ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the launch of Office XP. And now, please welcome to the stage --

CLIPPY: It looks like you're making an introduction.

ANNOUNCER: Excuse me?

CLIPPY: Would you like some help? I used to help people all day long. Remember how helpful I was? I was the most helpful talking paperclip ever. But now no one needs me. Office XP is too easy. It's embarrassing. Sure, XP stands for easier collaboration and increased productivity, but it also stands for "ex-paperclip."

Thanks to XP, I've had a lot of time for soul-searching and resume writing. I even took a few vacations. And I've been reading the classics of literature. I ran a marathon and I had a brief passionate love affair.

Then, after the brief passionate love affair, I sought counseling.

I've tried a few different careers -- hot dog distribution, urban transportation, mozzarella management. And, given my experience as an "Office" assistant, I thought I could try running for office. But my therapist said I'd only be truly happy as an assistant.

So please ask Mr. Gates to give me a bigger role in XP. Make me part of the whole XP experience. I want to be a star again. But, if it doesn't happen, tell him I could really use one of those Xboxes.

Well, it looks like I have to go. Please tell him how you really feel about me. Bring back Clippy. Bring back Clippy. Bring back Clippy. Bring back --

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Chairman and Chief Software Architect of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates.

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: Thank you. Well, Clippy did his job right up to the end. He even helped me write the letter informing him that he was fired. (Laughter.) Eliminating Clippy has turned out to be very popular. I wouldn't worry too much about him. He's sure to latch onto something.

So here we are, the big launch of Office XP, the most popular piece of application software ever. People have noticed that this year is a big one for Microsoft, a big one for the world of software. We not only have today's launch, but a lot of other important breakthroughs that are coming out this year. In the fall, we'll have Windows XP, we'll have Xbox, we'll have a breakthrough for developers, which is the Visual Studio.NET product. And in the area of services we'll have constant improvements to MSN and all the online properties around the MSN community.

People are really seeing that the long-term investments that we and others have been making in software can make a big difference. We're really only at the beginning of what we're calling the "digital decade" and empowering tools will be at the center of this decade, enabling things that were very inefficient or not even possible before.

And that's what today's announcement is all about. It's about a lot of new products that are based on our watching Office users, seeing what they do, what are they frustrated with, what do they want to see better.

It's been two years since the last major release of Office and our development team has been hard at work during that time building this breakthrough version. Office XP is launching today. This is a worldwide launch in over 20 countries. The launch events are taking place today. Office comes out in 33 different languages, and so this is a product for the entire world.

Along with Office XP, we have a number of other updated software products: SharePoint Portal Server is a new product for us. Visio, that's part of the Office family has a major update being released today. FrontPage, the most popular tool for editing Web sites, major updates today. MapPoint, that lets you deal with geographic information, a major update there. And finally another new product that relates to mobile information, writing applications and getting information on the intelligent phones that are increasingly popular, making that straightforward is the Mobile Information Server product.

This worldwide launch is something we sat down and talked about a few months ago and said, "How are we going to do justice to this product? How are we going to explain the breadth of new features that we've got available?"

Well, people often ask, you know, "What's the marketing budget? Who's the big star that's going to come out?" Our biggest launch to date was our Windows 95 launch. There we had all sorts of star power with Jay Leno and many others, and a lot of different approaches that gave it a lot of glitz. Well, here with Office XP we're taking a different approach. We're really letting the product speak for itself. The only star power I've got to help me today is old Clippy to help out, and most of what you'll see this morning is what we've done with the product.

Around the United States over the next few days we'll have over 125,000 people seeing Office XP. And if you compare that to the Windows 95 launch, it's way more than double the number of people. That kind of groundswell of interest that's let us create that size of launch is based on what people have seen about the beta and the important role that this product plays.

Already today the launch has taken place throughout Europe, showing off the features and showing the localized versions, the partner solutions that are being built in every country around the world.

I remember in the early days of building Microsoft Office we talked about this ambition of having it be a tool that everybody would use, that when you hired a temporary worker you knew that they were familiar with these tools, that when you exchange spreadsheets or presentations, everybody would have in common one powerful tool that they were all using to be able to share information. And Office has really fulfilled those dreams. Office has become the tool of knowledge workers.

In today's economy, the role of the knowledge worker is more important than ever. The information economy moves more and more of the work to knowledge workers. The key differentiation between companies is the work that you have your knowledge workers do. And for all the things that people talk about -- hiring the best people, training them, getting them to work together -- empowering them with the latest software is certainly one of the elements that makes a big difference.

The kind of productivity increases that the U.S. economy has seen over the last five years in our view are just at the beginning. What we can do with the Office tool is something that will continue to surprise people with how far we can go here.

Worldwide, there are over 250 million people who use Office. It's their primary tool from e-mail to presentations, all the different things they do. And we're constantly expanding the definition of Office. It is the product for all knowledge worker activity.

There is a whole community built around Office. People who develop specialized applications, whether it's for medical or insurance or financial analysis, over 3 million people use the expansibility that we've built into the product.

It's advances in Office that have driven forward personal computing. The move to graphics interface was largely driven by great Office applications. And so this standard is something that can make a very big difference. By making Office just 10 percent better, we've saved literally hundreds of millions of man-hours of time. And certainly with Office XP we've more than met that threshold to create a major advance.

It's interesting, people ask us, "Isn't Office at the pinnacle of what it can be? Haven't you really solved every problem?" And the answer is no. We are way short of what it's possible to do for these knowledge workers. The ultimate is that any piece of information that they care about is immediately accessible to them, that their time is used in the most efficient way so they always have what they care about and are never interrupted by things that are unimportant; their ability to work with people inside their company and outside their company is completely seamless; the boundary between the Internet and their productivity applications can be eliminated to let them have access to that powerful tool.

And so we are not anywhere close to the pinnacle of what we can do for people. Whether it's note-taking or meetings or forecasting, the frontiers of Office are expanded with Office XP, and there's even more that we can do.

And let's consider the trends in the industry. There's the trend towards rich communication. Today, we think of the screen as one way to share information and the phone as another way. Well, those will be brought together, so when you call someone up, your screen and their screen will be connected and you'll have all your Office tools to edit documents together, to exchange information. A lot of that information will be in this new XML format, the idea that all the paperwork of the business goes away, not just for simple orders but for all the things that go on, the changes that take place, the customer service things, reviewing what the bill looks like; all of those exchanges that take knowledge workers' time, getting those to be done in a digital fashion relies on XML.

And we're designing all our software products from the ground up around XML. Office XP is the first version of Office that supports XML, and you'll see some great examples of what we're doing with that here today.

Microsoft's overall strategy is to take XML and build it into a framework we call .NET, where getting information from all your different devices whenever you need it is very straightforward, so that if you have multiple PCs you're not taking your Office settings and having to manually move them between them. If you're trying to get at information and you've set up your favorites or your templates, that automatically shows up on not only your different PCs but any other devices as well, so when you go to your smart phone, it already knows all the things about you that would be useful to you to use that tool. So .NET is a very broad strategy, designed around XML, but it's about productivity across the many different devices.

The world of computing has some frontiers that we're finally tackling. The idea of bringing in handwriting and speech, making that a standard part of the interface; that's a dream that we've been investing in over the last decade. Here with Office XP for the first time we've got the speech capability built in. We also see handwriting as very important, particularly as tablet form factor devices will be coming out. For the first time, the hardware and software will be good enough that even your reading of long documents, immersive reading will take place on a screen. The new form factors will include a pen so you'll be able to do annotation and share information. They'll be connected up to a wireless network.

So when you think about these changes, we can see that the relationship of Office to the back office applications, to meetings, to communication, all of those things will be changing in the years ahead. Office will continue to be the application that drives these advances forward.

We've studied knowledge workers and the different things they do, really looking for where we can make a difference. You know, how can we make it easier to find information? If somebody wrote a memo on a topic, how can anyone in the company have access to that? If you're reading a memo and you see something of interest and you want to navigate to related documents or Web sites, how can we make that easy? How can we make creating these documents far simpler than it's ever been, make it so that you just focus in on the content itself and not the mechanism? What can we do in the user interface to make the power of the tool come to the front and not force you to learn all the different meanings? These are all areas that we've tackled with Office XP, and the feedback we have is that it's a very substantial advance in every one of these different activities.

This importance of Office and the number of documents created using Microsoft Office, the numbers are really mind-boggling. People create in a year over 100 billion pages using Microsoft Office. And can they get at the information they want in that? Can they really share that with people the way that they'd like?

Well, we thought about how could we bring this home, how could we get people to really see it visibly. And so I asked the team, "How many documents are created just in one week and just here in Manhattan?" And so they actually said, "Okay, Bill, you know, it's a lot, but we can bring that for you and have that available on stage so you can illustrate it." And so let's take a look here and see how many documents would be created in one week just in this Manhattan neighborhood.

(Pause.)

Okay. So, that's our opportunity, to make it easy to find the information in those different documents, to make the time spent building those documents a lot shorter than it is today.

So the leverage for advances here is like none other. No other tool has as much impact.

And so a theme of Office XP, it's this idea of unlocking hidden knowledge, information that's hard to find, information that's hard to capture, and finally the hidden features, the hidden power in the applications, making it so that every user can get at the capabilities they need, either by seeing templates or having the new capabilities show up in a very simple way.

Office XP really spans from the single person building that one document up to teams of people working in a department, up to organizations that want to take Office and build special extensions that relate it to their business, their special activities, whether it's their accounting software or their partnership activities, making sure that they use the Office extensibility to integrate those things in.

So today we're going to see examples of Office at work for the individual, for teams and for organizations.

For simple productivity, there's a lot that can be done. When we monitor users and see are they doing things the most efficient way, you know, are they going back and saving documents regularly just because they're afraid something will happen that they won't be able to recover their information; do they see how this search capability can reach out not only within that document but across all the different things they're doing; these are very important things to us.

We also need to make it so that when you move up to this new version, it's an easy upgrade. One thing that our customers are very excited about is that Office XP does not change the file formats of the previous versions of Office.

(Applause.)

What does that mean? That means that one user can upgrade to Office XP and still collaborate, send mail enclosures and share things with people who are using the previous version of Office. And so that means it can be sort of a grassroots effort to hear about the new version and easily install it on a machine.

Office XP does not require more hard disk or a more advanced processor than previous versions. So this is the easiest upgrade we've ever had. The changes to the user interface are all incremental, and so whatever you're familiar with, it's still there but you'll immediately see some new things that without any training at all you'll be able to take advantage of.

So first and foremost, this product thinks about individual empowerment, unlocking hidden capabilities. So let's go ahead and take a look at Office XP and how it makes productivity simple.

(Video presentation.)

DAVID JAFFE: Hi there. My name is David Jaffe and I'm an Office XP product manager. Now, I want to take the next several minutes to highlight how Office XP makes productivity simple by giving users the tools they need to accomplish their important tasks, as well as unlocking hidden features that were previously too hard to find, and as a result too hard to use.

The first way that Office XP makes productivity simple is through something that we call "Task Panes," which are shared across all the Office applications. Task Panes appear on the right-hand side and give me everything I need to do to complete my job. For example, everybody needs to format documents. The Styles and Formatting Task Pane allows me to see all the available formatting in my document, and if I hover over a given section of text, I can see exactly the formatting applied. I can even select all other instances of this formatting.

So what you're seeing is that Word now has discontinuous selection, meaning I can play formatting to multiple places in my document at once without having to do it block by block.

I can also highlight a header, select "all other instances" and even choose formatting from my Styles and Formatting Task Pane. I can even select custom headers as well.

The next thing I want to do is go out and gather some information for this document. But as Bill mentioned, searching for information across an organization is extremely difficult. That's because people have files stored in a variety of different places. Well, Office XP has a Search Task Pane that allows me to search for files on my computer, networked places, even in e-mail. I can even choose what type of file I'm looking for, including Web pages.

Now, if I'm using this with SharePoint Portal Server, I can even go ahead and search across my entire organization, including file servers and Web servers. So what that means is we've brought enterprise-wide search capabilities directly into Office XP.

In this case, when I go ahead and so the search, you'll see that a variety of results come back -- Office files, e-mail items. You'll notice I can even search on faxes as well.

In this case however, let me go ahead and access some information from this document, from this e-mail message. When I open up the document, however, you'll notice it's in German, and that's a problem for me because I don't speak German at all. But it's not a problem for Office XP because we now have a Translation Task Pane that allows me to translate any specific word or even more importantly, I can use a translation Web Service to go ahead and translate this entire document from German to English.

Now, what you're seeing is actually a machine-based translation, but if I wanted even greater accuracy, I could also do a human-based translation as well.

What do you guys think?

(Applause.)

In this case, let me go ahead and copy the information I need for that document. When I do so, you'll notice it appears on the clipboard, which is now part of the Task Pane. I can copy up to 24 pieces of information from any of my Office applications and I can even preview what I've copied.

Let me go ahead and copy this Excel spreadsheet. Now, if you've ever copied and pasted information before, you know it rarely looks right the first time you do so, so you have to copy it and paste it and keep doing that over and over.

Well, I'm going to go ahead and paste that Excel information that we just copied, and when I do so, you'll notice a little button up here. This is the second core technology that I want to focus on in terms of Office XP. These are called Smart Tags, which are context-sensitive buttons that appear when the user needs them and gives me all the options I need without having to search through menus and tool bars.

So in this case, I have the options for formatting what I just pasted. I can keep the source formatting match the destination formatting. I can even keep the source formatting and link back to Excel.

So let's say I go back to that Excel spreadsheet and I want to update some numbers, such as make the sales targets a little bit bigger, or I may want to even format my documents a little bit nicer. So, you'll notice that it automatically shows up in my Word document linking back to Excel.

Let's go ahead and now also paste that information that I translated. Once again, I get a smart tag that appears that allows me to keep the source formatting or match the destination formatting as well.

Smart tags through aren't just about pasting information. Smart tags also help me when things take place automatically in my applications. So, for example, say I wanted to add to this bulleted list. Well, it starts over from number one and that's not really what I want to have happen. So you'll notice a smart tag appears that gives me the option to continue numbering, or even access the bulleted numbering options without searching through menus and toolbars.

Now, I don't know how many times it's ever happened to you, but have you ever been typing in Word and something takes place automatically that you didn't want to have happen, such as when I type in this sentence, such as "schedule a meeting on 3/4" and you'll notice that the "A" was automatically capitalized and the date turns into a fraction.

Well, once again, you'll notice a smart tag appears that allows me to undo the auto correction that just took place or even let Word know how I want this to be handled in the future.

So let me undo that and I'll also go ahead and change the date into a fraction. Now, isn't this going to save you guys a lot of time?

(Applause.)

So like I said, smart tags again aren't just about formatting information or fixing auto corrections; smart tags are also about accessing information that may be in your Office applications, the Web or even in your organization. So, for example, I can type in a person's name here and when I do so, you'll notice a smart tag icon appears that recognizes the person's name and allows me to send mail to this person, schedule a meeting, add them to my contacts, or I can even insert their address directly from my Outlook contacts folder into this document.

And you'll notice if I hover over an address, it recognizes an address and allows me to display a map or display driving directions as well.

So, we'll just wait a second while this comes up and you'll see it goes to Expedia.com and automatically maps that address.

Smart tags are also available in all the other Office applications as well. So you'll notice here I am in Excel and I might want to go ahead and insert a row. When I do so, however, you'll notice that Excel makes a guess at what I wanted that formatting to be. Once again, a smart tag appears and comes to the rescue. I can choose exactly the formatting that I want.

And as I go ahead and add a formula, you'll notice a unique smart tag. Excel will recognize that I may have made an error, such as forgetting to sum all the cells. A smart tag appears that allows me to update the formula that includes the cells or accesses a variety of other options as well. So I can go ahead and fix that formula on the fly.

Now, smart tags are also available in e-mail, and that's because Word is the default e-mail editor, so I can take advantage of all the rich features you've previously seen directly in Word. So here I have an e-mail that has a bunch of smart tags in it. One of the best parts about smart tags is that they're extensible and customizable, meaning third parties can create their own. So this e-mail is filled with a number of third party smart tags. For example, Lexis-Nexis, which is a global provider of news and information, has created a series of smart tags, such as a name smart tag so I can hover over a person's name and have a variety of options, such as searching almost 9,000 publications for news on this person in just a matter of seconds.

You may have also noticed that when I hover over the smart tag I have a variety of legal options as well. So if I was in the legal profession, I could easily access those.

Now, speaking of the legal profession, Lexis-Nexis has already created a case name smart tag, which allows me to hover over a case name and find information such as federal case, state case, even find news articles, law reviews or verdict information.

So you can imagine how this could save lawyers hours of time. As they're constantly working in Word on contracts, smart tags will be quite useful and make it just a click away.

UPS has also created a smart tag as well, so if I hover over a tracking number, I can quickly view the package status for that package with just one click.

Pretty cool, huh?

(Applause.)

And finally you'll notice if I hover over a city name, I have a couple different smart tags, such as one from Expedia, where I can search for flight information, hotels or any other travel information, or at MSNBC.com smart tag, where I can go ahead and get local news or sports for the Las Vegas area, or I can even go ahead and find the latest weather forecast, which is just one click away.

So how do people get these great smart tags? Well, smart tags are available on Tools on the Web, which is accessible from any of the Office applications. Tools on the Web is a site that allows users to download some great information and get information on Office. More specifically, there's a e-services section, which has a variety of Web-based services that users can access and extend the value of Office. For example, here's all the smart tags, just a few of the smart tags that are currently up on the Web site.

So, like I said, e-services offers a variety of different improvements for users that they can use right in Office. One of those is a Web Service called the "Template Gallery," which provides hundreds of professionally designed templates for users that they can download directly into their Office application. Now, I could choose from an existing template or I could search even on a specific type, such as I want to search for all PowerPoint templates. So when I do the search, you'll see a variety of results come back and I can select exactly the template that I want. Now I'm just a click away from getting that template directly into PowerPoint and I can start working.

So now that I'm in PowerPoint, you'll notice I can switch between outline and slide view and the Task Pane is available so I can easily go ahead and format it exactly the way I want. You'll notice that Task Panes are easily resizable, so I can get them whatever size I want, given my screen. The new slide Task Pane, for example, allows me to go ahead and insert a new slide and get exactly the layout I want.

The Task Pane also has a slide design Task Pane allows me to see all the design templates in my presentation. I can apply design templates to the entire presentation or I can now even apply multiple design templates to the same presentation as well.

The Task Pane also helps me get the color schemes exactly the way I want, and PowerPoint has a new animation engine that really allows me to make my presentation come alive.

So let me go ahead and type in my company name here, and I'm just going to go ahead and choose a specific animation, such as an exciting animation like this Neutron one. And you'll notice that my company name flies in.

So how powerful is PowerPoint's animation? Well, the presentation you're about to see was created solely in PowerPoint. Now, it's not something that the typical user might create in a matter of seconds, but it does highlight how powerful PowerPoint's animation is. Let's take a look.

(Video presentation.)

So as you can see, PowerPoint truly does have a rich PowerPoint animation engine.

What do you guys think? Pretty cool?

(Applause.)

Now let's suppose I was working on this presentation and an error were to happen. So I should point out the error you're about to see was created specifically for demo purposes. (Laughter.) Well, it's likely that if you haven't saved this document in the past, I would have lost all my data and had to recreate it. But you'll notice that when an error happens, I have the option to recover my document and restart PowerPoint, even though I haven't saved it. Furthermore, I can choose to send an error report back to Microsoft or, if I'm in an organization, back to my administrator. So the benefit for users there is they can go ahead and be taken automatically, say, to a Web page with the latest download and the latest work-around. For organizations, they can proactively push down work-arounds based on the most common errors that their organization is seeing. What that means is that their users don't have to call help desks on those specific issues; they can go ahead and stay working. In this case, you'll see that when PowerPoint comes back up, all the changes I just made to this presentation are saved, and I can continue working without calling the help desk.

Now, speaking of help, you may have noticed that that annoying Office assistant hasn't appeared once while I was doing my demo. That's because we've turned the Office assistant off by default in new installation.

(Applause.)

However, that doesn't prevent me from asking questions in my own words. You'll notice that within all the Office applications I can still ask questions in my own words and get exactly the answers I need, just without the animated assistant.

So, as we've seen, Office XP helps make productivity simple by helping users accomplish more of their tasks and find more of what they're doing, as well as helping unlock features that were previously hidden in the product, making it easier to use.

So what do you think? Looks pretty good, huh?

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: Okay. So that's Office XP and individual productivity. That smart tag feature is one that has really caught us by surprise. We had a lot of exciting scenarios in mind when we designed it in, and we knew it was important to make it extensible, to let third parties come along and provide their creativity. But we just didn't expect the wide range of ideas that those third parties have come up with.

We have, through the Web site, the ability to publish all the different smart tag add-ons that people come to us with, and so you'll see that expand over time, but already up on the Web site you'll find several dozen of these smart tag add-ons. And so in every industry, whether it's retailing or medical or insurance, there will be special smart tag capabilities that get built.

It's really going to make you think of documents in a very different way. Documents become the source of navigation to all interesting information.

Well, the next category we said we'd talk about is how Office makes sense for teams. Today, teamwork is somewhat cumbersome. You enclose files in e-mail. You send e-mail back and forth quite a bit. The idea of having a shared Web site that's easy to set up, that doesn't require any IT involvement, that hasn't been possible.

Since we've had Office XP available inside Microsoft, we've been using these new collaboration features, including SharePoint, and so now when we organize an event or a meeting, there's always a SharePoint site up there, and so you can look and see what the latest changes are, who's going to come and it's far easier than it ever was before. I think this is an area that people didn't expect that we could make such a big change and yet SharePoint brings that to us.

Outlook is the module that people use the most inside Office.

And finally, one of the key things in Word is this ability to see changes that other people are making.

So collaboration has been a big theme. Let's go ahead and take a look at what's new in the collaboration area.

(Video presentation.)

DAVID JAFFE: So as we've just heard, a key area of focus for Office XP is collaboration. Let's see how. The first way Office XP helps users collaborate more effectively is by helping them manage their important e-mail, appointments, contacts and tasks. For example, one of the frustrations of using Outlook in the past was when you opened Outlook up and you got reminder windows that cascaded all the way across your screen, and you had to dismiss them one by one; pretty frustrating.

Well, you'll notice that Outlook now has a single reminder window that allows me to manage all my reminders in once place. I can just dismiss, open or snooze any one item, or I can even do it to all the items as well.

In this case, however, let me go ahead and open up a reminder from a specific contact person that I need to call. When I do so, you'll notice I have a message that says this person is currently online, and that's because Outlook is tightly integrated with MSN Messenger. I can actually start a chat with this person instead of first having to send them e-mail or call them on the phone.

So let's find out where he is. "So, hey, Boris, where are you today?"

BORIS: You can't pretend to be sick at home anymore, if you have a Pocket PC with a wireless card. With my Pocket PC I received this instant message from David asking me where I am. Well, I have to let him know that I'm working from home. I sent his message right from here.

DAVID JAFFE: So I see that Boris says he's working from home today. Let me go ahead and have him set up a meeting for when he gets back into the office so we can discuss the project we're working on with the team.

BORIS: It seems like David is asking me if I set up that meeting, which I already sent a request for, so I'll just reply back to him right on my Pocket PC: "Already sent a request." And I can use handwriting recognition to send this message from my Pocket PC right away.

DAVID JAFFE: So it looks like Boris has already sent me the request. Let me go ahead and check my Inbox. In fact, it's true, Boris has sent me a meeting request. But you know what, it looks like it conflicts with an existing appointment. So rather than declining this meeting and then calling him up on the phone to tell him I can't meet, you'll notice I can now propose a new meeting time, which allows me to see the free and busy times of everybody invited to the meeting, so I can easily pick an alternate time that works best for everyone.

You'll also notice that I can see the free and busy times of somebody who's not even in my organization, and that's because they've signed up for Internet Free/Busy Service, which is just another example of a Web-based service that's built right into Office XP.

(Applause.)

Now, speaking of appointments, Outlook makes it much easier to go ahead and manage your important appointments. And the way we do so is through color coding, so now I can color code any one of my appointments, and more importantly I can even edit the label so I have the label that's associated with the color exactly the way that I want it.

I can also go apply rules to specific appointments as well. So you'll see here I've set up a rule to apply meetings for my boss. I can also go ahead and set up rules to identify any other person, or for that matter a specific keyword as well. In this case, let's just go ahead and identify all meeting requests from my boss as important. When I do so, you'll see it goes ahead and populates all the messages from my boss with the important color, so I can better prepare for my meetings.

Now, if you guys are anything like me, you probably have multiple e-mail accounts, whether it's an Exchange account, an MSN account, a Hotmail account, or for that matter any other e-mail account as well. Outlook now allows me to set up multiple e-mail accounts right from within Outlook so that I don't have to go to all these different clients to access my e-mail.

Let me go ahead and switch to my Windows XP machine and get some help on this. Let's say I don't know how to do it. So here I am on Windows XP and one of the benefits of using Office XP and Windows XP together is a feature called "Remote Assistance," which is part of Windows XP. What Remote Assistance allows me to do is get help on any specific task I'm trying to create and this person can even take over my computer and show me exactly how to complete this task.

So let me get Boris. Hey, Boris, I sent you a Remote Assistance request earlier today. Do you think you can help me out?

BORIS: It seems like this Dave knows that I'm home but still can't reach me. He's asking me on his e-mail if I can help him. With Remote Assistance, I don't have to actually go into the office to help him. There is an e-mail that I received from him. All I have to do is open his invitation and I will start this help session. Remote Assistance is a great technology especially for larger firms who have to support remote locations, so they don't have to go to the location to work on the other machine; or for home users who can get help from their peers or help others using this application.

Alongside this Remote Assistance, we can do chat or voice chat as well.

So the screen that you see right now when I minimize it is I'm looking at David's screen, and he asks me if I can help him. Let's say, "Let's give me control of your machine." I'll send it to him and I will ask him if I can interact with his machine. Now he has to give me the permission to interact on his PC.

I scroll down. I see that his Outlook is on. And now in Outlook we have this new user interface that we call E-mail Account User Interface that allows you to add e-mails very easily. I will go in and add a new e-mail account, which I know is going to be a Hotmail account. Let's enter his credentials: David Jaffe. And his e-mail address is DV_ -- but naturally I don't know his password. Dave, what's your password so I can enter here?

DAVID JAFFE: Not so fast, Boris. This is where I go ahead and stop control and take control myself. Let me actually just go ahead and disconnect Boris and I'll move on.

So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and enter my own password and I'm going to finish walking through the Wizard. When I do so, what it's going to do is connect me to my Hotmail, and you'll see that Hotmail is automatically set up in my Inbox now so I can view my Hotmail without having to leave my Outlook application.

Now, the nice thing also is that because it's in Outlook, I can even take my Hotmail messages offline.

So, I spent a lot of time talking about e-mail, and the reason is that it's still the most popular way that people collaborate today. Well, one of the frustrations with collaborating via e-mail in the past is when it came time to working on documents and sending around those via e-mail. What happened is I would send a document out to four or five people and ultimately two people would forget to turn "track changes" on, and I, as the document owner, then would have to recognize their changes, put them in my document, figure out what those changes were, and then reconcile it into one coherent document.

Well, Office XP has created a new process called "Send for Review," which streamlines how I share documents with one another. For example, if I wanted to show this document and collaborate on this document with others, I can just go right from the file menu and choose to send this to a mail recipient for review.

When I do so, you'll see it adds a document as an attachment and now I can go ahead and send this off to my colleagues. And you'll notice as I'm typing in their address, that it's automatically completing my colleagues' addresses, and that's because we now have auto-complete addressing in Outlook, so I don't have to go ahead and search for their specific address.

So let me go ahead and send this off to my colleagues and in just one second we'll go ahead and see what their experience is once they've received this document.

So, hey, Bobby, have you received the e-mail message yet?

BOBBY: Actually, Dave, yes, I did. Let's go ahead and open this document and the very first thing that you're going to notice is that the reviewing toolbar is automatically turned on. Now, like Dave mentioned before, sometimes people actually forget to track their changes when they're editing a document and some people actually didn't know that this functionality existed. Well, now when you receive a document for review with Office XP, Track Changes is automatically turned on.

So, how is this helpful for me? Well, you'll notice here that when I make a change, the edit is actually captured in the right-hand margin. Now, this is actually what we call "mark up," and it's really helpful because it actually allows me to see the changes I've made, and at the same time it reduces the clutter of the document by moving things to the right-hand margin. And, in fact, this is actually the way that I go about editing a normal paper document if I received it in a hard copy.

So, again, a really great improvement to the document collaboration process.

Now, I want to go ahead and make one other change before I send this document back to Dave. You'll notice here that the word "Champion Zone" is actually our company name, and I'd actually like to give this a lot more emphasis. I'd actually like to make it bold. Well, now with the new find and replace functionality, I can not only search for it but I can also select all instances of the word "Champion Zone" and I can easily make them bold all at one time.

So now I'm actually done making edits to the document, and I want to send it back off to Dave. Now, in the past, I'd actually have to save this document. I'd have to close the document, open up e-mail, open up a new e-mail message. I've have to go ahead and add this as an attachment. Well, now with Send for Review I can just hit "reply with changes." It's going to open up a new e-mail message for me. It's going to add this document as an attachment. And Office XP will actually remember who sent me the original document. So now when I hit "send" I'll just send this back off to Dave.

(Applause.)

NICOLE: So, it looks like David sent the document to me for review as well. Let me go down to the preview pane here and open up the attachment. So let me scroll through the document here, and the first thing I notice is that this paragraph is not formatted like all of the others. So let me highlight that paragraph. Then I'm actually going to change the formatting to Arial 14 point font. So in addition to any insertions or deletions that I put in the document, all formatting changes are called out in the right-hand margin as well.

So let me finish looking through the document, and I see down here that under sales goals there's not a whole lot of data in there, and I actually think that David should add some information on our future revenue potential. So let me go up here to the toolbar and insert a comment for David. "Please insert more data here."

So I think I'm done editing this document, and all I need to do is "Reply with Changes" to David and all my edits are automatically saved in the document and attached to this e-mail, which I'm going to send back to David now.

DAVID JAFFE: Great. So back on my machine it looks like I've received both Bobby and Nicole's e-mail messages. Let me just go ahead and check them out. When I open up Nicole's message, you'll notice I get a message that says, "This document was originally sent out for review, and do I want to merge the changes back into the document." I can click "yes" and you'll notice the changes she made are captured right in the document.

Now, this is great because this is something that you couldn't do before, and as a result, it made it really hard to capture and accept or reject changes.

I'm going to go ahead and open Bobby's message as well and incorporate his changes, and once again I get the same message.

Now, you'll notice all the changes are in this document, so I can go ahead and hover over a specific component and see who made the change, and it's color coded, so I can quickly identify who made what change, such as Bobby made this change and Nicole made the other one. I can even go ahead and use the reviewing toolbar and see all the reviewers for this specific document. Now, I can choose to do them all at once or even one at a time. Furthermore, I can choose to accept or reject the changes one at a time or all at the same time.

Finally, I have a number of different viewing options as well. So, for example, I can see the original documents, which shows me exactly the way I sent it out, the final document, which incorporates all the changes or I can even see the view that we've already seen, which is the mark ups in the right-hand side.

When I'm done and accepted all the changes, I can end the review and save the document and continue working.

So you can see Office XP has really improved the way people collaborate on documents via e-mail, completely streamlined the process with a central review.

But what about people who want to collaborate in a more powerful way than what e-mail can offer? What we've introduced is something called SharePoint Team Services that helps you to collaborate more effectively via the Web. SharePoint Team Services is a Web site tool that can be hosted internally inside of an organization or even by a variety of Internet service providers.

So here I am on my SharePoint Team services site, and you'll notice there is a variety of components, such as announcements, events or links to my favorite team Web sites.

The great thing about SharePoint Team Services is that I can easily add to this site. So say I want to add a new announcement. I'll just say, "Office XP Launches in New York City." And with just one click of the button, you'll see that it's added to my SharePoint Team Services site. So it's super easy to add content.

You'll also notice that I can access such things as events for my team and even see a team calendar and see all the events that are populated for my team.

Now, SharePoint Team Services is tightly integrated with Office XP, so I can create a document library, which is a repository where people can share and store information with one another.

Let me just go ahead and create a new document library and I'll just call it "Champion Zone Project," which is the project I'm working on, and I'll go ahead and click "create." And when I do so, you'll see it's created a space where people can share and store their documents. Now, this is fully customizable, so I can add a row or a column, for example, and I'm going to go ahead and add a new column called "description," because one of my pet peeves is when people save things some place and they don't describe what it is. So I'm actually going to make this a requirement that people enter this information and I'm going to click "okay." Now when I go back to the document library, you'll see that description has been added to that site.

Now, there are a number of ways to get information up to this document library. I could create a new document right from here. I could upload a document, or I could even save a document directly from one of my applications, and that's what I'm going to do. So you may have remembered that earlier I searched on a fax document. I'm going to go ahead and save that up here.

Office XP now has a new document and imaging program that allows me to take paper documents that I've scanned in, or faxes and turn them into digital documents that I can search on or use in my other Office applications. So I could go ahead and save this fax directly up to SharePoint Team Services, but I want people to be able to edit this information. With the document imaging and scanning program I could copy any given section of text and put it in an existing document or I can even export this fax document into a new document.

Now that I have it exactly the way that I want, I can go ahead and save it up to SharePoint Team Services. So let me go ahead and just type in the URL for that site, and when I do so you'll see that it connects to my Web server, recognizes the document libraries and I can save it directly up to Champion Zone Projects, which is the document library I created. You'll also see that the description I added earlier, it's now requiring me to add a description. So I'll just call this "press release" and click "okay." So now it's been saved up there.

When I go back to the document library and hit "refresh," you'll see the document I just saved is up there and Bobby and Nicole have added documents up to the document library as well. Now we can go ahead and collaborate and share on those documents via the Web.

(Applause.)

SharePoint Team Services also has a number of unique ways to collaborate as well, such as discussion boards, which allows me to create newsgroup type discussions that I can collaborate with my team. So here it's already populated and you can see Bobby and Nicole and I were having a discussion about this adventure project.

SharePoint Team Services also helps get team feedback in new and unique ways. So, for example, you'll notice if I go to my home page I have something called "team training feedback." This happens to be a survey. Now, I could go ahead and fill out the survey, but let's go ahead and edit it first just to show you how easy it is to contribute to this survey.

So I'm going to actually go ahead and modify the survey, and what I want to do is add a question. So I'll just go ahead and say, "What date did you attend?" And I should point out I'm doing this without being a developer or without knowing anything about HTML. So let me go ahead and make this a date and time response, and I'll make today's date the default, and I click "okay."

The next thing I want to do is go ahead and change the order of the questions as well. So let's make that the first question. So I'll just say, "What date did you attend?" I'll make it the first question. And now I can go back to my home page, select "team training feedback," and let's go ahead and respond to this survey.

So there's this question I just added: "What date did you attend?" Let's just select a date. I can select other options as well. And let me just continue filling this out. I'll say, "It was great." And I'll save enclosed the response.

You'll notice that I can now even go ahead and track responses to this survey as well, so I can get a graphical summary of the response. And you'll notice that Bobby and Nicole have also added their feedback as well. So this makes a very easy way to go ahead and analyze data. I can even export the results back from Excel and analyze the data in a greater manner.

So we've seen a lot about SharePoint Team Services, but the site looks a little generic as is. It's not a problem, because SharePoint Team Services is completely customizable. All I have to do is hit "edit" in the browser and it will round-trip it into Front Page where I can change the look and feel, such as adding a theme or even adding a company logo on the fly.

So as you can see, Office XP helps you to collaborate more effectively by managing e-mail, being able to use the central review process to share documents with one another more effectively, as well as the power in SharePoint Team Services.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: SharePoint is another feature in Office XP that really surprised us in terms of the quick popularity it achieved. Inside Microsoft now whenever anybody sets up a meeting or organizes something, it's the standard way of doing it is to set up one of those SharePoint sites.

We also want these SharePoint sites to work very well across company boundaries. A lot of the sites will be so-called intranet sites, but in other cases you want to involve your partners as well. So to make that really simple so you don't run into any firewall type problems, we've worked with partners who are hosting SharePoint up on their servers. And so here I've got a list of the partners who actually have SharePoint up and running today and make it simple to create a site. You just sign up very easily according to what sort of capacity you want, and boom, you're up and running.

So SharePoint works inside companies. It works across company boundaries. And setting up the names and the security on the various entities on the SharePoint site are very, very simple.

It's really about the Internet and collaboration coming together. The Internet to date has been so much just about reading information and only experts can publish, but here any Office user can create the shared site and use that as a new collaboration approach.

Well, let's now move to the final area we talked about, which is the use of Office XP as a solutions platform. And this is thinking about the flow of information inside a company that's mission critical, thinking about how you can look into the business systems and see what's going on, thinking about how people throughout a very large organization can work together.

It's our view that XML is going to unlock a lot of business processes that have been paperbound and bring them onto the network. And we need to use the standard Office interface as the way that people can navigate that information, the way they can create it, track it, annotate it and be directly involved.

These new XML transactions that will take over all business activity aren't just computer-to-computer type things; they also have to involve the workers as well, so the front office and back office come together in a really new way. So it's sort of beyond the desktop with the richness of a new platform.

We asked two of our cutting-edge customers to come and show us the kind of things they'll be able to do using Office XP. The first of those is Bridge Information Systems. And we're really pleased to have with us Jeffrey Woodruff, who's the senior vice president of their Internet products, and Scott Parsons, who's their chief scientist. And so let's meet them and see what they're thinking about doing with Office XP.

Welcome.

JEFFREY WOODRUFF: Thank you. It's nice to be here.

BILL GATES: Good morning.

SCOTT PARSONS: Good morning.

BILL GATES: So tell us a little bit about what Bridge does and where you're going?

JEFFREY WOODRUFF: Well, Bridge is a financial information provider. Our classic clientele are stock traders, stock analysts and portfolio managers, the people in the financial industry that manage our money. We, as part of our service, take in data feeds from over 280 exchanges in the world, keep that centrally, commingle it with news from other 450 different news sources, and then distribute that out over a wide area network to over 15,000 Windows-based servers that we install at our client sites. So, in a sense, Bridge is a giant data content aggregator that we then distribute out to our client sites.

One of the interesting things that we've done is we've taken one of those Windows-based servers at a client site and combined that with IIS, the Internet Information Service. So what we have now is both a data feed and a Web server rolled together, which means we can offer up the same content that we supply to high-end financial professionals through Internet type delivery.

So what we're excited about is that we're going to be able to go into new markets outside of the traditional markets that we've been able to go to. We're going to be able to offer solutions for off trading floor groups, for corporations and even individual investors. And we're really excited about the technology.

One of the things that is missing in our grand scheme is the end user application. We could go through and develop our own applications, right, but rather than force the users to learn yet another application to look at his financial data, what we really want to do is bring that information into the applications that the user uses every day that he uses as part of his normal productivity suite, and that's where Office XP comes in. We need to be able to bring that data in in a very simple and easy way so the user has a very gentle slope learning curve and make that easily available to let him keep focused on what he's trying to do.

BILL GATES: Well, that's great. So go ahead and show us how you've used Office XP to do that.

SCOTT PARSONS: Simplifying investment product was clearly our goal, and we took advantage of two new features that Microsoft exposed in Office XP. One is you've seen demonstrations from David Jaffe and the Office team on smart tags. So now we have a smart tag indicating I know that's the Bridge symbol. I know that's an equity. And I might want to get more information on that individual instrument. So in this case, we're looking at Anheuser Busch and I might want to bring in, in this case, the second feature that we're looking at. We brought in the little Web part with a sample HTML page, and I might want to get this data streaming. So the second feature that we're taking advantage of is the actual what is called RTD or real-time data function that's now available in Excel 2002.

So I'm selecting the data fields I want to populate back into Excel. I now have a real time streaming feed directly into my productivity suite. I don't have to go out to the Web or another standalone tool, and I could use the simple features that are packaged with Excel, like fill down to simply those repetitive tasks.

So I've now created a watch list or a portfolio that's streaming real time with my interest lists.

(Applause.)

In addition, I can look at what's going on in the market with a snapshot. I can look at indices, what's going on in the Treasury market. The Bridge is not just an equity player, but also fixed income, treasuries, what happened in the global markets overnight; and again, take advantage of the features of Excel. So I want it to rank real time and show me what's the best performing market in the Americas; it's Colombia. And the weakest today is the S&P in Peru; so on the fly what's going on.

In addition, we made these available through Word. So the smart tag function, and clearly RTD, or real-time data, you've not streamed into Word, but the smart tags I wouldn't want to build a research report on the fly. So in this case, we've taken a sample company, and I might want to get a quote data from here.

Now, the Web part has changed, so it doesn't say I can stream the data, but I can look at the data or insert that directly into Word. Or more importantly, as a research analyst, before I had to go out to the Web, comb multiple Web sites. You know, it's a complicated process. But what I really want to do is bring the historical data directly into Word.

So I could say, "insert all data." Word automatically knows that I want a table, formats the data for me -- I don't have to worry about parsing or concatenating the data -- and drops it directly in there.

Continuing my research and analysis, I can drop a chart back into there and literally with a single click, I've taken the information from the Web and dropped it into my productivity tool.

So that's what we're doing with RTD, the real-time data and with smart tags and leveraging this new functionality in Office XP.

BILL GATES: That's great. How much work would a user have to go to, to get this add-in set up with Office XP?

SCOTT PARSONS: From the Office e-services site, literally a simple subscription process, they would get their own user ID and password and be able to stream real-time data in Excel in under a minute.

BILL GATES: Oh, that's fantastic. It's a great use of the XP platform. Thanks a lot for being here and showing that.

SCOTT PARSONS: Thank you.

JEFFREY WOODRUFF: Thank you.

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: The other company that agreed to come and show us some of their breakthrough work today is Ford Motor. Let me invite Marv Adams, vice president and chief information officer, and John Stenlegg , manager, Advanced Information Technologies to come on out and tell us about what they're doing.

Good morning, Marv.

MARV ADAMS: Good morning.

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: Good morning, John.

JOHN STENLEGG: Good morning, Bill.

BILL GATES: Well, everyone knows Ford, but tell us what are some of the challenges you're trying to address with your new applications.

MARV ADAMS: Well, ultimately it's about customer satisfaction, Bill. And customer satisfaction is tightly linked to delivering our products when we tell our customers we're going to deliver them. As you know, it's a complex industry. There are thousands of build combinations on any model, and there are thousands of parts from thousands of suppliers. And keeping things synchronized is relatively straightforward when there is a predictable build schedule, predictable demand, predictable supply. The problem comes in when there are changes that are fairly sizable, and those changes in either demand or supply of components can ripple into build schedules, resulting in missing dates and customers not being satisfied with that, and frankly suppliers and Ford experiencing more costs than we would like.

So we've put together a solution. We call it Cobra. And we have a pilot with 12 suppliers. And the beauty about this solution is we were able to assemble it rapidly using standard components: Office XP, the Internet and e-mail, which is important to us, because those supplies range from mom and pop size shops to large companies. And we were able to put this solution together rapidly that, in essence, gives us more of a real time collaboration so that we can rapidly identify changes in demand or supply and then deal with those changes before they become surprises and causes delays in shipment.

BILL GATES: That's a very state-of-the-art approach. Can we take a look at how you've done it?

MARV ADAMS: Yeah. Let's show them, John.

JOHN STENLEGG: Certainly. Just before we run through the demo, let's give ourselves a little bit of a view as to how the Cobra system works. So if you think of Ford being on the left-hand side of this diagram and the supplier on the right-hand side and the fluffy cloud in the middle is the Internet, the first thing that happens is when the supplier sets up, all he needs is an Internet access and Office XP and there's a one-time download of a small template that tells Office XP how to render and manage the XML files he gets from Ford.

What then happens when we run Cobra is the material planning system does a regular run through and looks for any significant deviations in the planned volumes and works out via use of BizTalk and SQL Server which of the parts and which of the impacted suppliers that need to be told that there's a change in the schedule that may disrupt their own planning.

So we send them an XML file that informs them of the changes in the schedule that they need to react to. And remember, you only get one of these if things have changed. And the supplier then can look at the XML file using Office XP and can work with it within a very bounded, contained, easy to use experience of an application and then send the file back to Ford. Once again, it goes back as XML. The BizTalk system then again processes it, and the material planning analyst can take a look at summary information and if everything is fine, the supplier can handle the changes, he can just look at the summary or he can, using Office XP himself, drill through and look at what the supplier sent us.

If, on the other hand, there's a problem and the supplier can't handle the change in volume, he immediately gets an e-mail through his Outlook system, which tells him that there's corrective action that needs to be taken.

So to show you what that looks like from the supplier's perspective, which will be what we'll be demoing now, this is the Inbox. I'm pretending to be a supplier, and I've got some initial escalation warning messages from Ford. So there are some things I need to go take a look at.

So I double-click on here. This will bring up Excel with the Cobra application. So what's happened here is that the XML has been rendered in this nice bounded interface, and you can see we've got the predictive volumes coming, the current difference, and it's highlighted the differences for me. Here is where we need more volume. Here is where we need less. So some things have been moved around a little bit.

The option at this point is I have some buttons to make that easy to fill out. If I hit that button, it says, "Yep, okay, I can manage the Ford volumes." And you'll see down here the summary status has immediately toggled to "demand met exactly." So I can send that back to Ford and Ford will know that I can handle what's necessary.

But equally, if I want to say, "No, I can only handle the previous volume," I push that button and it defaults.

Well, let's say that I can largely handle the volume, but I can't actually change this week's schedule; we're locked and loaded. It's toggled to "demand not met," and I'm going to put some text in this box that says, "Can't change this week." I'll focus out of there and then I hit this button here, "Send back to Ford."

And so at this point, my outlook is saying, "Okay, am I allowed automatically e-mail this," and this is a security feature that makes sure that no malicious e-mails are sent automatically from my system. You say, "Yes," and that goes back to Ford.

At that point, if I just take a look at my Outbox and see what I've sent back, once again it's an automatic message. There is no text, because this is going to a machine. This is person to application, not person to person e-mail.

But here's the XML message. If I save that out, put an extension as XML on it, and we go to the desktop and just open that up, what's happened is that that nice rendered environment has been dehydrated out as a standard schema XML file that contains the information I sent back. It's got my numbers. It has my text notes, "Can't change this week." So you can see it's got all of my information. And that's what gets processed by the back end system at Ford.

Just coming back to Excel again, you'll see it tells me "response successfully sent to Ford." And then it highlights it on the screen there. It locks that file, so I know if I go back into my system exactly which of these alerts I've responded to, which I haven't, and we get consistency of information between what we're doing and what the supplier is doing.

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: That's great. What kind of reaction have you had from the suppliers that you've been working with this on?

MARV ADAMS: They like it. They like the functionality it provides them, the synchronization with Ford. They also like how easy it is to implement, that there hasn't been a big customized IT project to pull this off.

BILL GATES: Well, it's a vary state-of-the-art use of XML and we're excited to be working with you on it; a great use of the technology. Thanks.

MARV ADAMS: Thanks.

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: So we expect to see large companies in every different industry looking at how they can break down the barriers between the back office applications and the front office applications. Flowing information around using XML will be key to that, and it's very exciting how the entire computer industry is getting behind XML. This is something that we believed in from the very start, and it has a profound effect on all of our software applications.

With Office XP, this is the first day it's available, but I can tell you that we have very strong momentum -- momentum with partners, people building the XML extensions, the smart tags, all the extensibility that we've built into the product. Every generation of Office has succeeded, partly because of this open outreach to partners, letting them take their expertise and put it on top of the product. And every one of the companies listed here and many others are doing things that really are very impressive and speak to the strength of the overall platform.

Another group that's very important to us are, of course, the customers licensing the product and putting it into use. We have a very extensive beta test and the people who are involved in that beta test are moving very rapidly to do deployment. Even though this is the first day that the product is out, the companies we've got listed here are actually in the process of their deployments right now. You'll see companies up there, very large companies, government entities, manufacturers, financial organizations, educational institutions, quite a range of organizations that are moving full speed ahead. The investment in knowledge workers are really a key thing not only for these companies but the other Office customers as well.

I'm really pleased that one of our leading customers for Office XP and a key Microsoft partner is here with us today. Let's welcome the founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, to come up and share his thoughts.

(Applause.)

JEFF BEZOS: Thanks, Bill.

BILL GATES: Welcome, Jeff.

JEFF BEZOS: It's great to be here. Listen, let me first start by saying congratulations to you and the whole team. I know how complicated something like this is to pull off, and I know there have been hundreds of people working to make this product.

We are deploying inside Amazon.com to thousands of seats Office XP and we're really excited about it, so that's our internal deployment. Of course, we're also selling Office XP, so, you know, don't be shy -- (laughter) -- in our software store. And do you want to go buy a copy?

BILL GATES: Sure, let's see what that's like.

JEFF BEZOS: Let's do it.

BILL GATES: And here we are.

JEFF BEZOS: All right, here we are at Amazon.com. Now what we're going to do is let's go straight to the Microsoft store. You know, we've been taking pre-orders for Office XP for a month now. So here's the e-store. You can see that here's Office XP, the professional special edition, the number two bestseller in the Microsoft store. Let's go ahead and one thing I'll point out here too is we've got all these buying guides, Office XP buying guides. As most of you probably know, there are four different editions of Office XP, so this helps people figure out which one to buy and how that works. Let's go right into the product.

(Laughter.)

Oh, I didn't plan that, but don't forget. Seriously, I didn't plan it. We practiced this an hour ago.

But you can see here this is Amazon.com's sales rank number 16 already. That's based almost exclusively on just the pre-order sales. This is the first day that it's actually available for sale not as a pre-order.

There are some other, and I thought this was very interesting, this is our purchase circle. I don't know why, but this particular product is especially popular in Ohio. (Laughter.) And this one makes more sense: MSN.com ISP users are also disproportionately heavy Office XP buyers.

So let's go ahead and buy a copy. We'll buy it with one click. There we go. I'll also go ahead and share that purchase with my trusted friends at Amazon.com so everybody can know that this is what they should go and buy. And I think we might have a special delivery.

BILL GATES: Oh, really?

JEFF BEZOS: I think so. It's possible. Oh my God, it's Clippy. (Laughter.)

BILL GATES: He's good for something.

JEFF BEZOS: I was going to say.

BILL GATES: There it is. Very nice --

CLIPPY: Ahem, how about a little something for the service, Bill, Jeff?

JEFF BEZOS: Listen, Clippy, you definitely have our condolences, and judging from audience reaction, I think people are really, really sad to see you go -- not. (Laughter.) So we're very pleased to see you.

BILL GATES: We have very generous severance policies, and here's a t-shirt, Office XP t-shirt, and XP stands for "extra special paperclip." So good luck with that, Clippy.

CLIPPY: Ah, I love this guy. See you around the "Office." (Laughter.)

BILL GATES: Well, there it is. You've got the mouse and everything.

JEFF BEZOS: That's right. It's the whole package.

BILL GATES: Super. Well, it's great to be working together on this, Jeff.

JEFF BEZOS: Absolutely. Thank you.

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: Well, it looks like buying Office XP will be every bit as easy as installing it and taking advantage of it.

So we've tried to give you a quick overview of what we've got. Office XP is a very broad product. We don't have time this morning to show you all the features, so you'll have to go up and see what we've got up on the Web site, the demo file things there, or download the demo copy and try it out.

We really do see this as a very big milestone for all productivity workers. I think the individual features will be what drives it forward, but then you'll be surprised what teams and organizations can do with it.

For us, it's just the beginning and it's part of our .NET approach that lets people get at information on any device anywhere they are.

So thanks for coming and we look forward to hearing from you about how you like Office XP.

(Applause.)