Remarks by Bill Gates
Sydney Media Centre
Sydney, Australia, Sept. 11, 2000

MR. GATES: Good morning everyone. Its great to be back here in Australia again.

Let’s assume that the miracle of the microprocessor and the miracle of buoyant competition in the hardware space could really give us a wonderful platform to build our software on.

PCs today sell over 100 million units a year, and that’s really quite a phenomenon. As we look forward, though, the kind of things that people will be able to do with their PCs and these other new hardware devices, the screen phones, the digital set-top box connected TV, all the different things connected up a wireless network, the range of applications will be far broader than it has been for the PC.

We talk about the digital lifestyle. This means your ability to organize your schedule, to find the best things to buy, find the information that you care about. It will all be very, very simple, and we are starting to see this in the world of music, we are starting to see it in the world of photos. We are just at the very start in terms of people dealing with movies, being able to make movies, edit them, annotate them, send them around to their friends and have that just be part of the digital experiment.

There are a few areas where the PC is not yet used very happily. One of those is actually in meetings themselves. When people go into a room to sit down, talk to each other, sure there is a PC operative controlling the slides, the PowerPoint slides that everybody is talking about and those have been printed out and people are taking notes.

But because of the form factor of the PC it’s reasonably rare, not unheard of, but also not prevalent, for people to sit there with their computer and be able to take their notes in a digital fashion, and what that means is that all the material in that meeting, the discussions in that meeting, there is a lot of effort to get them back into the email, into the digital world.

So you have this mismatch of the paper based world and the email based world. How would you bridge that? There are many breakthroughs that we have to make in the software. One is to work with the hardware industry to make sure we can have a device where the readability of the device, the overall experience of sitting even for hours at a time and looking at pages of text or other information that that is as good, if not better, than doing the same thing with paper.

We also have to get the form factor down to an actual tablet sized device. This, you can say it goes back to the original dream of when we talked about the "memex" machine that people would have, how it would help them track of things. We are just on the verge, with the advances in LCD technologies, small hard disks, better battery technology, of being able to have tablet form factor, but the hardware alone is not enough there.

We’ve also got to take the idea of note taking, using your handwriting, using voice annotation, organising things, being able to share those with other people and really revolutionize how we think about meetings, how we think about creating that information.

The work style in a few years will be one where you are always in that digital environment. Whether you are looking at your cell phone that’s got a nice little screen on it, all of the data that you care about adapted for that small screen will be available to you wherever you go. When you go home at night and want to look at different documents, you want to share things, you will be able to use your tablet device at home to do that.

So it is really kind of a revolution in communications. Part of it is to take this split that we have between the screen and the phone and bring those worlds together as well. Part of that is to say that when you are talking on the phone information should be able to come up on the screen, no matter whether it’s the cell phone or the full blown PC. Things like NetMeeting that you will find avant-garde users doing today where you’ve got a microphone on your PC and you edit documents together, that will become very widespread and you will think of every kind of communication to plan into both screen and phone type sharing.

In fact, four or five years from now you will wonder when somebody called up to get technical support how they just used the phone to try and describe what was going on with their PC, or if you called up your bank and were talking about a statement or a bill you didn’t understand that you could just bring it up on the screen and point to the part that you don't understand, collaborate with both the visual and the audio together, people would be surprised that at one point we didn’t have that.

Now Microsoft’s role from the beginning has been to provide a platform. We did that for the early personal computers, we did that with DOS in 1981, with Windows in the 1980s that became successful in the 1990s. Now with the Windows 2000 codebase that brings new levels of reliability and scalability to the PC platform, we are providing the platform that all of this will get built on.

This year was a huge year for us. We got Windows 2000 shipped, and there is a lot of products that go together with that, SQL Server 2000; Exchange 2000 that have just been shipped very recently. In fact, we will have that whole family of 2000 server products out within the next month.

And what those do is they bring the PC technology to a whole new level. In fact, we are able to say in terms of benchmarks of the absolute performance, no matter what you are talking about, database, transactions, web, email, any of those activities, the PC platform has more scale and more reliability than any other platform.

It’s really the combination, not just of the hardware advances but of some software breakthroughs where we can now take multiple PC servers and have them work together, so you not only get the power of all those going together, but you also get the ability to have any one of those machines go down and yet the user who is connecting up to get the services doesn’t even notice it because the other machines can immediately take over.

Now underneath the covers that’s a very sophisticated thing. In fact, it was Tandem who did that in their specialised products in the traditional computer world, so nobody used mainframes to run stock exchanges or phone exchanges, they used this special software scale approach that Tandem had that now we have brought into the mainstream of PC computing.

So with that as a base, we talk about our strategy as being the .Net strategy. What is .Net? Well, it is the idea that all your information should be free from any individual device. In the same way that Microsoft came along and said, "Okay, PC hardware should be your choice. Who do you want to get the hardware from should be independent of what software you buy."

Now we are going much further than that. We are saying to people: no matter what cell phone you get, what PDA, what PC you get, you should be able to connect up through the Internet and all the information that you care about should be there. Your programs should be updated automatically and the system should understand on your behalf all of your communications preferences. You know, who should be able to ring your phone at various times of day, who should be able to get something in your inbox.

This digital world is one where we facilitate communications so well that the ability to avoid interruptions, or even things that you want at some point but aren’t timely, the ability to stay in control of that is very important. And so .Net has the information agent that works across all these different devices.

It is a new platform, it is based on XML as the key technology, it has got a level of inter-operability that’s greater than we’ve ever seen before and that’s because since we’re behind the platform that has not only the best performance now, but also it has always had the best performance for us, the ability to work together with traditional systems and get the data out and get the data not just as bits, but in very high level XML self-describing form.

That facilitates the adoption of the mainstream platform, the Windows based platform and all the tools that go around it. So we have really made a huge bet on XML, we’ve made a big bet on how all these things tie together, we’ve made a big bet that the Internet will go beyond just a bunch of HTML screens.

A scenario that we like to talk about is say you want to get a bunch of economic data, government forecasts, pricing data and you want to sit there as a knowledge worker and do forecasting work? Well, today what you are going to do is go out to many different URLs and you are going to have to scribble the information you see down on a piece of paper and then move into the world of your spreadsheet and try and model out what you think is going to happen.

If the data changes you have to go back to those individual Web sites and try and figure out where the new information is and very manually deal with that data. So things like planning, things like buying, things like collaborating -- as long as it is just screens and we don’t think of the Internet itself as a platform -- we are not unlocking its true potential.

But letting programs talk across the Internet, even XML is only one part of that. We need security advances, we need better tools, those sort of things that at our professional developers conference in July we talked about. We showed Visual Studio .Net, which is really the foundation of all this work, letting people easily write applications that run not only on the server, but take advantage of the different devices that are out there.

So a simple summary of this is that after 25 years our software has had this immense impact. It’s had this very central role and Microsoft has had a chance to lead that.

In the next 25 years, because the devices will be even better, even more empowering, that role of software, I would say, is going to be even more critical, and so we are taking the best things that we have done and pulling those together into some revolutionary advances around .Net.

I am excited to have a chance over these next few days to talk to various customers about what this means for them, what they are interested in seeing, how we should prioritise these advances, and I am sure I will go back with a lot of data to influence our development plans.