog port it's not going to know. Whereas, if I had USB, and USB ROM said, "hi I'm an array mike with this kind of characteristics", that would be really cool.

MR. WILLIAMS:With digital microphones you can also add more value with some digital speech processing?

MR. WATERS: Exactly, yes. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the Whistler architecture and we're going to put a little slot in there where you can put array microphone processing, so the microphone doesn't have to ship the DST with the microphone, and then the parts cost then becomes a lot lower.

MR. WILLIAMS: Okay. So we're seeing advances in Whistler that manufacturers can take advantage of to do lower cost digital head sets, but in the meantime if they follow the PC 99 and PC 2001 design guides for their analog devices, analog inputs, then all they have to do is worry about the quality of microphone or headset they are delivering with the game or application that's taking advantage of this.

MR. WATERS: That's exactly correct. And the current design guides are especially important. For instance, you see this microphone here has this little connector on here, because they didn't agree on what the pin out was for the BIOS voltage. And I'm supposed to know whether or not to use this connector. This doesn't make sense to me, but now with the new PC 2000 guidelines it's there, everybody does it the same way.

MR. WILLIAMS: Okay. Thanks, Rolland.

Now, I want to step through a couple more scenarios, where we're seeing some value add for the full PC. You've seen scenarios here where the PC and the Power PC continue to drive new features, new functionality. Take advanced scenarios and make it simple. And because of that we're seeing more PCs are coming out new, different, and frankly some fairly exciting form factors.

This device is a full-fledged tablet PC. Now, this is called a Cube Tablet, it's by Access Technologies. And while it has all the functionality of the traditional PC, they've also added -- it has a full screen touch pad, digitizer for handwriting recognition, it has a DVD ROM in the side, it has all the various ports that you need to connect, PCMCIA, it actually has a built in camera. But, what we're seeing is that more and more PC devices are being built as people want full PC functionality, but different sizes and different form factors. The other interesting thing, as we see, is the race for power performance is also still being driven by size.

This device is called an Espresso PC, and this is actually a full active PC. It has a socket 370 810-based motherboard, so it will support Celeron or Pentium IIs, 128-megabyte of RAM, a 12-gigabyte hard drive. You'll notice right here is the touch pad for the PC. So this is a fully functional, very active PC. On this one edge you'll see the ports for mouse, keyboard, video, audio on the side. And if you want to add USB here, and if you want to add networking, there's a spot for docking port, networking, CD-ROM, DVD. So you have a companion device. So we're seeing this explosion of not only features and functionality in the PC, but the PC is being driven to different new and exciting form factors.

Another form factor that we see are PCs that are architected for the entertainment center. Now, this is Net TV, this is a system OEM that's manufacturing systems that go into your entertainment center. Now, what we're doing with this system here, and you can see the UI on there, in Windows Whistler we're building all the plumbing and building blocks that are necessary for manufacturers to create and build these different types of PCs, based on PC architecture. We have up to the level of all the APIs and DDIs needed. For example, we quickly put together this UI just as a demonstration purposes, but all the pieces are in place in Whistler for Net TV and other vendors to build the UI requirements they have.

Now, this is a complicated UI, because this approach here is really a device that supplies all your entertainment needs in one place, your audio, your video, your DVD playback, your movies on demand, your cable box, your high definition television, your satellite receivers, all of that infrastructure, all of that architecture, the broadcast architecture in Windows Whistler, and the other architectures we have in the Windows driver model will continue to supply that. So, for example, here's a list of all the games that are on this system, here's a list of all DVDs that are in. There's a Power File C200 DVD changer connected by a 1394 to this system. Here's a jukebox with all your media, including all your audio, all your photo albums, maybe your little video clips. Here's video on demand, now here's an interesting one where this could be coming through cable, or in this case actually video on demand broadcast through the Internet.

This is the Quantum Project, it's a motion picture starring John Cleese and some other major actors, but it's only going to be broadcast on the Internet using the Windows media format. So this is a trailer for that film. So you're seeing that there are opportunities for video broadcast, video distribution that you may want to see in the home, in the entertainment center. Let's turn that off.

There's also the ability to do premium channels. For the first time we have the ability to plug in and there's actually one of these units plugged in the back. This is actually a device bay cable receiver, so essentially this is your cable set top box, and it's capable of receiving and decoding the premium channel selections that you may have subscribed to. And it's a simple addition to the system; you just slide it in the slot in the back, hook up your cable, and subscribe to your service. The other service that you can pick up, of course, is HDTV. This particular one is actually being broadcast -- this clip is a three-minute clip we're actually broadcasting inside the convention center. Because of the shielding in the convention center we couldn't pick up any local HDTV signals, so this is actually being broadcast.

The other thing about these is you can get some value add information streamed into the video stream. So here in the special report, I've got some special function keys I can pick up, so while this is being broadcast live I can actually pick up live data. And this will show me actual telemetry, and other information about the launch. And you can see things about rudder trim state of the solid rocket boosters.

Now, we're not necessarily proposing that every OEM and every vendor build and create an all in one platform like this. We can go so far as what I've got here, is a simple HDTV receiver card, this is a PCI card that can plug into any relatively current PC system and for $75 become an HDTV receiver. Of course, the advantage of the PC architecture is you have content that has much higher resolution than can be displayed on normal NTSC televisions. So the higher resolution displays, and the higher resolution of the PC actually adds tremendous value. You get better TV on a PC than you would on a normal television.

So what you've seen here is a series of demos that talk about where the PC is going, how the PC is creating and adding more value to stand alone and application type devices, some new exciting form factors we're seeing, all the architecture pieces we're trying to put in place, that really drive and make the PC platform very exciting. We're seeing more and more vendors counting on features like advanced 3D to be in the client PC to drive new and exciting usages and actually push content.

The next and final demo I'd like to show is a content demo from an ISV provider, and I think probably the best way for this demo to start is just to let the demo explain itself.

(Digital voice demo off mike.)

It's amazing, I think this is the first time I've ever had a demo run itself. What you've just seen is real time 3D rendering that is rendered using simple XML language. So they type the script out, that can control the emotion, as she said. So you can see as a content provider counting on rich and high end 3D capabilities in the client that can push some very rich and exciting content directly out to the users. So what you've seen there is just some examples of how the PC is changing, how we continue to see just tremendous growth and tremendous opportunities in the PC and the devices it's going to support.

Thank you.

Now, I'm going to hand it back over to Bill.

MR. GATES: Well, the PC plus era is going to have a lot of important devices. We're emphasizing a number of those, including the idea of the stand-alone phone, and the phone connected to the PC. Now that we've reset the prototype driver we have on this system, let's see if we can get a call here.

Hi, this is Bill Gates.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: So, how do all these pieces come together? Well, our commitment is to provide the software that are going to deliver on all the advanced scenarios. In some ways you can think of those as platforms, and in some ways you can also think of them as services. Things like the constant updating capability that we've had with Web TV or Windows Update, and you're going to see a lot more of that -- the ability to roam information so that somebody's preferences move from device to device. A lot of that will come through services that we'll integrate into Windows, and that will actually be present out there on the Internet.

It's a wide range of products that make this all come together. This year is a huge year for us in terms of new product introductions. Of course, we kicked it off with Windows 2000, and there's a whole family of products around Windows 2000, an updated SQL Server, an update of Exchange, some new things like the App Server Center. We also have this year the latest in the Win 9x line, which is the Windows Millennium Edition. So all these things are addressing what are some very straightforward and exciting scenarios.

In summary, I would like to come back to really the theme of this speech, which is The Best Is Yet To Come, to make that true, it's going to take great work from all of you. The exciting breakthrough devices, the chip level miracles, new PCs that have got the speakers, the cameras, the universal plug and play, the video, the audio, the new form factors, even that tablet-sized form factor that I know will be coming along. And from us, the software that's going to help it all work together. And so, there's a huge opportunity for us out there to empower the world in new ways.

Thank you.

(Applause and end of presentation.)

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