Remarks by Bill Gates
Tablet PC Launch
New York, New York
Thursday, November 7, 2002

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

(Applause.)

BILL GATES: Thank you.  Well, up till now when we used our personal computer, it's always looked like this, but in the future it's going to look often like this.  And today we're going to explain why there's a whole new way of experiencing the personal computer that's ushered in by the Tablet PC.

The tablet has been a dream that I and many other people have had for years and years.  Even when Paul Allen and I first talked about starting Microsoft and how we'd take computing from being something that large businesses use to moving it down to something that was personal in nature, we thought of reading and note-taking as things that would eventually be in the realm where the PC would have software that would help out with those things.

And we weren't the first people to talk about that.  In fact, if you go back even to 1945 and Vannevar Bush writing about how he thought computing would move forward, he talked about the machine you see here, called the Memex, and his idea, although it was a little mechanical compared to what the eventual realizations ended up being, was that you would have a computer where you could call up information that was of interest, record your thoughts and share those with other people and so it looked strikingly like a Tablet PC.  Well, of course, it took the miracle of semiconductors and microprocessors before this could become at all concrete.

And so then, as we moved into the '70s, people are talking about, hey, can we make these things small, can we make these things portable. Well, we realized that the PC itself really couldn't be in a handheld form factor and so we worked on building specialized devices.  This machine here was called the Tandy Model 100.  It was very popular with reporters, so some of you will remember what a breakthrough this machine was at the time.  It had a four line by 20 character LCD and it had built-in software, 32K bytes of software and it was actually a ROM that I and one other person wrote together, the last Microsoft product where I wrote the majority of the code.  (Laughter.)  And it was a great product in terms of its simplicity and its portability, but there was a real sacrifice with this machine in that you didn't get full power applications; it was not a PC and so you had to learn how to use this machine and learn how to use your PC and go back and forth between those two different devices.

Well, then if we go about ten years later there were a number of devices in the early '90s that said perhaps miniaturization and software had advanced so this idea of something you could hold in your hands could become a reality.  Gold Corporation had a machine like the one I'm showing you here.  Momenta had a machine.  Microsoft was also a participant during this phase of the industry.  We worked on a number of machines that were running extended forms of Windows.  In fact, this is a slide that I used in 1992 to talk about this idea of full functional PCs with pen input.  It's almost painful to recall what the results of those products were.  They ended without substantial sales simply because the people who used them didn't find them easy enough to work with, they weren't light enough, they didn't connect up the right way.  And looking back, we can say, boy, the hardware and the software really weren't there, but the dream was there.

So what Microsoft did is we said, okay, we were going to keep working on this every year.  We were going to put tens of millions in to keeping on improving the handwriting recognition software, the ink rendering software and the collaboration with the hardware manufacturers, including people doing the digitizers to make sure that we have all the pieces come together as soon as technology is ready.  And so for every year since the time of these machines we've been pushing forward in our labs trying to perfect this concept.

Soon after this wave of the pen window came along then we had the Apple Newton, and this didn't give a particularly good name to handwriting recognition.  People were reading about handwriting recognition in Doonesbury more than they were using it themselves. And so it created kind of an expectation of, boy, you'd better make sure you've got some scenarios that work really well right out of the box before you bring this and try and bring it into the mainstream.

And so that's what we've been working towards, working with partners, working with the most advanced research that we have, trying to get these things to come together.  Because after all, the idea of a tablet is a natural idea.  You want the benefits of digital documents, being able to call up the latest information and search that information, and you want to be able to do immersive reading where you sit and as you read the materials you don't think about the device.

We never get immersive reading on the desktop machine as it is today.  No matter how much resolution we put on that screen, our research has shown that the fatigue of looking at a single point means that for long documents you're going to print them out, you're not going to sit and read them off the screen.  For some people a three, four-page document they're fine reading it on the screen but as it gets larger you print it out and get it into your hands where you can if you read shift your gaze and not fatigue your neck muscles and so the reading is what takes over.

There are so many things we do today that show us that this boundary between the PC and the world of paper activities is very unnatural today.  An example I like is that you go to a meeting and take lots of notes about people you want to send e-mail to and then as you get back to your office there are some urgent things there, you end up going to the next meeting and a few days later you're looking at those notes saying, oh, I didn't send that e-mail to those people and I didn't really capture for people what happened in the meeting that they ought to know about.

Well, the right answer is that while you're in the meeting you should take either the particular observation you want to share with people or your entire meeting notes and mail them off to people right there.  You should have the latest information there so you just read it right on the screen.  And so it's obvious to get down into this form factor.

One debate that took place in the early '90s was whether a device optimized to be held in the hands and to have ink as a fundamental data type, whether it would be a specialized device with its own applications or would it be an extension, an evolution of the PC itself.  And we felt very strongly, even going back to those days, that it had to be an extension of the PC in terms of your e-mail, your browsing, your spreadsheets, all those things you wanted those with no compromise, full 100 percent compatibility and then the ink and the note-taking brought in on top of that.  And so the question was to take Windows and extend it and build some applications in that would make this come together.

Some people have asked why now.  It seems like we go in ten-year cycles:  the Model 100 in '81, the early pen machines in the early '90s and now here we are in 2002 saying this time it really is ready for prime time.

Well, what's happened is that there have been so many key advances -- battery advances, processor performance advances, LCD advances, advances in the digitizer and those things have been driven by the volume of the portable market.

Now, another new factor that's come in that we think is critical to many of our scenarios is wireless networking; so-called 802.11 or Wi-Fi type networking is becoming more and more popular not only in businesses but also in homes or any place, public places that travelers find themselves spending a lot of time.  And so that idea that you not only have the full power of the software with you but it's still connected up to all the information on the Internet is a very big thing.

So it's those advances, together with the breakthroughs that we've been able to make on the software side that said to us now is the time.

So what are some of the key elements of this software? Well, ink is something that people have high expectations of.  If it feels like you're on a piece of glass and just slipping around or if it's not immediate and it's not smooth and if it doesn't vary according to the pressure of how you're using that pen, it doesn't feel like what you're used to, which is ink on paper.

And so we were very demanding in saying that this machine had to have a digitizer that samples over a hundred times a second in order to get that very natural ink flow.  It had to be high-performance machines so that you would feel like it was a very rapid ink flow and so again just like it is on paper.

Then we also said that not only would there be ink as a data type but we had to have for many things handwriting recognition.  That's a very tough problem, as the Newton showed, but with the benefit of all those years and looking at the kind of mistakes recognizers made and putting more and more smarts into the software we made a huge advance in that.

One of the interesting things was that when they brought it to me first they said, boy, this is working really well and I tried it out and it worked very poorly for me.  And they said, how can this be; five of us all used it and it was very accurate.  And the issue was, in fact, that I was left-handed and they had trained it primarily for right handed people.  And left handed people do stroke things in slightly different orders and slant things in different ways and so they went back and did a lot of refinement to get it so that it would cover left handed people as well.

Now, what we've done to make sure that the pieces have really come together to create a new phenomena in computing is we've been going out and testing this device with many people over the last several months.  Our view of this product is that it is a horizontal product; that is, anyone who spends time in meetings and wants to take notes, anybody who wants to read material in a natural way where you just hold the device in your hands will want this product, anybody who annotates things and wants to share those things will want this product.

We also see that virtually every application written for the PC can be enhanced by bringing ink into the mix.  So imagine somebody filling out an insurance claim form or somebody filling out a patient record that in the past would have been done on paper.  So there are lots and lots of vertical applications that can be used on the device.

What we think we're going to see is that as the early users of the tablet are traveling around, as they're on the plane and they're in a meeting, people are going to kind of drop their jaw and walk up to them and say, "What is that, what are you doing and did it really change the number of hours you use the PC?  Are you finding that those new applications help make you more productive in a pretty dramatic way?"  And they'll ask, "What do you have to give up, which applications don't run?"  Of course, the answer will be that they all run.  "Do you have to go out and buy a device that's dramatically more expensive than buying a typical sub-notebook portable machine?"  And there again the answer will be that it's only a few hundred dollars more to get at this device.

One of the things I enjoyed doing to kind of spread the word about the tablet is I send my e-mail as ink e-mail, and so it's got kind of a personal touch to it and anybody with a PC can receive that e-mail.  You don't have to have a tablet to be able to read notes that get e-mailed to you or ink inside an e-mail.  And immediately people send back and say, "Are you really using that thing, have you made it your primary machine?"  And the answer is yes.  Over the last few months this has been the machine that I have and it's truly indispensable.

Because I've had it for the last few months I've gotten a chance to send lots of e-mails to the product group about last minute refinements here and there.  I think my record was sending 30 e-mails in one day, some of them the kinds of things like "the poor lefthander" or "time for more integration" because making sure that the Windows group does the right thing for this ink data type and the Office group as well, those are very important for the end-to-end scenarios to work.

And so it's been a lot of fun to see this product emerge, emerge from something that we dreamed about decades ago to something we committed to spend money year after year ten years ago, despite the difficulties those early products had, to three or four years ago where we launched the particular hardware product and built up a team that reached out to the hardware partners and more recently the software developers and said let's really go ahead and do this. 

So one thing I want to give you a sense of is that it really changes the desktop experience.  Here comes the desktop, the new and improved desktop.  You can see it looks quite a bit differently than a normal desktop would.  Here I have the LCD on my desktop, but I have my docked tablet machine.  And so I simply take my mouse; let's say I've got the cursor here, I can go down here and pick the inbox and bring up my Outlook.  So then you can see I can have Outlook and work with it over here while I've got another application running over here.  This is just one PC.  In fact, if I want to focus in on Outlook I just take it and put it over there on my CRT.

Typically what you'd have is things like the stock quotes or the weather or your daily calendar would be up here, along with, say, some of the new e-mails coming in and whatever document you're writing would be over here.

Now let's say that a phone call comes in.  I'd like to take some notes about that phone call.  Well, what I do is I simply take this and I lower it down like this and I take the pen and then I bring up my note-taking application and so as I'm on the phone I can say, "Joe Smith called" and write down what he's talking to me about, say he wants me to follow up on a budget, and these notes then are available for me to search later or send off to other people.  And so this is my standard desktop.

Typically in the past the LCD that you have on the portable computer is completely unused when you're at your desktop.  It's actually shut down and not available at all so you're not getting that extra screen area to have glanceable applications as well as a primary application.

Now let's say that I want to go off to a meeting.  How hard is it to switch from where I am here at my desk to go to a meeting?  Well, all I do is pull this up and I take this out and here it is; I've got the full-blown Tablet PC capability and now it's noticing that it doesn't have the wired connection, it's connecting up to the wireless network and it's all there ready to go.  When I go back I simply put it in the docking station just like this and then I'm back connected up and I've got my desktop experience.   So that gives you a sense that it's quite different than the way that would have worked before.

Another area that I think is quite interesting is the idea of how this will be used in Asia.  You're all probably aware that countries with large alphabets like Japan, China and Korea, the keyboard is somewhat of a challenge and doing handwriting recognition software for those alphabets requires a lot of special effort.

This is something we've also made a huge breakthrough on and so I'd like to ask Koji Kato, who's been a program manager for Tablet PC, to come out and show us how this is going to work for Asian languages.  Welcome, Koji.

KOJI KATO:  Hi, Bill.

First let me show you a video from a recent trade show in Japan where there were more than 150 Tablet PCs on display.  There is a lot of excitement surrounding the Tablet PC because of the more natural Japanese character input.  Let me show you what I mean.

Today, handling the thousands of Kanji characters using a keyboard is quite difficult.  Just watch how many keystrokes I type in order to enter a short phrase.  I actually typed 31 keystrokes to enter 19 characters. Furthermore, I would need to do a conversion process to get the Kanji and occasionally there are ambiguities that require manual correction.  So you can see that the keyboard experience is quite difficult, but the Tablet PC is going to change that, and let me show you how.

In the Tablet PC I can write the characters I want directly on the screen to immediately get the characters that I want.  I'm writing the evolution of the notebook computer.  So you can see that the experience on the Tablet PC is much more intuitive and natural compared to a keyboard.  (Applause.)

But also we've received customer feedback saying that users are not always interested in character recognition.  Sometimes they just want to send handwriting as handwriting for a personal touch.  With the Office XP pack, which is a free Web downloadable, you can actually write your handwriting inside an Outlook e-mail message and let me show you how.

So I would do this and I would write "Thanks" and I would probably write "Please buy a Tablet PC for me" -- (laughter) -- and when I hit Send this e-mail gets sent to my friend, which actually does not have a Tablet PC but he will still be able to read my handwriting as a picture.  It's so cool, Bill.

BILL GATES:  Thank you.  (Applause.)

Let's talk a little about the reading scenario. Note-taking, annotation, you know, the Tablet PC is really very unique in that, but reading it depends a lot on the type of document that you're working with. Already if you think of the encyclopedia that's moved from being primarily a print-based document to one that you buy on a CD or DVD or that you access through the Internet; that is, the richness of navigation and searching and sound and timelines just make it so superior in digital form that it's taken over print even without the new form factor.  But as we get the tablet PC form factor, many other types of documents that you want to get on a timely basis or that you want rich linking inside those documents, they will also move to be consumed more and more in digital form.

We're working with people who have periodicals, weekly magazines, daily newspapers in particular.  This is an extension of the e-book work that Microsoft has been doing for a number of years.

We've even got some milestones in the progress we've made on this.  Here we're seeing a machine displaying a cover of the New Yorker and what you'll find is that because of the technical work we're doing together with the New Yorker as you click on here -- there's the buttons to navigate -- you'll see that those pages virtually in an identical form that you would have seen them in the magazine itself.  And so we've preserved the advertising paradigm and yet give people the ability to link into that information.  This is work that we're doing with people like Forbes, the Financial Times and many other leading publications.

An ISV partners who's writing software for reading on the tablet is Zinio and they're also working with many key magazines like Business Week and you can see the cover there.

We can make the navigation really bring the best of the Web experience and the best of the print experience together and that simply hasn't been done yet.

Finally, now you're seeing a tablet that's displaying what's called the Microsoft Reader and literally thousands and thousands of books are published every few months that come out in this e-book format and so we've done a custom version of this Reader that takes advantage of the tablet and lets you write little notes on these documents and share those notes with other people.

So digital reading more and more will move into the mainstream.  Imagine a classroom where the professor wants to do a unique handout, taking material from many sources.  They'll be able to do that by building the digital material up on the Web and then as more and more students have this tablet form factor where we think there will be a particularly strong audience for the tablet, then they'll simply have the best of both worlds, the richness of the reading and yet the note-taking, the navigation, the customization that wouldn't have been at all possible in the paper-based world.

I mentioned earlier that we've been getting the prototype Tablet PC machines out to a number of users and it's been very gratifying to go through that process and hear from them what we needed to refine and understand exactly what type of activities they were finding the Tablet PC beneficial for.

One person who's been making great use of her Tablet PC is the writer Amy Tan and she offered to come and share her experiences with us, so please help me welcome Amy Tan.  (Applause.)  Welcome.

AMY TAN: Hi.  Thank you.  Thank you. 

BILL GATES:  So tell us a little bit about what kind of things you've been up to with the tablet.

AMY TAN:  Well, I'm going to take you through a short evolution actually.  When I first started with this I did I think what everybody is going to do in the beginning and that is have a lot of fun with it.  So I began to draw.  I drew a picture of my dog.  I had always wanted to be an artist when I was a kid and this was a dream that I had, but I didn't have the confidence because I couldn't erase.  Now I have the confidence so this was a lot of fun for me.

I got a little more serious and I decided what else could I do with this and I thought in my spare time when I'm on an airplane I should be writing letters to people.  Now, there are a lot of social situations that demand a handwritten letter and this was one that I thought was perfect for this, a letter to the firefighters of Ladder 11, with whom I had had dinner. And it was wonderful with the idea that I could write these letters on a plane and then later go back and print them or send them off as e-mail.

Then I had the notion of doing something even more, which is what I used to do on little scraps of paper, and that is to take notes of what was going on around me and draw pictures.  This is how I get the ideas for my novels.  And so I started to draw what was next to me, which was my husband Lou on the airplane and started to think of ideas and at this point I thought maybe I should become a courtroom reporter and illustrator and change careers.

I then thought, now that I can do this, now this only took me probably an hour's worth of use, I was able to do something like this and I thought I should also take notes.  What I call my 2 o'clock ideas, when I'm sitting in bed late at night, this is when I get the ideas for my novels.  So I started to write at 2 o'clock in the morning what some ideas would be on the novel that I was working on and you can see it includes imagery that I have that I wanted to include in the novel, things that I'm going to be doing and it's all handwritten.  I can save it, I can keep it on file, I could send it to wherever I am when I'm traveling.

BILL GATES:  And what about the editing process?  Do you think the tablet will come into that back and forth?

AMY TAN:  This, in fact, is one of the most exciting things I think about this tablet for me and that is that -- well, we're not going to show this on here because the only person I ever show my dirty work to, my dirty laundry, is my editor.  This is the novel that I'm working on, and what I'm able to do is take my manuscript and write notes on it and make comments.  I can also then send that manuscript to my editor and have her do the same thing and she can send it back to me, we can write in different colors of ink on top of each other on what it is and where this novel is going.  So this is what I'm most excited about; she's going to get a Tablet PC and we're going to work together on the next book that way.

BILL GATES:  Super. And what about reading?  Have you tried that out at all?

AMY TAN:  I have been reading at night with the MS Reader and I think what I love about it is that now it's in this portrait format it's just like the page of a book.  And because my husband is lying there next to me sleeping I don't have to turn the light on.  It's illuminated already.  (Laughter, applause.)  It's in the clear face type for my middle-aged eyes so I can actually read the novel and I can just sort of click on it silently and the pages turn and the story unfolds and unfolds and unfolds and it's wonderful.

BILL GATES:  Well, it's been great to get your feedback and we're super excited to have you as a tablet user.  Thanks for coming, Amy.

AMY TAN:  Thank you.  (Applause.)

BILL GATES:  What really brings the tablet to life for me is actually seeing documents like the ones that Amy created in Journal and seeing how that's the information that she cares about, that she wants available, that she wants to share with her colleagues in doing her work.

We've gone out a number of places that were involved in the pilot Tablet PC programs and filmed people at work, so let me show you that, you're going to see some software demos and later I'll come back out and talk to you about some of the hardware.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

(Video segment.)

ANNOUNCER:  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Group Vice President for Productivity and Business Services for the Microsoft Corporation Jeff Raikes.  (Applause.)

JEFF RAIKES:  Thank you very much and welcome.  It's a great pleasure to have you all here for this milestone event.  We're very, very excited. 

In my role at Microsoft I've had the opportunity to work for the past couple years with people like Dick Brass and emerging technologies and Alex Loeb, the leader of our Tablet PC group.

It's been a very, very exciting time but in particular for me the thing I really focus in on is the vision and the opportunity during this decade for information work.  I'm responsible for our business centered around Microsoft Office but in particular what we like to think about is the many ways in which we can enhance the way people can use technology for information work.

And we like to think about information work as being a broader opportunity beyond knowledge work and I think the Tablet PC helps to illustrate that and, in fact, I believe the Tablet PC will make it possible for many people to take their regular work and turn it into knowledge work, so this broader opportunity is very exciting for us.

During this decade we see that people will be able to use Office tools to be more easily connected to the kind of business information that will help them with the key insights for their company.  They'll be able to collaborate more efficiently, they'll be able to use the convergence of audio and video and the network as a way to be more connected with their colleagues. 

We'll be able to have the Office tools get them connected to business processes, more effective communication and coordination, the ability to capture content, the ability to share it, to author it in new ways and to better understand the fundamentals of the business.

So in our view there's a lot of opportunity in this decade for information work and in particular we see the Tablet PC right at the center of that opportunity; a very, very exciting time.

So what I'd like to do for a few minutes is share with you some of the great opportunities that people are going to have in information work, both for broad horizontal applications as well as vertical applications.

And I'd like to begin with an individual as an information worker who you may recognize.

(Video segment.)

JEFF RAIKES:  Well, many of you probably recognize Rob Lowe but you may not have realized that he's really a multidimensional information worker -- actor, writer, producer, entrepreneur and businessperson.

So I hope you'll join me in welcoming Rob Lowe.  (Applause.)

ROB LOWE:  Hey, Jeff.  Good to see you.  How are you?

JEFF RAIKES:  It's great to see you.

ROB LOWE:  So seriously, I have the worst handwriting of any human.  I was listening to Mr. Gates earlier.  How much time did you spend on that?

JEFF RAIKES:  Well, like Bill said, we've been working on it for a long time, as have other people in the industry and we've been trying to bring the metaphor of pen and paper and its simplicity to the screen but frankly I think people are probably a lot more interested in what it is that you're doing with your tablet.

ROB LOWE:  Well, I'm developing three different projects right now and instead of having to lug the three scripts to three offices, I have it all in my tablet and I can take it wherever I want.  And the main thing that it does for me is I can work on my dialogue for the West Wing anywhere and it's not in the script so people don't come up to me and say, "Are you really leaving?  Why did they kill Mrs. Landingham?"  (Laughter.) I don't have to deal with any of it because I'm just looking at the tablet. I'll show you.

JEFF RAIKES:  Yeah, I'd love to take a look.

ROB LOWE:  All right.  I'll also teach you my memorization trick, because they give me such just dense speeches to learn and I've learned a trick to memorize it and so maybe I can save you some money in teleprompters next time.

JEFF RAIKES:  Well, we're always looking to save costs, Rob.  (Laughter.)

ROB LOWE:  You know, you've got to help Microsoft out, you know what I'm saying?  (Laughter.)

All right, let's see.  Let's find my scripts here.  Where's my script?  There it is.  Okay, this is not the scene I would be working on at the moment, so I'm going to go to the search.  Great.  There it is.  This is a big speech.  "If your guys gonna win big you don't want it to rain because there's less motivation anyway because of the blowout, blah, blah, blah."

So I go to the highlighter and I'm old school so I'm going to stick with yellow.  I'm going to highlight it like that and then I go to the pen.

Now, what I do is I take the first letter of every word in the phrase and I write that with punctuation, so "If your guy's" -- apostrophe-s because it's guy's -- "gonna win big you don't want it to rain."

Now, I don't know why that works but it does.  I think it subconsciously programs your mind so when you're looking at this now you just look at the letters.  " If your guys gonna win big you don't want it to rain."  And it takes the memorization time down by almost two-thirds; they teach you this at the Royal Academy for memorizing Shakespeare.   So that's my little tip for today.  (Laughter.)

JEFF RAIKES:  Great.  (Applause.)  I'm going to get right on that.

ROB LOWE:  Now listen, I love technology and my kids, their hero is Bill Gates.  So you've got to rig me up with like a picture.  Do you think we can do that?  (Laughter.)

JEFF RAIKES:  A picture?

ROB LOWE:  A picture signed, it's got to be signed.

JEFF RAIKES:  You know, he's backstage and let me show you a little technology here. Rob.  Basically this is from Colego.  It's ink instant messaging and, of course, we're working with lots of vendors on ink instant messaging, including Microsoft, so what we're going to do here is we're going to say, "Bill, time for a photo?" and just see what he has to say.  You know, that's the beauty of this kind of technology, get connected, and, well, "Busy now."  (Laughter.)  You know, what he's probably doing is he's trying to learn his lines.  (Laughter.)

ROB LOWE:  Well, later? 

JEFF RAIKES:  Later, later.  I'm sure we can work it out.

ROB LOWE:  Do I have your word?

JEFF RAIKES:  You've got my word.  But, you know, there's this thing if you need a U.S. Senator from Nebraska on the show, you know, I'm your man.  Give me a call.  (Laughter.)

ROB LOWE:  It sounds good.  That's good. 

Now just I have to ask you if I have a room full of press, Dusty Baker, Mariners?

JEFF RAIKES:  I'll get back to you on that one.  (Laughter, applause.)

ROB LOWE:  Thanks a lot.

JEFF RAIKES:  Rob, thank you very much.  (Applause.)

Well, working with Rob has been a lot of fun but it's also been a lot of fun to work with a lot of great software companies and we're very, very gratified that we have such industry momentum behind the potential of the tablet PC.  Here you see on this slide just some of the logos of the many companies that have taken advantage of our independent software vendor kit and have begun to add new capabilities for their software on the Tablet PC as well as in many cases building whole new applications to take advantage of the form factor.  And when you think about that, new applications, extended applications, along with the ability of the Tablet PC to be able to use all of the existing Windows application software, that really brings a great critical mass that means the Tablet PC is ready now.

We're very excited to be announcing that Siebel is joining our Tablet PC program and will be enhancing their leading Customer Relationship Management software with tablet capabilities in their upcoming release.

Now, what I'd like to do next is actually just show you some of the work of one of these ISVs.  This is from Corel and it's called Grafigo -- graphics on the go.  And it's an application that's been written by Corel and from a technical standpoint it's all written in C#, it's managed code but the thing that's really important is what is provides to the user.

We see more and more people collaborating and here you have some marketing material where people may want to collaborate and improve the material and they have a concept in Grafigo called Onion Skins and it's a very, very cool concept for annotation.  I am just layering a little Onion Skin, a little annotation layer and what I can do is I can take my pen and I can say to my colleague, "We need to verify this number." 

In addition, I could do another Onion Skin here and you'll notice how they just lay over the top of each other and I can have the Onion Skins disappear or I can bring them back, we can share the material so I can see what Jim's comments were, what Rob's comments were, and so here I'll go in and I'll say for these labor costs we need to go ahead and do the calculation.

So Grafigo is a way to take graphics on the go and to do this kind of sharing.

We're also very excited in the way in which they've used not only our ink but also our recognition, recognition in the sense of shapes.  So, for example, what I can do is I can roughly draw a triangle and Grafigo recognizes that as a triangle.  And if I do a square or a rectangle and if I do it multiple times like this Grafigo figures out that I would like to do a very bold rectangle.  Or let's say I want to do a circle, something like that, and I'll pretty it up a little bit and do a little stitching.  I won't say anything about Dusty Baker, but what I will do is circle this and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this and make this into a symbol.  So now like maybe this is a corporate logo or something that I wanted to commonly use.  What I can do is I can use that in multiple ways at multiple times.

So Grafigo from Corel is a very, very exciting example of what people can do with the Tablet PC when you think about new kinds of applications.

And I'm very pleased to say that it's already available for free as a download in English and within the next few weeks it's going to be available in some other languages -- French, German and Japanese -- so that people around the world can have the opportunity of working with Grafigo.  (Applause.)

Now, one of the things I think is very important about the Tablet PC is how it opens up the potential of information work, and our next guest has focused his life on helping people and their organizations realize their potential, Dr. Steven Covey.  (Applause.)  His book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best selling business books of all time and recently was ranked by CEOs surveyed by Forbes as one of the two most influential business books. 

The vision of Franklin Covey and Microsoft with the Tablet PC is to help people realize the potential of information work.  So I hope you'll join me in welcoming Steven Covey.  (Applause.)

Welcome, Steven.  It's great to have you here.

STEVEN COVEY:  Thank you, Jeff.

Let me ask everyone, if you would, to participate in a little experiment.  Close your eyes for a second.  Now, no peeking.  Everybody point North.  Don't peek.  Point North.  Okay, keep pointing now and open your eyes and see where people are pointing.  I mean, this way, you straight up, this way, this way, that gentleman is that way and that way.  You can go to your organization tomorrow.  With few exceptions you'll find this will happen. Ask the first 10 to 15 people what is the purpose of this organization and it will be just like pointing North.  (Laughter.)  Seriously.  It will shock you to realize how little people are on the same page.

Now, I have under my watch a compass.  This way is North.  (Applause.) How many got it?  How many blew it badly? 

Now, there is something else about this.  This is a symbol for direction.  The two biggest problems of every organization is focus, to get people on the same page, and execution around those priorities.

So now you have your focus from your sense of true North and then you work on the clock so that you schedule all your activities to be in alignment with those highest priorities.

Now, why is this new Tablet PC so helpful in doing this?  It brings together high tech and high touch.  It can be synched together.  It's easy.  It's extremely versatile, small and it's amazing what happens when people have a feeling that their own intuitive approach with paper as well as electronics can be put together, synched with others and get the entire team executing around the highest priorities; so there are those two applications -- focus, the compass, our purpose and values, execution, are caught.

Now, you've been working with this somewhat.

JEFF RAIKES:  Well, we're very excited to be working with you and your organization.  In fact, you know, I thought maybe it would be good for the audience to have a chance to see some of what we can do and what you've been able to do in bringing the value, the power of your paper-based organization system, to the tablet PC.  It means that people don't need to make the tradeoff.

And one of the things that I think has been very exciting is to see how Agilix, working with FranklinCovey has been able to use our tablet software so that it really builds on that notion of the screen metaphor merging with the simplicity of pen and paper.

So here on the display, just like I'd see if I was using your paper-based organizer, I see all of my tasks, I see my calendar, and, of course, you can do more because it's the PC, it synchronizes in with Exchange and Outlook so my calendar is kept up to date.

STEVEN COVEY:  And, Jeff, I noticed you have a place in there for blow-drying.  While you're blow-drying I'm working for my customers.  (Laughter.)

JEFF RAIKES:  Okay.  (Laughter.) 

Now, one of the things that I can do is I can go ahead and -- and I'm just going to move on, if that's okay.  (Laughter.)

Now, one of the things I can do is I can use the note-taking and, in fact, I was very pleased to see that what you've done is you've used capabilities similar to what we do in Journal so that effectively I can just go for each meeting, I can add lots of pages and one of the things that you see is this is the way that note-taking I think was really meant to be, where I'm not just typing on a keyboard; I have the ability to draw diagrams and to keep my notes. So it's a very, very natural way of using the organizer.

And one of the things that your folks did was they took advantage of the ability to search on ink.  So, for example, here I can search for "habits" and I'll find all of the instances of the seven habits throughout all of my notes for the whole year or as long as I've been using the organizer.  And so there you see them right there, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Great job by your team, Steven, great job.  (Applause.)

And how about availability? 

STEVEN COVEY:  Three sources:  First, there's 180 FranklinCovey stores that have these right now.  They'll also sell the Tablet PC itself.

JEFF RAIKES:  Great.

STEVEN COVEY:  Second, our Web site, www.franklincovey.com.

JEFF RAIKES:  Great.

STEVEN COVEY:  As well as your Web site.

JEFF RAIKES:  That's right, www.microsoft.com/tabletpc.

STEVEN COVEY:  Right.  And the third is there are about six major OEMs that are going to bundle our planner inside the tablet for about a 30-day trial period.

JEFF RAIKES:  Super.

STEVEN COVEY:  So people can get excited because this is really an idea whose time has come.

JEFF RAIKES:  We certainly agree and we really appreciate you being here today, Steven.  Thank you very much.

STEVEN COVEY:  Thank you.

JEFF RAIKES:  Steven Covey.  (Applause.)

Well, certainly one of the things that we wanted to do as part of our development cycle is to get out very broadly and get the chance to hear from customers.  In our rapid adoption program we had more than 25 companies who saw the vision of the Tablet PC as being important to their people and their organizations and so they took it as an opportunity to immerse themselves in the potential of information work using the Tablet PC.

You see some of the logos here, great work by companies like 7-11, where Keith Morrow estimated that the reduction in resurvey work that they do within their organization will save $3 million to $5 million a year, so a very, very good example.

Or Weil, Gotshal, & Manges LLP, a law firm headquartered right here in New York City, and a leader in how technology is applied in the legal field, because they feel for their attorneys knowledge management and having quick access via the Tablet PC to that knowledge is the difference for their clients.

So very, very good examples of customers being able to use the tablet; in fact, many of them are here today and we hope that you'll visit the trade show later where you can see the ISV partners, the hardware partners and perhaps visit with some of these customers on their experience.

Now, one of the things that was very interesting to us during the cycle and getting the feedback was some of the ideas and insights that people provided, and I wanted to share with you one that I thought was really quite fun.  This came from a gentleman at GE Transportation Systems and we thought it was a very humorous yet accurate reaction to what the tablet is like.

Day 1:  Drove him nuts.

Day 2, day 3:  Not too bad.

Day 5:  Pretty neat.

By day 6 he felt he was depending on it.

And by day 7 he made sure he wasn't going to give it back to us.  (Laughter.)

So a very, very fun way; this is an actual e-mail that he sent to us to be able to share his thoughts about the Tablet PC.

Now, next what I'd like to do is to show you some of what's going on in the enterprise application markets.  The world of information work is very broad.  You have the opportunity to help people in their daily productivity, you have the opportunity to really help companies in their organizational effectiveness.

Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to bring up SAP.  And we're very pleased to announce that SAP is going to be using the tablet to enhance their My SAP Customer Relationship Management software, because they feel it's very important for the people on the front lines with customers to have this kind of power.

So here you see an example.  What I'm going to do is show you how they've taken our inking work, our inking recognition and built it right into the use of the CRM application.  For example, I'm going to ink in the type of products that we're going to discuss at Becker Berlin, which is a retailer. 

You have the ability to add notes right within the customer record.  For example, since this is my customer I can do a little map and show where the highway is and where the meeting room is where I need to enter.

I have the ability to go and take a look at the actual product line and make notes, for example, the volume at Becker Berlin is two times and three times for this different product, and they're currently selling this one at $8, so I have the ability to on the fly interact with the system for higher productivity.

I can go ahead and look at what the shelf lineup should be -- that could be built right into the record -- and drill into the success rate of any of the particular products.  I can go ahead and I can take a look at the details for the products and perhaps it's time to create an order because of what we're seeing in the market.

They're using a clever approach where I can as the customer sign my name and then once I've filled out that signature form that is locked and now is the equivalent of me having signed for the order.  And they're linking into Microsoft Word to automatically generate the purchase order on the spot so that I can print it out right there and hand it to my customer.

(Applause.)

So a very good example of how the Tablet PC can be applied to help people on the front lines with customers, information workers be more effective to aspire to the value of knowledge worker.

I'd like to give you another example.  Obviously we feel very strongly about the opportunity in horizontal productivity, but there are, of course, great opportunities in vertical applications.  I like to think of an analogy to our work on Microsoft Word.  Back in the 1980s, early '80s when I started at Microsoft word processing was a back office function.  You actually went to somebody who ran a Wang word processing system.  Today we can all do word processing.  It's an example of bringing those kinds of things to people so that they can use them as part of their daily work.

Well, let me take an example in the medical field.  Stentor is a very important company that is doing great work bringing radiology to the front line, to the doctors, the nurses and the patients, which will be both more cost efficient as well as more effective in terms of the experience.

So let me show you some examples.  Now, what they do with radiology, of course, is the ability to look at the x-rays or MRIs or other radiology work for the patient.  I'm going to take a look here.  Obviously this is a brain scan.  And you'll notice that as I move around right here at my fingertips I have the ability to look at all of the information that I might need relative to this brain scan.

In addition, I can go ahead and I can look at x-rays.  Now, typically the way the process works is you have to go back to the radiology lab and they have to do multiple printouts, multiple versions of the x-ray for you and what I could do here is I could go ahead and I can look at this x-ray, I can change the contrast right on the fly, I can scale it up, I can even annotate it with ink if I want.

Now, those are the kinds of things that you can do with the tablet to equip the people who are right there with the patient, so that not only is more cost efficient but, in fact, it's a better experience throughout the process of providing healthcare.

So great work by Stentor in the medical field with the Tablet PC.  (Applause.)

Well, as you can see, there's a lot of opportunity for the potential of information work with the Tablet PC, both very broad horizontal productivity as well as productivity in vertical applications and industry applications.  We're very excited to be working with all these companies in the industry, software companies, hardware companies to make the potential of information work real through the possibility of the tablet PC.

Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

(Video segment.)

ANNOUNCER:  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Bill Gates.  (Applause.)

BILL GATES:  Well, now I get to show you some of the incredible breakthroughs our hardware partners have made --

ROB LOWE:  Bill!

BILL GATES:  Who's that?  Rob?

ROB LOWE:  Yeah.  Oh, is this a bad time?  (Laughter.)

BILL GATES:  Oh, come on out, come on out.

ROB LOWE:  Are you sure?

BILL GATES:  Yeah, we can get this done.

ROB LOWE:  My kids, I'm telling you I've got to get this photo and that Jeff guy is crazy.  He's disappeared and we've got to get this thing done.

BILL GATES:  All right.

ROB LOWE:  Oh, good, here we go.  Smile!

BILL GATES:  All right.  (Laughter.) 

ROB LOWE:  Oh, excellent.

BILL GATES:  Well, let's see if that came out here. Let's take the pen out here, we'll look in our picture folder.  Oh, there we go.

ROB LOWE:  You've got to have photo approval in all my contracts.  It's bad when we've got to kill it and do it over again.  (Laughter.)

BILL GATES:  There we are.  (Applause.)  All right.

ROB LOWE:  Approved.

BILL GATES:  What I can do is take what we call the snipping tool and just circle the part of this picture that we want and then just put a little ink on here and then all I want to do is e-mail this off to you, so I just point here and it sticks it right in the e-mail.

ROB LOWE:  Oh, great.

BILL GATES:  And you can forward that to anyone you want to.  (Applause.)

ROB LOWE:  My boys will let me back in the house. Thank you.

BILL GATES:  All right. Thanks for coming today.

ROB LOWE:  Thanks a lot.  Sorry to bother you.

BILL GATES:  Okay.  (Laughter, applause.)

All right.  Now let's talk about the new hardware.  Jeff got to show the applications, but those really come to life with the implementations we've got.  The challenge here, of course, is to make something small, something light, something with long battery life using the latest hardware technology.

So here they are.  (Applause.)  What you're looking at is the class of Tablet PCs and all but two of these will be shipping in the next week and all of them will be shipping this year. 

You can see there's quite a variety.  We talked about the slate form factor where you detach it.  This is the Fujitsu that you can carry around without the keyboard.  The ViewSonic also takes that kind of slate approach.  The convertible approach we see here with the Toshiba.  Toshiba has the 12.1-inch screen so you can see it there.  The Acer is the original convertible, works very well.  The HP here is the one where you can actually go back and forth; you can use it as either just the slate being carried with you or you can slide in the keyboard and that works as well.

One thing that I thought would give you a sense of how quickly these things keep improving and evolving is to take a look at this NEC machine, which is the one you have back here.  The thing that is phenomenal about this is how thin this device is and I hope you can get a sense of that. And that's very helpful when you want to sit on the couch and read long documents, sit in bed and read long documents, that the thinner the device the more common that's going to be.

So an amazing job was done by our hardware partners to get all of these things done, in the market.  As I told them many times, I hope they're ready to deal with the demand that we're going to see of the products out there, because I am very optimistic about that.

What you'll see in the years ahead is constant evolution of the hardware, you're going to see more and more software partners coming along.  We'll also have new hardware partners, new people building systems.  In fact, today I want to announce that we have two companies that will be joining in making tablet machines and that's Panasonic and Samsung and so they'll be showing you how they contribute to the hardware variety in the months ahead.

There are also a lot of peripherals that need to improve here.  We talked about the next generation of LCDs being even better, the digitizer getting even better, the battery life, there are a lot of new ideas there that will come in and affect this product.  Eventually even the so-called solid state disks will come along and not only will we have the mechanical disks going down to 1.8 inch but some kind of solid state disk in the next three to four years will be part of different Tablet PCs.

So this is just the beginning but it's quite an amazing beginning.

Our view is that this fits right in with the thing that Microsoft is all about and that is helping people realize their potential, and the fact you can go to meetings, take your notes, the fact that you can access information, share information, that is something that virtually every PC user over time we think will want to get involved with.

In fact, we would say that as we move into the rest of this decade the idea of ink as a standard data type will become as commonplace as graphics user interface did with the popularity of Windows.  By the end of the decade we'll look back and say was there ever a time where computing didn't involve having these kinds of applications, this kind of accessibility to information?

So it's just the start but it's a start that's going to build based on the word of mouth of the end users and so we couldn't be more thrilled about the partnerships we've had and having achieved the milestone of launching the Tablet PC.

Thank you.

(Applause.)