Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Government Leaders Forum (Europe): Government in the Digital Decade
Rome, Italy (via satellite transmission)
September 16, 2003

BILL GATES: Thank you. Well it's a real pleasure to have a chance to talk to you about government in the Digital Decade. This is a decade where technology will be moving faster than ever before, and the opportunities to take that technology and make government more effective and face new issues that digital technology brings with it we think is very very important.

So what kind of things can we expect during the Digital Decade? First is that computers won't be used exactly the way they've been used. New types of communication will become standard in using computers, not just e-mail, but what would have been meetings can be conducted, collaboration in new ways, reading off the screen because of the new form factors, really will revolutionize the way that information can be navigated, the way information can be made available. We'll also connect systems that have been tough to connect. The '90s were about making sure that we had the network infrastructure, but this decade is about making sure we have the software infrastructure, the software infrastructure that allows different government systems to connect and allows business systems to connect with government systems.

You hear about this a lot in terms of new standards around XML and Web services. These are the software advances that are going to make the cost of building systems that let you bring information together, and understand that information, far less than ever before. And when I say less expensive I mean less expensive in all the dimensions -- the hardware costs, the communications costs, a drastic reduction in the amount of consulting and special code that's required for each one of these applications. And these new systems won't just be providing the same information to everyone. The information will be personalized depending on the role in the government or the thing that the citizen cares about. The bottom line for all of this is that this decade will deliver greater productivity increases than the last decade. And it'll do it without the hype, the wild valuations; it'll do it on a steady basis as we take the top problems and solve those problems.

So what's the framework for this? Well, there's three things I want to touch on: how we work together, some of the new kinds of innovation and some of the fundamental advances that we're so focused on with our $6 billion dollars of R&D a year to make sure that these issues are not a problem, are not holding back the innovation. In a technology economy there's a lot of things where the government has to make policy decisions, how the network regulation takes place, encouraging the private sector to come in and build networks, not just for businesses but also for citizens. Thinking about broadband connections, not just for the cities, but for the rural areas as well. Thinking about technology and education, technology and databases around the government. Making sure that information transparency also preserves privacy where the information should only be accessible to a limited number of people. So lots of challenging issues for government. The pace of the technology will be moving very, very fast. The commercial sector, including Microsoft, has an important role to play as we work together. For us, it's to make sure that in every country we're bringing the expertise that we've gained by working on a worldwide basis. That we give you visibility where we see our research and development, and the research and the development coming out of the rest of the industry, going. That we talk through these very tough problems, the security problems, the privacy problems, and make sure that you can look at the regulations and approaches being taken in other countries and make sure that the right balance is struck in putting these things together. Microsoft is very interested in being involved in training activities, education activities, pilot programs, where we take risk in helping you build new applications that can be a model for e-government activities, and so we see this as a very rich relationship and we're investing more and more in this, including events like this one, but also our people on a day-to-day basis having more resources, more capabilities to drive forward programs for e-government.

When we talk about innovation, we mean real breakthroughs. You know, think about something like photography. Photography was a film-based activity only five years ago. Well, five years from now it'll be overwhelmingly a pure digital activity. Phones with cameras, cameras that are purely digital, the pictures being automatically sent to the PC where they can be organized and edited, where you can do voice annotation. That's a case of a revolutionary new approach. Even reading, reading will move from being something that's done primarily on paper for long documents to something where the Tablet form factor and these new high-resolution screens shift that substantially -- so that as you're filling in forms, as you're annotating documents that you have comments on, more and more of that will be done on a purely digital basis. Meetings will change, the idea of recording a meeting and having it available for digital playback, with a transcript that's created through speech recognition. Being able to find the part of that meeting or presentation that's of interest. And even being able to watch it faster than the -- the time that it took for the information we present to watching it up to two or three times the speed -- without giving up any comprehension. Advances like these we will take for granted by the end of this decade. Now there are some very tough challenges in doing this. The ease of use, the reliability, some of the fundamentals like security that I'll talk about, these are why Microsoft has continued to increase our R&D budget.

Some people find that surprising. You know, they're saying well, what's new in software, is there really something dramatic there? They're saying that IT spending is down on a global basis, and so we are fairly unique in our optimism that has us increasing these R&D investments and saying that the power of the software will be based on breakthroughs, breakthroughs that will make development far less expensive than ever before, managing these systems far easier than ever before. And so we're taking on very smart people. We have research groups all over the world that help us with this, so we can draw on the smartest people worldwide and so we're taking a comprehensive approach. We're reaching out to universities, very strong relationships there, something we're growing in every country to make sure that we're passing the latest tools along, and working with the university researchers and helping them, whether it's testing out their ideas or forming commercial startups that will create jobs and create tax payments for the country that they're in. We think that's very important. And so partnering and driving the worldwide ecosystem is a big thing of -- for what Microsoft is all about.

Well, now let me address one of the big issues that people are asking us about right now, which is so-called Trustworthy Computing. Most critical infrastructures like electricity or water operate on an extremely high level of reliability. These are mature systems, where there's an understanding of what the challenges are and how they've been designed so that they work on an almost continual basis. For computing to achieve it's full role, for it to be able to be the primary way that commerce, tax payments, information understanding, communication is done, we have to take the Internet, the computers, the software on the Internet and make them as reliable as those other infrastructures. It's fair to say that the original design of the Internet was not done that way. It didn't assume that there'd be malicious behavior. It didn't assume that software viruses would be attacking. And so at the Microsoft level and at the industry standard level, there's a lot of work to be done here. One of the most exciting advances of the last five years is the ability to use the Internet to monitor systems, to see where problems are taking place and immediately get a view of what's going on there and being able to use the Internet to deliver improvements very rapidly. That infrastructure for keeping systems up to date, for getting rid of bugs, patching things that might be a problem, it's very weak today compared to what's necessary. In fact, by fixing that we would have prevented all of the security problems of the last several years, and that's something that over the next 18 months there will be a dramatic advance. We also need the idea of proper security walls, so-called firewalls, in the Internet. Those were designed to take care of some problems, but we've seen recently they're not rich enough, and so with improvements to those capabilities we'll have appropriate firewall protection that makes sure that these problems don't recur.

The area of security requires a constant commitment. People who are willing to work 24 hours a day to do the monitoring of these systems, and putting the company on the line to really commit that these systems will work well. There is a security analysis process called Common Criteria that most governments now have signed up to -- a common effort so that software gets tested and certified, not in different ways in each country, but in a common way between the United States and most of the countries in Europe. This common criteria process is a really great process and one that we're committed to spend the tens of millions it takes to make sure our software meets the highest standards of Common Criteria. In fact, we were the first provider to go through that process, and you'll see it requires a lot of rigor and control of exactly what's going into the software.

Accessibility is our term to cover the idea of making sure that, as we get digital technology, that people with physical handicaps are not left behind. This includes people who have a challenge with the keyboard, either typing with one hand or with repetitive stress injuries so that the keyboard is not an option. It includes people who have visual impairment. And so making it so that they can find the information on the screen and have that read back to them. The design of doing this right is very difficult and yet we've been pleased to see that governments are setting very high standards for this. They think it's very important that jobs be created using IT for everyone in their society, including people who have these accessibility problems. So in almost every country there's a strong dialogue now to make sure that Microsoft, in all of its products, Windows, Office, has done exactly this work. For a typical Microsoft product, we spend 10 or 15 percent of our development effort just on this challenge alone, making sure that everyone can use the product. And we think that the standards expect us to continue to improve this, and that's something that we'll deliver on.

There are many amazing stories about how people who wouldn't have been employable or people who wouldn't have been able to exercise their skills are now taking computing technology that was designed for accessibility and having great success with it. The idea now that somebody who has visual impairment, who's blind and can't read, can actually get all the latest information by connecting to the Internet and using the speech translation that takes place, it's really phenomenal and something I encourage you all to understand how that's progressing in your country and make sure that Microsoft is reaching out and partnering so that you get the full benefit of these software investments that we've made.

I mentioned the fundamentals. This covers a lot of so-called abilities. Reliability, availability, scalability, manageability, ease of programmability. One of these I'll touch on, we really have solved the problem, and that is scalability. You today can take a low-cost industry standard server using Intel technology and the Windows operating system and solve problems that with a $50,000 server system that historically would have required a UNIX or mainframe-based system that would have cost millions of dollars. Even the most demanding government applications, with lots of backup and lots of failover, can now be done very very inexpensively. We're taking advantage of these hardware advances to provide redundancy. So even if one system goes down, another system can take over without the people connecting to that application having to know that there's been a problem whatsoever. Now as we're getting many many of these systems, we have to be a pioneer in solving management of those systems, making it so that, to keep the software up to date, you don't need to visit the individual systems. If you're patching that system you don't have to take it down so it's not available. So the administrator can look out to all of the desktops and see what software's installed there, apply the right policy very easily and understand immediately if somebody's running into not just errors but also slow performance. The productivity of all the workers in government using these tools can't be much higher because of these software advances.

We work, of course, very closely with other companies and other industry-standard groups to make sure that the right protocol standards have been developed so that things like management and e-commerce not only work very well on our systems but can work when you have multiple types of systems, so-called heterogeneous environment that is very typical of government where you have many departments that need to work together. We believe that because we offer a high performance, best price performance solution that the idea of having interoperability is very positive for us. It means that we get a chance to compete for every one of those systems because it meets your bar for how these systems will work together. And that's why we've been working on Web Services and XML advances. We were one of the first to really drive in and commit to that, that's a process that's gone extremely well and we're starting to see the applications that are based on that.

The way that we take the standards and build rich products around them is called .NET. We have an implementation of the standards; other companies like IBM, Oracle, many others also have implementations. And yet they conform to the standards, so you can get the productivity that we provided with our tools here without giving up the interoperability that's very important because of all the different things that you want to connect out to, including the businesses in your country. So our vision for e-government is there's a lot of ways of looking at it that are becoming much more workflow- and task-oriented. It's not just about taking all the information you have on paper and putting it on a portal, it's not just about taking all your forms and making sure those go away and over time you have pure digital entry. It's about giving visibility to the process, you know, taking something like a business application or a legal process and making sure that you have complete visibility. A lot of the new things we've done around SharePoint and e-mail advances and our development tools are focused on this task orientation, and we'll be talking about some of the models, some of the examples where many of you have pioneered taking the new tools and building this generation of applications that takes you even further.

So realizing e-government; it's a process. It's a process that will roll out over the years ahead. I'd expect that virtually all of you over the next year will have very exciting projects in this area. We want to be a partner to help you on those things, we want to show you how the cost for doing those things can actually be kept surprisingly low by using the latest in software and hardware technology. And we want to make sure that as these systems roll out the security audits, the review to make sure that these systems are fully accessible to everyone in your country, that all of those things are done in the right way so that e-government really is a benefit to everyone. So we're very excited about what's going on, that's why we're investing and that's why we're reaching out to you at events like this and all the different things we're doing.

Thank you.