Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software
Architect, and Jeff Raikes, Group Vice President, Productivity and Business
Services, Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Office System Launch
New York, N.Y.
October 21, 2003

BILL GATES:  Good morning, and thanks for coming to the Microsoft Office System Launch.

Today, we're introducing more software products on a single day than on any day in our history, and all of these are products aimed at one thing, making information workers more productive.  We've spent a lot of time talking to information workers, understanding how they spend their day, understanding how we can empower them to make them more effective.  And one of the amazing things is their interest in having the very best tools, their interest in connecting up to the information that they need to do their job as effectively as possible.  We've titled this event "Great Moments at Work," because when we think about this software, it really is about giving those people more and more great moments at work.

One of the questions we ask them is, what tools really help you get your job done?  What are your favorite technologies at work?  First was electronic mail.  They loved electronic mail.  They gave us lots of input about how we can make it better by improving Outlook.  They love their cell phone.  Their cell phone is now connecting up to more information.  They told us a lot about how we can make that cell phone experience far better than it is today, bring in their calendar, the information they care about, notifications that are important, having those come through.  And things that are not important not interrupting or using up their time.  They love their laptop, they want to be able to work even when they're not connected, when they're traveling around.  The phone needs to be integrated in so that even when you make phone calls you can easily connect up to screen.  And they had all the different pieces of Office in their top 10 favorite tools, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the entire Office Suite that's become so popular.

Every day most of the information workers in the world, over 400 million people, fire up Microsoft Office.  And they use it in a very intense way.  On average, they use it well over two hours a day as the tool to get things done.  They'd like to see us extend it so that it can help them in even more hours of the day.  So, this software tool can do more to improve productivity than any other thing on the planet.  In fact, part of our optimism about the rest of this decade productivity growth and economic results comes because we think that people are now underestimating these advances.  In the '90s, there was a lot of hype, people in some ways over estimated how quickly information technology could drive the economy forward.  Today, we see the opposite of that.  We see people not really appreciating how much more there is to do.  And yet, we're driving our research at an even faster pace.  We've increased the R&D we do driving this whole suite of products forward because of the opportunity here to make people more effective.

What are the milestones that we've had in this?  Well, Microsoft has been in the business of providing Office software since the early '80s.  Microsoft Word was our early entrant there.  And I think if anything proves our willingness to listen to our customers and improve, it's the evolution of Word over the years.  No doubt that first version was a little clunky, a little bit too much of a technologists dream.  I still remember some of the terminology that we had in that product.  But we listened hard.  People asked us to change it, and we drove it forward.  During the '80s, what we established as commonsense was the idea that you would create your Office documents digitally.  You would use the PC to do it, and mostly then you would print those documents out.

In the late '90s, things moved up to another level.  The Internet got all the computers on the planet, including these desktop machines, and portable machines, connected up to the Internet.  The graphics interface became commonsense.  Things like printing and color, having the mouse to navigate around, all of that became standards.  Things came into the Office Suite that weren't there before, PowerPoint and Access came along to let you manage presentations and lists of information, and now those are part of what people use in their Office experience.  And really, e-mail exploded.  It's here that it became commonsense that it wasn't just your administrator printing out e-mail for you, it was you sitting down interacting with it on an ongoing basis.

So, what is the next frontier?  The next frontier is what is driven by this new Office System release, and that's the idea of people working together more effectively.  That's the theme of the release we have today.  Every one of these products is about sharing information and collaborating.  We are far short of what's possible there.  One of the key technologies that you'll hear about today is how we're taking the new standards of XML and Web services, and building those down into Office and, therefore, letting people connect up information in new ways.  So, all of the software on the Internet will be provided as Web services, and that information to be fed into all of the Office capabilities.  And so, they have easy ways to navigate and get at that richness.

What are the different things that are being brought out today?  It's important to say that it's more than just products.  We have, of course, lots of software products that have been updated, but we also provide a number of other things.

We provide servers that these products connect to including what we call the Windows SharePoint Server.  That's something that's actually free to people who have the existing Windows Server capabilities.  And you'll see how it really changes how you think about a group of people sharing information.

We've got services, we'll show you the Live Meeting service that lets people connect up their screens and have either better meetings, or avoid travel that they would have had to do otherwise, like two involved workers who wouldn't have been able to be part of the meeting activity.  We've also got the ability to connect Outlook now to our MSN mail back end, to Hotmail, and that's a service that will make rich e-mail far easier to get at

We also take all of these software capabilities, and we show people how to use them to deliver solutions.  For example, people want to do quality management, what's called Sigma, people who want to do financial reviews, personnel reviews, any of the things that are typical business processes, we've got guidance and templates that let those things be done as a complete solution simply building on what's here.

I said that the list of products was quite large, and you can see them all mentioned here.  Many of you are familiar with Microsoft Office, the fact that it's got the different modules, and got different packaging.  There are some big advances in the way we do that packaging, making it very attractive at the student and teacher part of the market to this at a very attractive price.  At the high end of the market, packaging in things like the InfoPath capability, that's a new product that lets you connect XML information.  We have the extra modules, the Visio and Project capabilities.  Those are large businesses in their own right, and they've brought for a lot of information workers a very exciting way of dealing with information, and publishing things for lots of people to see.  You'll see that we're integrating those in in new ways.  We've got the servers, Exchange Server, Live Communication Server, and Project Server also connected up here.  So a lot of different things all designed with one approach in mind collaboration in connecting up to the new standards.

Let's go ahead and take a look at how this comes together for one customer.  The first customer we want to show you, who is really thrilled by what we've got here is called LandAmerica.

(Video segment.)

Now I want to ask Jeff Raikes, who runs our Office business, to come out and talk about our investments, and how this will drive forward business productivity.

Good morning, Jeff.

JEFF RAIKES:  Hey, Bill, how are you?

BILL GATES:  Great.

JEFF RAIKES:  Super.  Thanks very much.

BILL GATES:  Take it away.

JEFF RAIKES:  Well, I want to say welcome to all of you, and thanks very much for joining us today.  You can get a sense from the excitement that Bill was sharing with you, and how we've been building to this point many, many years, you can see that this really is a major milestone in the history of Microsoft Office, truly a big transformation for us.  And in my view I think there are three core elements to this transformation.

You can see that Office, which has historically been extremely important to personal productivity, continues that, but now becomes a workspace for personal, team, and organizational productivity.  You can see that Office, which has traditionally been thought of as client applications, is now becoming the combination of programs, servers, and becoming the foundation for solutions for our customers.  And this is a particularly important time for us to step back and reflect, because many in our industry might wonder, isn't what we have out there good enough?  But, I think those challenges that Bill described, the kind of e-mail overload, the problems that people have in collaborating with each other, or getting connected to the information that they need, that shows, in fact our software today is not yet good enough, or if you think about the software breakthroughs that Bill emphasized, again, I think that underscores that fact that, yes, our software is not yet good enough.

In fact, what we see here today is an incredible new opportunity to support great moments at work.  And what I'd like to do is to build on Bill's theme of broader focus, and take you through some elements of the kind of deeper business impact that people are having.  And I'd say that probably the best place to start is right at Microsoft.  Many of us at Microsoft have actually been using Office 2003 for a full year.  There are now probably about 40,000 or more users within our company, and it's been very exciting to see how people react, what their opportunities are, what they see as the most important thing to them.

One of my big surprises, and I'm sure all of you wouldn't be surprised to know that historically I've used Outlook more than any other application.  But, one of my big surprises is that now my most used application is Microsoft One Note, because I'm using One Note throughout my day to keep track of important information, important notes, that really can be translated more rapidly into action for the business.  And if you look across the Microsoft organization, you see us using the information rights management capability, Windows SharePoint services, the SharePoint portal server capability, Microsoft Outlook, InfoPath, Live Meeting, and really all of the capabilities.

I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper and show you some of the impacts.  For example, by using the information rights management capability, we can have improved confidentiality for financial and personnel information.  By using the advances in Microsoft Outlook that are so critical to the amount of work people do via e-mail, we can save millions of dollars, and already are saving millions of dollars, by being able to link with the new Exchange Server 2003, by being able to reduce the number of servers, and to lower our overall bandwidth cost as a corporation.

By using the new Office Live Meeting service, we expect that we could potentially save up to one trip in five during the year, and that would be savings within our company of nearly $45 million.  Using the SharePoint collaboration capability, we have teams springing up throughout the whole company, where people are able to get connected for a meeting, a document that they're working on of an important project.  In fact, within our own organization we have more than 25,000 SharePoint workspaces that are already being used.  And people are taking advantage of the personal site capability in SharePoint portal server, so that we would expect that all of our employees will ultimately have their own personal site within the organization.

So those are some examples of the benefits that you see within the Microsoft organization.  But, I know all of you sit in the audience, and you expect that, you expect us to be good users of our products.  So what I wanted to do today to dig deeper is to bring one of the world's largest corporations here to the event, and to have them share with you the impact that they're rapid adoption of Office 2003 is having in their organization.  So please join me in welcoming Dieter Reinersmann, and the Office of the CIO [Siemens Corporation].

Welcome, Dieter.

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Hi.

JEFF RAIKES:  Thanks very much for joining us.  You know, one of the reasons why I was very excited to have you here today is that I know within your organization you saw some document management challenges that involved how you handle corporate identity, corporate governance, and very important these days, regulatory compliance.  Why don't you share with the audience a little bit about the issues that you were seeing in your organization?

DIETER REINERSMANN:  That's actually true.  So Siemens have maintained a corporate form solution since the mid-'90s to serve all these issues, legal compliance and corporate identity, and to enable the employees to create documents that are that style.

JEFF RAIKES:  And there are a lot of end user challenges, I think you saw in your previous approach?

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Right, the end user challenges were first of all, this was built on top of Office, an integrated solution, so the end user was locked into a specific workflow in creating documents, and visually you even had to reenter information.  This wasn't intuitive at all, so we were not really able to deploy globally, but just retrain a high power user that created a lot of documents a day.

JEFF RAIKES:  So the solution on the older version of Office wasn't as intuitive, and in addition there was the aggregate of the end user challenges into organizational challenges.  What were some of those organizational challenges?

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Basically it was the high maintenance cost of the whole system.  So we do a refresh of the system from time to time, the refresh cycle was bout six months.  And with the new solution we were able to bring down that from six months to six weeks.  On top of that, we were required previously to have dedicated maintenance personnel in the field, to support the end user and maintain the whole system.

JEFF RAIKES:  Yes, so a lot of challenges.  Now, by moving from a set of older versions of Office to the new Office 2003 you were able to address a lot of those challenges.  Why don't you share a little bit about what the solution was with the new Office System?

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Absolutely, with the new Office System 2003 we were able to implement a smart document solution that maintains the standard word editing experience to the users, so it's fully integrated.  So it automatically extracts data from databases, and then they go into the document, it's an automated process, it brings down the error rate, and really increases the experience for the user.

JEFF RAIKES:  And, as I understand it, you saw some substantial results for Siemens with this approach?

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Absolutely.  I mentioned that we brought down the development period from six months to six weeks, and that is a cost savings of $315,000 each year for Siemens.  So really a lot of savings.  And in the field I mentioned the maintenance we needed, we were able to bring that down by as much as 80 percent.

JEFF RAIKES:  That's a substantial business impact.  As I understand it, you saw some things that surprised you a little bit, or that you didn't anticipate about broader impact of the new Office System within your organization?

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Well, we had experience through the last month we were already using the new Office System.  Several enhancements, just to name a few, we have a very nice word reading layout, we have the Office mail reading pane, we have a great working spam filter in Outlook, and we have the enhanced experience you mentioned, the enhanced outlook that will allow us to reduce the number of locations where we and Siemens need to maintain Exchange servers, from currently as much as 150 to less than 20.

JEFF RAIKES:  Wow, that's a substantial improvement, I'm sure like Microsoft you'll be saving millions of dollars a year in server and bandwidth costs.

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Absolutely.

JEFF RAIKES:  Now, when you looked at the combination of the specific document management solution, and also these additional benefits, what conclusion did you draw?

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Well, when we saw all these benefits of the whole package we decided right now to deploy Office System 2003 throughout our 330,000 desktops within Siemens.

JEFF RAIKES:  Wow, 330,000 desktops.

DIETER REINERSMANN:  A huge number.

JEFF RAIKES:  A huge number, and I believe the largest to date.  Well, Dieter, I want to thank you very much for joining us, and sharing the observations of you and the Siemens team.  You're doing a great job.  Thank you.

DIETER REINERSMANN:  Okay.  Thank you.

JEFF RAIKES:  So, as I said, I want to dig into the deeper business impacts that come from customers adopting the Office system.  We were very fortunate, because of the ability for many customers to get on a rapid adoption program, an independent company, Navigant Consulting, was able to dig deeply into the impact that they were seeing within their organization.  They did an analysis of about 20 or so companies, looking at their administrative processes, looking at their cycle time on work, looking at how employees access information, looking at how they handle forms-based processes.  And there were some very important conclusion.  You know, the old adage is that speed kills, but I think we know in this kind of a business environment, in business the lack of speed kills.  And in the white paper that you'll see from Navigant, you'll be able to understand how companies like HP, and Guidant Medical dramatically improved the speed of their processes.  HP, reducing the amount of time that it takes for them to develop a marketing guide by 46 percent.  And Guidant Medical improving the ability for their employees to access information by using the XML capabilities by up to 75 percent.  Great examples of how significant speed improvements came to information work processes.

Another example has to do with the importance of information in this information-based economy.  Some would say that without information we are powerless.  And Wortmann A.G. was able to use the new Office System to take data or information that would be a full programmer day in order to access it, and now make it available to all of their employees to access in just a matter of minutes.  So in that case, providing access to information, provided their employees what they needed to know to do their jobs better.

In today's business environment it's clearly one of survival of the fittest.  And when it comes to software, and it comes to this issue of good enough, in my view the metaphor that I have in my mind is, should companies accept a grade of C or D, or should they make the small investment necessary to have the A-plus tools for their customers?  And that's the way in which I look at it, and that's what we saw in the Navigant study.

In fact, by making a small investment, relative to the overall compensation, the overall expense in information workers, they saw a deep impact on information work.  They looked at nearly 4,000 people doing information work, and concluded that on average there would be a 5 percent improvement.  In other words, information would get another 2 hours per week without having to work any additional hours.  They looked at the payback in traditional business terms, like for example, internal rate of return, the median payback time was 8 months, ranging from 3 to 19 months across the companies that were studied.  So all of the companies saw a very profitable decision in moving to the Office System.  And finally, if you look at the net present value, the net present value, the mean across those 20 companies was about $4,000.  And the internal rate of return ranged from 46 percent to nearly 500 percent, with a median internal rate of return of 142 percent.  So this is what we've learned from a third party firm studying the impact of the new Office System on information work.  And I think it gives you an example of why we're excited about this transformation.  And so are our partners.  There are more than 250 partners with more than 500 Microsoft Office System solutions already available today.  In fact, 150 of them are profiled on the Microsoft.com Office Web site.  And all of these logos that you see here on this slide represent companies that are here at the partner pavilion, so that you, too, can learn about the impact, the opportunity that partners are seeing.

I want to thank you very much for being here today, and for participating with us in this great milestone, the transformation of Microsoft Office.  And now I'd like to toss it back to Bill Gates.

BILL GATES:  Thanks, Jeff.

JEFF RAIKES:  Great.  Thanks, Bill.

BILL GATES:  Someone mentioned to me this week that this is the first major wave of products Microsoft has had out since I became chief software architect about three years ago.  So they said, hey, is this better, did you really help make this more innovative?  And I hope you'll see if you look at the breadth of things we've done, and the way they fit together, that this is something that there is a single architectural approach, there's a view of the products working together, and using an approach, the Web services approach, to let integration be at a very different level than ever before.

So, where do I see these innovations?  Let's look at them in the following categories, collaboration, people working with other people; business process integration, people working with their backend software systems and people in other organizations; and then finally areas where we just make you a lot more efficient, things you would have been doing, but you couldn't have done nearly as effectively as before.  And I want to step through each one of these and show what we've got with the new software.

Collaboration is, as I said, the theme of this release.  How do you share information?  Right now, you either put the files out on a file share, and that doesn't work very well if you want to go across companies, or you do e-mail attachments, and e-mail attachments have real limitations.  If you want to involve someone new in the activity, you have lots and lots of people making different revisions, if some people should only see revisions at a certain checkpoint, if you want to make small changes, but yet make sure everybody has visibility of those changes when they're interested in them, you can overflow somebody's inbox, and it's very difficult to work together.

Instead now, with the Office System, we have this capability called SharePoint, and what you do is, you give a simple command to create a SharePoint Web Site.  So, when you're going to have a meeting, when you're going to have a product launch like this one, you build that site, you put the list, the schedules, the documents that relate to that all up on that Web site.  IT does not need to be involved, they just put up a single server, and on that server you can have over 50,000 of these sites that are provisioned by the individual user.  They decide exactly who should have access to that information, so it's far more secure.  There are ways to connect it up so that people from other companies can come in and see that information, and yet retain it as something that is completely secure.

As you go to that SharePoint site, you can even see for the other people who have access to the site, who is online, and if you want to collaborate with them right then, you just click, you can start instant messaging, or a real-time Live Meeting connection with those people.

Another part of our collaboration story is Microsoft Project.  Project is an amazing success story.  It's a product that we've had now for almost 20 years, and it's grown to be by far the most popular in its category.  It would be one of the top ten biggest software companies in the world if it were independent, over $500 million for this software.  And here we look at how people can coordinate things, not just professional project managers who understand all the different ways of presenting information, but how do we involve everyone.  A big part of that has been adding a Project Server, and letting you not only have this server taking little pieces of information from that Project Web site and embedding those on SharePoint Web sites, so you can see the schedule, and then click if you need more detail, and you're taken to that Project Server.  And so these pieces are working together.

Live Communications Server, that's our ability to provide rich instant messaging within a corporation with the kind of security and logging that people expect.  And yet, of course, it connects out to the consumer instant messaging system like the instant messaging provided by MSN.

Collaboration is one of the things that people who reviewed the product saw that we had really made some advances in.  Here Alan Goldstein talks about how SharePoint is compelling, really automates communication that you would have had to use e-mails and phone calls for in the past.

Another way to look at this is to see how it comes to life.  And we've had SharePoint out with the other Office System capabilities for these last eight months.  And one of the customers that has used it in some very exciting ways is Nordea.  Let's take a look at how it is benefiting them.

(Video segment.)

The next area is how Office and business processes come together.  Historically, these have been two very separate things.  The business process offer you run is an ERP system, extremely structured screens that you have to fill in the data, and that's very separate from the unstructured world.  The unstructured world really lets workers come together, decide who needs to be involved and use e-mail and ad hoc approaches to organizing the information.  But we really need to connect those two things.  You know, think about a sales opportunity, you want your backend system to know the state of that customer, you want to see what's going on with them, but you want to be able to connect that to all the workers who are thinking about that customer.

Say, during the work with that customer, there's an invoice that's disputed.  You want to bring all of the productivity software to bear to let people go in, make that customer happy, figure out exactly what the resolution will be, and therefore connect up what's decided back into that structured system and have that reflected in a way that you can always navigate to it and see that.

And this disconnect between the business processes and the Office software has been something that's used a lot of knowledge worker's time, it has not let them come in and get at the information they need to see.  We're seeing this changing.  We're seeing companies be more explicit about their business processes, model them out using Visio.  Visio lets you do the diagrams that show all the different stages.  And for each of those stages you can decide the role of the structured software and the Office software in bringing together the best solution.  We realize there was a missing piece in Microsoft Office to make this possible, that information visualization was not rich enough.  And that's why we've added the InfoPath module to Microsoft Office.  The response to this has been phenomenal.  You know, it's a first-time module.  We thought that maybe with the first version it would be a slow burn, but I would say that this is one of the really amazing things is how customers have adapted to this, and seeing how it can fit into their different processes.

So, we connect these SharePoint sites with all the programs running, using the Web services standard, and for many of our customers we make that easy for their developers by letting them use the rich BizTalk Server.  BizTalk connects up to all the different protocols including Web Services, and we have an integration with SharePoint there that is pretty amazing.  I think that this advance would not have been possible without the industry's commitment to XML and Web services, and I want to emphasize the incredible progress that's been made there, the basic standards have all been agreed to.  Virtually every large customer Microsoft has, they're now building at least some of their applications around Web services.  Even the most advanced ideas for Web services, Microsoft and IBM recently demonstrated how their software and our software would connect together with transaction capabilities, security, and rich, reliable messaging.

And so this is quickly becoming the commonsense way that all the software on the Internet connects together.  It's about letting you see information from many different places.  And, of course, letting that visualization use the rich capabilities of Office, whether it's bringing it into Excel, or a rich InfoPath form, or an Access application, that is of very deep importance.

InfoPath is something that the reviewers recognize as a very strong offering.  The first time we've seen that when we've brought a new module in, and here the InfoWorld reviewers talked about as the best new feature to hit Office since real-time spell checking.  That's quite an endorsement of InfoPath and what it brings.

Now, the kind of people at Microsoft who really understand best how our customers can benefit from this software are really called business productivity advisors.  They're out there with customers understanding their problems, what they'd like to make more efficient.  And that's something that we just started up a little over a year ago, and it's really richened the dialogue between us and our customers.

Jeff Raikes asked the business productivity people to think through how could they show examples of where customers would benefit the best by these new business automation capabilities.  In fact, Nick Stillings created the very best example.  And so we asked Nick to come on up and show us how this software changes business automation.

Let me welcome Nick to the stage to show us that.

Good morning, Nick.

NICK STILLINGS:  Good morning, sir.

(Applause.)

Good morning, I'd like to show you a solution that was created for Fraser Health Authority in British Columbia, Canada.  The solution was created by Habenero Consulting Group, and was designed to solve a business problem that they had.  Fraser Health provides a variety of medical services in the 13 communities that they service with their 13 hospitals and 20,000 staff.  One of the problems that they were facing is they didn't have any way to centralize the approval and process for capital budget projects.  When a department, say a medical department, would order a piece of medical equipment, they wouldn't let any other departments know what was going on.  And as a result, interdependent departments weren't talking to each other.  I can have a million dollar piece of medical equipment sitting out on the receiving dock, because the facilities department didn't know they were supposed to be there to install it.

I'm going to play the part of a person working in the radiology lab at one of those facilities, and show you what it's like to walk through the business process, where I'm going to order a new MRI machine to do magnetic resonance imagery.  Let me show you how Office Systems helped Fraser Health with their solution.

Now, the heart of my solution in Office System is based on my SharePoint team Web site.  This is a departmental site that was created for the department of radiology, it has the information that I need to connect with and share information with other people in my department, as well as serving as a starting point for any new business process, or as they say in British Columbia business process.  When I want to start a new business process I'll actually go ahead and click on this project initiation forms library.  This is a document library inside of SharePoint that has forms, so I'm going to go ahead and fill out a new project.

I'll go ahead and open up one I was working on, and this opens Microsoft Office InfoPath.  As Bill mentioned, InfoPath is a new application designed to help users capture information in a structured manner, and pass it via XML and Web services to back end systems to tie into their business processes.  Here in the form I'll go ahead and name the project that I have, I'll pick a project sponsor, this will be someone with budgetary approval to sign off on the project, they'll also give me my scapegoat in case anything goes wrong.  I'll go ahead and pick my project priority, details on the project itself, and if at any time in this form I'm not sure what to fill out next, InfoPath gives me a handy help feature.  Over here on the right I've got an Office task pane that gives me step by step instructions on how to complete the form.

Now, I mentioned one of the problems they had is they weren't connecting with other departments to let them know what was going on.  Here when I order this piece of medical equipment I'm going to go ahead and specify that I consulted with two departments, one of those being facilities, I can put in the department contact name, as well as the date that I consulted with him.  So I've got a nice paper trail that we talked to those people, and that they signed off on the project.

The other thing that happens at Fraser Health, every time they initiate a new capital budget project, they have to do a risk assessment.  I'm going to click here to go into the risk assessment list.  Now, this is one of the beauties of InfoPath, I'm not going to leave this physical form, I'm still in the same form, but I'm looking at a different view of the information.  This view shows me all the individual metrics that I have to keep track of risk analysis and risk management.  I can change any of these, and there's actually numerical data in the back end that's being updated.  Inside the form I have the capability to go ahead and update multiple views, and multiple components of the information.  And it shows me just the view that's specific to the task that I'm working on at the time.  Now, down here at the bottom I have a calculate button I can click on, and it uses a set of heuristic rules to take all that risk information, give me a risk-benefit analysis, it looks like this is a viable project.

So I'll go ahead and return back to the primary view of the form.  When I do that you'll see the form is almost complete.  I've captured all my project information, details on the project, departments that are going to be affected by it, and how I've consulted with them, my benefit-risk analysis.  Notice now in this view I just see that summary of the benefits and risk, and then finally I've one last section to complete.  You'll notice that this field is red.  That means it's a required field.  I can't submit the form without it.  So one of the great things here is we can use InfoPath to force our business logic and make sure that we follow all the appropriate processes.

I'm going to go ahead and specify the source of funding for this, which is going to be our capital budget.  I'll go ahead and put in capital funds, and submit it.  So I've gone ahead and submitted my request to initiate a new project.  I'm going to send that to my approver.  It tells me it's been successfully submitted, and it's over in the SharePoint document library.  If I go back over to the document library and take a look at it, you'll see that I list all the forms here, as well as their form status.  And right now I can see here is my new one, purchase MRI, and the status is pending sponsor approval.

Let me show you what's happening with the workflow on the backend.  A picture is worth a thousand words, and nothing shows pictures better than Microsoft Office Visio.  Here I've got a diagram of the workflow that Fraser health is using.  When a business unit initiates a project the fill out the form I just showed you, when they submit that form BizTalk picks it up out of the SharePoint library and sends an e-mail to the supervisor, to the person who is listed as the form sponsor, to go ahead and give sign off authority.  If the sponsor approves the project, a second process steps in, an e-mail is sent back to the project initiator, in this case myself working in the department, to tell me that my project has been approved.  And the last step that I do is create what's called a project charter, essentially an executive summary document of the project itself.

Let me show you what that looks like for the project sponsor.  I'm going to switch roles now, and sign into e-mail as Jane Wilson.  Jane is our department supervisor, she sponsors all of our capital budget projects, she has budgetary approval for the organization.  When Jane comes in in the morning, she checks her e-mail to see if she has any new e-mail that's come in, and I can see one has arrived here.  This is the one sent automatically by BizTalk, and it says, this is a new project initiation request awaiting your approval, just click here.  And that will take me right out to the InfoPath form that was submitted where I view all the information I entered earlier, and decide whether I want to sign off on the form or not.  So I'll scroll back down through the form.  I'll check to make sure that the sign offs are done appropriately, the other departments were consulted, the benefit-risk analysis has been done, and you'll notice there's a slight different view of this form.  InfoPath recognizes that Jane's role interest eh business process is one of approval, so it turns on one more component in the form for her, and that's this component here, where she can go ahead and approve the project, put in the date that she does the approval, and go ahead and submit that to begin a new project with the project management office.

So if I sign out of e-mail now as John ‑‑ I'm sorry, if I sign out as Jane, and sign back in as John, there's the update telling me it's gone back to the document library.  We'll close out of e-mail.  I'll sign back in, in my original persona, when I initiated the project, check for e-mail, and you'll see now my project has been approved.  And the first e-mail I see is one that says, a new project is there.  If I click to view that project, here's one of the great things about the Office integration, Fraser Health users Microsoft Project Server as a central repository for all the projects they're working on at any time.  Project Server has a component called Project Web Access, which shows all of my project repository through the browser, so I can go right out, see all the projects that are going on at Fraser Health.  Here's the one we just submitted, starting today, to go ahead and order and install an MRI machine.

So that looks great.  So the last thing I need to do, as the person who is in charge of this project, and started it off, is go ahead and create one of those project charter documents.  Again, I've got document libraries right here on SharePoint for all of my files that I'm sharing and working on.  And if I've got a document library I can specify a document template to be the default document I use to fill out that library.  I'm going to open up the Microsoft Word document.  Now, at first glance this appears to be just a blank Microsoft Word document, but behind the scenes here, if I turn them on, you'll see I have a whole bunch of XML tags throughout the document where I've tagged the different elements of the document with XML fields.  These fields are going to use Web services to pull down the information that I entered into the original InfoPath form, and bring it right down into the Microsoft Word document.

If I click on any of these, look at the document task pane on the right, you'll see it pops up with document action, so it prompts me what I can do.  This document is called a smart doc, or smart document, because it allows me to automate the creation of the document and pull in information through XML sources.  I'll go ahead and click retrieve, that will populate all the fields in the document with the information I entered in InfoPath.  And you can see, now I've got a complete project charter document with a summary of all of our project information that was entered in InfoPath that came over automatically when I completed the process.

So Fraser Health is using Office System for business process automation.  You saw how they used InfoPath to capture their data, SharePoint and BizTalk to route it to the appropriate people, and a smart doc in Microsoft Word to bring that captured data back down in XML, and integrate it into Office System.  With this solution they've been able to save the amount of time it takes them to create a new project by 43 percent.  They have a net present value per user of $267, and their first initial payback period was 16 months.  That's a great example of how a customer today is using Office System for business process automation.

Thank you.

BILL GATES:  The next area I said I'd touch on is efficiency.  You might ask, where does the time go, what do people do if you're an information worker?  It's a less defined task than, let's say, a farm worker, or a factory worker, and the ability to make it far more effective is much, much greater.  Software is the magic tool.  We can see that in every different aspect of this day, data analysis, e-mail activity, creating documents, phone calls, letting you have the screen there, and letting you organize and schedule those.  Attending meetings, that's a scenario where we're really extending software out into that environment, as well, before the meeting, during the meeting, after the meeting.  And finally, administrative things, filling out forms, and things like that.

So we're tackling all of this, saying let's understand it, let's create extensibility for specialized functions that people need to do here, and make it better.  Now, first let's talk about e-mail.  E-mail today, you love e-mail, you hate e-mail.  It is certainly a glass half full, and some days you see some aspects of it, and some days you see the other.  Just finding things in e-mail is too hard.  When you're forced to put things into folders, the effort to put them into the folders takes too long, and why should you just put e-mail into one folder, after all, sometimes you want to see your high priority things, sometimes you want to see everything related to a particular person, or to a particular project.  And so the idea that you have to move it into a single place is not only time consuming, it's not really the right metaphor.  The right metaphor is to be able to define the criteria, and then as you click, you immediately see all the mail that meets that criteria.

That's what we call search folders.  That's built into Outlook 2003.  For businesses, you want to manage business contacts.  And we've included for the Small Business Edition this Business Contact Manager that is a unique product, just comes with Office, and connects up in a very rich way into Microsoft Outlook.

Controlled distribution, a lot of people today don't use e-mail for things that need to be kept confidential, because they have no ability to control the forward, say, of confidential medical information, or personnel information, or say, you're closing the financial books at the end of the quarter, there are strict regulatory requirements in terms of exactly who can see that information before it gets out to the public.  So we've added into e-mail that when you create a new e-mail, of course, the standard e-mail is available to everyone, but you can add special types of e-mail that have this controlled distribution.  And that's a feature that our customers demanded, and now it's built in.  You simply take the Windows server capabilities, and the new Office professional capabilities, and you will have this information rights management.

Spam has now become the bane of e-mail.  Some people are receiving as much spam as they receive legitimate e-mail.  So we've had built into Outlook the ability to know exactly who you want to receive e-mail from, be able to pass that through, and then analyze the rest of the mail, and propose to you which of that goes in the junk mail folder, which of it is legitimate.  So a very big advance by having the Outlook client let you decide exactly what mail is important to you.

Again, another thing that's important to people is they use e-mail, they have personal e-mail, they have work e-mail, they don't just want to have one place that the information is stored.  And so the ability to see different e-mail accounts, to see multiple calendars, a lot of richness that's come along in this area.

I'd say that Outlook is the most changed module that we have in the Office Suite, and reviewers who looked at that didn't miss that.  In fact, David Pogue at the New York Times talked about it as a sensational and far- reaching overhaul.  This is the thing that makes the upgrade alone worth the money.  And he says, jump, don't slump into your desk chair and order it.  We certainly agreed with that, and appreciated that review.

I would say that personally I was most surprised by the great work the Outlook team did.  They went back and thought through the user interface, how they could get more information up on the screen.  And that's really a godsend, because of he amount of time that people spend in Outlook, and the increasing amount of e-mail that we have.  Coupled with that, we also have an advance in the Exchange Server.  Exchange has emerged as significantly the most popular mail server.  Most corporations now use exchange.  And they've had a lot of feedback about how we manage the systems.

One of the most complicated things was that you needed to have your Exchange server near to the user.  If you want a really good responsiveness for somebody in Europe, you needed to have the Exchange Server there, or even in the country they were in.  So customers were putting Exchange Servers all over the globe.  We came up with an idea called cache mode that would prevent this need, and actually provide better performance, put less load on the servers, let the servers be centralized, in a few places around the globe, or even in one, we built that into the Exchange Server.  And so cache mode is an advance in Outlook and in Exchange, and a very big deal.  Microsoft went from having 56 places where we run Exchange servers, now down to 7, and in the future we'll reduce that even further.

A lot of demands here on the server, of course, relate to the reliability and the security aspects.  How do you connect in the spam and virus elimination features, and that's a very big advance we've made here.  A review talked about this as the product to beat in this category, and I think that's fair in terms of both the innovation, and what's going on out in the marketplace.

People want e-mail on every device, and everywhere they go.  Historically, in order to get your Outlook capabilities you had to do what was called VPN, virtual private networking, into the corporation, and this involved a lot of overhead in terms of the time to set it up and the authentication.  Now we've changed it so Outlook can connect with an HTTP type connection.  So you can have full Outlook, but connected over HTTP.  So that makes Outlook easier to get at.

In cases where you don't have Outlook, you only have a browser, we've taken the browser form of e-mail, Outlook Web Access, and made that far, far richer.  Sometimes for very casual workers, they connect up only through Outlook Web Access.  For most workers, they use a combination, where on their own machines they're using full Outlook, but when they're casually dropping by a kiosk, or someone else's machine, they simply connect up to Web Access, and immediately have a lot of the features of Outlook, very familiar, and they're off and running.

Another key thing here is connecting up through a mobile phone.  Other than the PC and its software, I would say the mobile phone is the only real change there's been for information workers that can make them more effective.  And now we have this transition from those devices, pure voice devices, to data devices.  Data that includes Web site information, that includes getting your Office documents down and being able to look at those, but first and foremost being able to have the e-mail work well in this form factor, and that's something we've invested a lot in.  We have our smart phones out there in the market.  In fact, this slide has a picture of the one that Motorola has come out with recently, which is a really stunning design and it's won major design wins with the largest carriers around the world.

One thing people often say to us is, how do I deal with my personal mail and my work mail?  Let's say that my family and I want to work together on calendars, and sharing information, things of that nature, but they're not allowed access to my corporate Exchange Server.  My corporation, on the other hand, wants me to use the corporate Exchange Server.  How could I get the best of both worlds there?  Well, what we've done is, we've made it easy to view information, multiple calendars and things like that, even if you're not on the same server.  We've also created a new option which is that by enhancing our MSN e-mail server, Hotmail, we now give you the whole features of Outlook when you connect up.  So, you can think of it for the mass market as the equivalent of Exchange for them.  This took a lot of work.  What we had before was a very limited e-mail connection from Outlook into that Hotmail backend.  So, this is a radical change to that.  You get everything you expect out of Outlook.  Actually, this service is the only thing we're talking about today that's not available today.  This will be available early next year for an inexpensive subscription.  But we'll finally have that complete answer for how does your family connect up, how do you connect up, keep your personal and work e-mail separate, and yet be able to navigate them together in a very rich way.

I also mentioned, we have a new module in Office, other than InfoPath, which is called OneNote.  And we believe this is the future of notetaking.  Over the years, there have been many products that tried to capture the idea that you want to use outlines when you are brainstorming about ideas, and you want to grab different information and pull it together, you need something that's very ad hoc, and let's you put in only as much structure as you think is important.  And that's the spirit of OneNote.  We've learned from all the efforts to do these kind of organized notetakers in the past.  We've taken the advances of the graphics interface, the tablet, some of these integration approaches, and really come up with something that is very, very new.  This is a team that really got a passion for this and said we can do a lot better than has ever been done.

The reviews have been very strong. Sam Diaz at the [San Jose Mercury News] talks about this as a productivity tool that could change the way people take notes, and certainly we expect that everybody who sits in meeting will be using this as a way to take their notes.

Now, meetings showed up, of course, as a very big block of time.  For the average worker, it showed up as a few hours.  I know for my schedule, that's more like six hours out of the typical work day is in meetings.  And, those meetings, there's a lot of variety.  Some of them I'm the key participant and need to be totally involved, some only some parts of the meeting are really affecting me.  And so now I take my Tablet computer to every one of those meetings, I have my notes there electronically, moving from internal simply notes over to OneNote, I connect up to my e-mail, anything that comes up in the meeting I am immediately letting people know about.

But there has been an additional challenge, which is what about people who would have to travel a long distance to have to come to the meeting, or just can't be there.  How do you involve them?  And that's where we've now made a big investment in this real-time approach we call Live Meeting.  This is a product that we bought the company PlaceWare to accelerate our efforts here.  You see now we've got a very dedicated marketing campaign, so people understand what will be commonsense in the future, which is you don't just have the phone, you have that screen there to edit and browse together, whether it's a training session, or helping somebody out with software, or just trying to figure out how to solve a business problem.  That makes an incredible difference.

In fact, we're broadcasting this presentation over Live Meeting, you can see this is what the interface looks like, where you can navigate to the different slides, people can submit questions, and it really is a way of involving everybody.  And then you can archive this as a digital document, go back through, search through, review it, and watch the parts of the meeting that you might have missed, all of that being available.  And this will become something that almost every meeting in business takes advantage of this capability.

I thought the best way to give you a sense of how this all works and my excitement for it would be to show you how I work with the software myself.  One thing we've got is what we call little movies, they're little Windows Media files that have audio and then they show you on the screen exactly what's going on.  We've got a lot of those out there on a site which is our Microsoft.com/greatmoments Web site.  And so, if you're wanting to learn about, well, how is Outlook different, should I upgrade, how will it help me?  You can click on those demos and see how people work with those.  And so we're taking all of the learnings about what's better about the software, and getting them up there so that it's much easier for people to make sure they're taking advantage of the features, and knowing why this update will be very important to them.

Okay, I've got over on this side here one of these Tablet machines.  Some of you were here when we introduced the Tablets.  That's been out almost a year now, and there's a little over 400,000 of those in use.  We've seen a number of verticals where it's very, very popular.  We've seen the ISVs now building software solutions to take advantage of that.  And the Office System is a great example of that.  Throughout all the modules in terms of being able to ink into instant messaging, or to your e-mail, or Word documents, we are very ink-enabled, and that's a leadership thing.

We're also seeing the second generation of Tablet hardware come along.  In fact, what I've got here is a Toshiba machine that will be out by the end of the year.  Toshiba was one of the very popular because it was a convertible.  You could twist the screen around.  But now they've done it in a lighter form factor, more capabilities, and all the kind of rich updates you'd expect in a portable device.

I'm running OneNote here, so, of course, I can take the pen, circle something, put notes next to that, refer to other things.  I can also navigate around.  You can see there's a tab structure here, and an outline structure.  Let me show you how some other people have used OneNote.  This is an example of  somebody at Microsoft who is using it to think about, well, how do they do their remodeling project.  And so they've got it organized by things in the kitchen where they took photos, and they just do these little marks where you can click and see the related point to that information.  As they put things in, this is a product description that they got out on the Internet, and they've been able to put their notes in here, and this OneNote document, their family, their person doing the design work, are sharing this and doing updates here, including having little audio recordings as well as ink-type annotations.  And so it is a very rich environment for organizing things in an outline, being able to have different photos come together, and it's an exciting addition to the Office Suite.

Let me move over now.  One key point to make is, although it does support ink, this is useable and a big advance even for machines that are not tablet machines.  And so, as the tablets become more and more popular, people will be using ink there, but everybody has access to what we've got in OneNote.

I'm moving now to what would be more like a desktop machine.  Here I've got Outlook Web Access.  And when you first see it you might think, no, no, no, he's wrong, that's Outlook.  Actually, just looking at the screen the only easy way to tell is this name here that tells me that, in fact, it is Outlook Web Access.  Historically, if you did e-mail through the browser, it was a very limited experience.  So, the idea that you could navigate to inbox, to the calendar and see a rich view, to your contacts, to your tasks, you essentially had to learn a different user interface than you were used with Outlook.  Here we've gotten a high percentage of the features, in fact, I'll just go and right click and see the idea of flagging e-mail, making this unread, adding the sender to your safe sender list, all of that kind of right click functionality is available, and doing that in the environment took a lot of innovation.  And so this is available when you get onto any different machine.

Let me go ahead and close that.  And now I am in Outlook itself, so you can see it's changed a little bit.  I've got a little bit of a richer toolbar, but the basic interface is exactly the same.  I've got a lot of different mail being presented.  You can see on the right this is a reading pane.  So, as I click through for an e-mail, I don't have to zoom down in for anything.  If it's a short e-mail I can immediately take care of it, delete it, reply to it, very, very efficient here.  You also see that the way that e-mail is being organized, this is organized by date, you can see it's got the mail from today, the mail from yesterday, the mail from last week organized, and even the way it is using the space on the screen.  So this mail that is today, it doesn't even show me the date, it just shows me the time.  For yesterday's mail, it says when that day, and so they really thought through exactly how to use the screen in the most efficient fashion.

Now, when you get lots of e-mail, which I certainly do, this idea of being able to flag things is pretty interesting.  So, I bring this up and I think, okay, I would like to have a follow-up here, let me put a yellow flag on this and let me follow-up on this, let me have an orange flag.  And so those are things that you want to go into and follow-up on later.

To actually view things that way, we do arrange by flag, and so we've got all the blue flags, yellow flags, all the different colors organized together.  That's happening very rapidly.  If I want to go back and arrange by date, that's very straightforward.

Another feature that you saw there that is super-popular is this idea of arranging by conversation.  You'll often, particularly if you come back after being away from the office for a few days, have a massive amount of e-mails on one topic.  People going back and forth, back and forth, and sometimes they'll include the previous things, sometimes they won't.  And so what you'll do is go into this conversation mode and take and process all that e-mail at once, decide what you need to read, whether you need to reply, and then just delete it all, because it's brought together, since it's a single conversation.  And so we think that is something that a lot of people use.  In fact, a lot of people have bought third party add-ons to do that, but we've been able to integrate it in a richer way just by building it into the product itself.

Let's look at the calendar thing that I mentioned.  Here I can see my calendar is quite rich.  But, you know, as I'm looking at my calendar, I might want to see the family calendar also.  So, now that's brought up side by side.  Or if I'm trying to organize something with co-workers, I have them listed here, and I just click to bring their calendars in, and I can think, okay, what's it going to take for us to do a meeting where we all come together.  Will people have to make changes, or how will that work?

I can see with my family what conflicts there might be between my work schedule and if I decide, no, no, that's really something that I need to have on my work schedule.  I just drag and drop that over and the right thing happens.  Now, this work, even though that family schedule can be on the Hotmail server whereas my other schedule here and my co-workers' schedules can be on the Exchange Server.  So a much richer way of doing calendars.

Today, many people track their calendar online, but many people don't organize their schedule that way because the features haven't been rich enough.  And we're going to make that change by having these calendars be rich and available on all the different devices.  You're going to see here that my MSN mail is down here, and my corporate e-mail is up here, and I can navigate back and forth between those things.

Let's say I get an e-mail that has an attachment.  That's a common part of my work activity, about a fifth of the e-mail documents that I get have an attachment.  Here's one with an interesting Word file, so I'll click and I'll bring that up.  Now, immediately you see, we thought a lot about reading, making reading easy on a PC is something we've thought about.  It's been a very important thing for us for a long time.  Now, with our Clear Type capability, and the way that Office displays the information, we've brought reading to a whole new level.  You can see the document is laid out in a very rich way.  I can add thumbnails here that let me navigate through the document.  Of course, it's very, very fast.  It's a very rich document that let's me go around and get at anything that might be of interest.  I can actually see one page at a time, two pages at a time.  And we're laying it out so that the columns aren't too wide.  Seeing two pages side by side will be a very common way that people read online.

Now, if the document is less than, say, 20 pages, I never print it out because it's so easy for me to annotate, search and read that document online.  I've got a little enclosure here, this little race car.  But before I show that, let me talk about how this connects up to the Web.  Say somebody sent me this, and I'm not really even sure, I'm not some car expert, what this Factory Five roadster is.  I just click on this research button, and what I see is called the Research Pane.  Now, over here I can select any place where I want to look up that information.  I'll just go out to the Web and do that through a search, and I can see different Web sites come in.  This is right inside my reading view now that I get this different information, and it lets me drag and drop things into the document if that's interesting to me.

The search capabilities can be across anything.  Basically, when I'm looking at Microsoft documents internally, I will search for the thing that reminds me what codes and things refer to what product.  And so, you know, I don't look like I'm out of date because I don't know what the code names are.

We've also got lots of commercial information here, we've got the Encarta Encyclopedia.  Factiva is pretty amazing; that's the thing that Dow Jones puts out, and so any company that has a subscription to that would just put that entry here on the search pane, and when people want to look up about products, or articles, or things, they have all the richness of Factiva there at their fingertips, something they can get at.

Now, if I go into this document, I can click on that actual car there, and this shows the richness of the .NET Web Services.  This is actually a third-party component from somebody called NGRAIN.  It lets you look at rich 3-D models, and so you can navigate through those models and have the richness of their component, but it's actually built down into the Word document itself.

Now that I've clicked on it, you can see that's there, 3-D, I can rotate it around.  I can look at different parts of the car.  I can go back, I can even take the different pieces of the car and actually go through and see those in a different way.  So, actually I unloaded it, let me load it back in again.  I can take these pieces, flip it around, see the chassis, any different way that I want to work, this now takes the integration capabilities of Word and lets you have any data type involved here.  This could be an AutoCAD drawing and engineering project, and rich interaction, without having to leave the application, or you can click the link that's in here and go and get a full screen full of information about that data.

So, let me leave Word and let me close Outlook down and show you what's called a SharePoint My Site.  SharePoint is used inside a company for anything people want to collaborate on, meetings, projects, within Microsoft as soon as we put it up we had tens of thousands of sites that people built, because it was ad hoc, just so straight forward.  In fact, when you actually send an e-mail with an enclosure it offers to say, hey, if you're going to have an ongoing dialogue about this, why not just click here and we'll build you a SharePoint Web site without any additional effort.

One type of Web site is a personal Web site, where you can have information that just you see, and a public part of the SharePoint Web site.  Here I've taken a few Web parts for the traffic in Seattle, my schedule, different news things, sort of the things that I'm interested in.  I also have the ability for people ‑‑ I can put my own documents up here and have them available through a browser.  I've got people who are putting documents up here, that they think I would be interested in, that they know that I want to review.

They can see, the person who put this up here, I can see their status, and it says, that person is online, so I can send them an instant message.  This uses the Live Communication Server.  I will prove that I can type and send that along, that was not pre-canned.  So the idea of knowing which of your colleagues are around, being able to easily navigate into that is great.  And here we're showing that instant messaging now includes the ink capability.  So Taylor is obviously on some type of Tablet, Windows Tablet machine, and he sent back a thing saying, that's absolutely no problem.  So the ability to customize these Web sites and bring in project status on my personal Web site, I certainly have the project status for our Longhorn project, I'm always up to date on exactly what's going on there.

One last thing I thought I'd show is the pervasiveness of this Web service concept.  I think everybody can appreciate that in terms of looking up a price list, or looking up data bout a customer, or looking up opportunities, that's a great thing.  Here we've got it integrated into Excel.  The example I took was, say I have a lot of junk, or wonderful stuff that I'm trying to sell out on eBay, and this is actually an Excel template we'll make available to everyone where I've simply typed in these things.  I've got little pictures that I can look at of all this.  This is a Clippy t-shirt, sweatshirt, and these are a real collector's item.  Clippy was really quite a phenomena, and now he's become a cult future.  You know, we've got the old Altair here, and so I can see my inventory of stuff.  I can say, okay, let's go ahead, there's a few of these that aren't listed right now, but let me switch and say that I want to go ahead and list these other things, as well.

So then I'll go into a different view, and I'll tell this spreadsheet, go ahead and make the Web service calls to list anything that I've added to my listings.  And so you can see, a dialogue came up, says we are connected to eBay, and those listings are now done.  That's absolutely taken place.  Anytime I think, gosh, what are the latest bids on these things, maybe I should change my minimum, lower them, or put a buy now type price on these things, I click and update the items.  Again, it goes out to eBay, it's very efficient, and so it's sowing me that, hey, the bid on the Altair increased quite a bit, the bid on the Clippy t-shirt increased.

I can also go over here, I've got a few more columns in this spreadsheet, and I can see who's bidding.  It looks like Steve B. may be the big winner on buying this Clippy t-shirt, which is a really great thing.  But, you can see that all these nice graphs let me understand exactly what's going on.  I can also navigate out from here, I can have a link that would take me to the actual eBay site, and that's got the typical information that you'd expect here.  This is my world's greatest bridge player's watch. I decided I'd sell it, since I didn't win in a tournament I was in recently.  Maybe someone else will want to buy that.

One thing that's interesting is that, even if somebody wants to take this listing information and present it on another site, they can do that.  It's very straightforward for them to have it on another site.  In fact, they use FrontPage to build that site, and connect up with the Web services capability.  So here's a bridge site that's got the up to date quote.  This is built just literally in a few minutes using FrontPage, and in FrontPage we said, hey, call the Web service here to make sure this watch listing always has the latest up-to-date price for that offering.

So that's just a quick glimpse of some of the ways that Office is helping me do things in a  little bit different and better way.  The fun I'm having using it, and how it's making me more effective, I encourage people to go up to that Web site, and see some additional examples.  One thing to be clear about with Office is that this release is not the end of the benefits people get by upgrading to this software.  We use our Web site, the Office Online website, and provide rich templates, and we're always putting new things up there, we have it organized by profession, or type of work you're doing.  We do updates up there.

If there's anything in the security or other areas, we make that updating a lot simpler than ever before.  We've used the ability to see what people are using in Office during the beta to make it far better.  For example, things like the BCC field in Outlook.  People were very confused, the help topic just didn't help them, and so we've rewritten that.

This is the first version of Office that when you go to Help we don't look to the local files first, we try to go out on the Web, and that lets us get the full richness of the help we've got out there, plus which that help is thousands of times bigger in terms of its richness than could be stored on the local machine.  We still use the local machine Help for when you're offline, but what's online it's not only better and richer, but we see which topics people are going to, and we ask them if they like the response they got, and so we can make that constantly better and better.  So there' s a real commitment here to have this online connection be a significant part of the Office value proposition.

Now, we are going to promote this in a way bigger than we ever have with previous versions of Office.  We haven't been on TV with Office for over a decade now, and so we thought, how can we get the excitement of this to really come through.  And what we did is we decided, let's use this idea of great moments, and how people who really want to be more effective, they really want to have the best tools.

So I want to quickly show you two of the 30-second spots that carry through this great moments excitement.

(Video segment.)

(Applause.)

So you can see we were having fun with this great moments idea.  And every one of those will drive people to Web sites so they'll understand exactly what they get, and how easy it is to upgrade.  So we've got a real commitment to information workers.  We are the company that's spending billions of dollars in R&D to understand what can make them more effective.  We're going to keep this innovation going.  We're taking on the very tough problems in communication, creativity, and collaboration.  We're going to let the users guide us down this path, do everything we can to enable more great moments at work.

Thank you.