Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Real-Time Collaboration Web Conference
San Francisco, California
March 8, 2005

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

BILL GATES: Well, good morning. Welcome to our event to talk about real-time communications and how software advances are changing the way people work.

Microsoft Office started this revolution over a decade ago, and today over 400 million people every day are using it as their primary tool. Our ambition for Office is very broad: to change the way people communicate, the way they meet, the way they share information or even, of course, having people take notes electronically.

I was at an event a few months ago where unfortunately I didn't have my Tablet PC with me, and so I was actually taking notes on paper, I'm embarrassed to admit, and in fact, these notes from the World Economic Forum at Davos were grabbed by the press, and they decided that these were Tony Blair's notes, and so they had expert handwriting people come in and look at this and determine that you could tell that this was a very weak leader and somebody who really didn't know what they were talking about.

So this is the picture of the notes themselves and we can blow up a few parts we have here. This is "record 24 tonight," wondering about what Bono is up to with those sunglasses all the time, thinking about emoticons, trying to design some new ones -- (laughter) -- and then something even more personal. (Laughter.)

So I highly recommend using the Tablet PC and taking your notes with you when you leave so that this kind of mistake can't happen.

But it did all get straightened out. We went to 10 Downing Street and told them that they were my notes, and so then the handwriting experts weren't quite sure what they were supposed to say about that.

Communication Breakthroughs

Well, as I said, Office is a very pervasive software tool, the most-used software application of all time, and so things we can do in Office to improve the way people get their job done can have a really unbelievable impact. And we see the opportunity to do this as very, very dramatic.

One of the key areas, the one we'll be focusing on today is breakthroughs in communication, breaking down the silos, bringing the information together, making things easy to set up.

That's one of many areas that Office will be revolutionary in. Information navigation -- we'll make it so that you never want to think about a sales report being on a piece of paper again. You'll want to have it live so that you can navigate through the data and slice it in different ways and share that with other people.

We'll make the idea of business intelligence, how you see market forecasts and budgets and what your accounting software is reporting, so you can see that in much richer and better ways than ever before.

And then, of course, meetings themselves -- there are meetings that you probably don't need, there are meetings that are hard to follow up on, meetings with remote participants where you want to connect up to those people in rich ways, meetings where you want the notes to be shared out with other people -- a lot that can be done there.

Collaboration and communications, obviously we can go well beyond e-mail, bringing the real-time aspects, have software help people get connected up, not have the multiple different phone numbers or e-mail addresses and all the missed coordination, make it very straightforward not only to connect up but also then to have audio and video and screen sharing as part of those interactions.

So it really can be what we call a "new world of work," an evolution of Office way beyond what people have thought of it as traditionally when it was very much about a single worker doing a spreadsheet or doing something like word processing.

Collaboration

Now, let's expand on collaboration, what is it that we need to bring together. Well, collaboration has aspects that are real-time connections and aspects that are non real time, and SharePoint is at the center of what we're doing for this non-real-time capability. We have so-called workspaces -- this is a feature that SharePoint has in the Windows Server and we have all sorts of different types of workspaces depending on the type of activity that you're engaged in: authoring, meetings, business planning, things of that nature.

With integrated communication, really a big thing here is simplification, taking all the different user interfaces you've had to learn and the things that don't connect together and bringing those together. And so having one set of contacts and buddies, that has to be done and that has to show up everywhere, you invest in that, and that's what you use.

The idea of presence -- as soon as you have one of those contacts, to see to the degree you're allowed, what they're up to and have all the different ways of connecting with them, to see immediately which of those are available or not.

As we're providing communications we want to provide both services that you can connect up to and server software so that if you want to run these things inside on your premises, you can do that as well. And by really supporting both of those, having an architecture that gets the richness in both places, we can give organizations very simple choices, the same user interface to run things on premise, run things up in a service with all of these rich capabilities integrated together.

When we talk about connecting up with people, how are you going to do that? Well, sometimes you'll have these predetermined workspaces, SharePoint workspaces, that have sets of people in them, and then you can look and see their presence, you can decide if you want to notify those people.

We'll also, of course, have very rich search, searching not just on the name but searching by who is an expert in this topic or who is involved in this meeting, and very rich ways that the information comes together.

Notification

We'll also have lots of notification. If you're interested in when a document changes or when somebody's status changes, when they become available, you can be notified of that and we put you in control of when you see these notifications; lots of ways that, instead of you're having to go out and find things or you're being overwhelmed with things that you might not care about, you control what's brought to you and the things that you care about are brought to you.

There are many processes in companies that are people-driven. What I mean by that is it's not just a piece of back-end software keeping track of information, but lots of things happen where people decide I want to bring somebody else in to help me on this, I want to reprioritize this. When you have these people-to-people connections, the need for the non-real-time, the workflow and SharePoint capabilities and these real-time things come together in lockstep.

The richness of these environments where they're connecting up to business data in a new way to things like BizTalk, where the business data is far richer than ever before with XML, we're really getting to this vision of people having the information they care about when they want it, and really connecting people together is a huge, huge thing.

Integrated Communications

Let's focus in now on the real-time space for integrated communications. Communicating in a better way has a huge impact for business. Knowing what your customers are thinking, seeing what it is that they'd like to see differently, understanding, when you actually need to make a trip, to go there face-to-face, and when you don't have to do that, this is a highly, highly leveraged area. We can, of course, see that with all the investments in the different silos, investments in mobile phones, voicemail, instant messaging, things of that nature. Even when they've been separated, these have been investments that people have been willing to make. And, of course, overwhelming the investment is made in travel and in the time that people spend in meetings.

What we want to do is take identity and presence and put that at the center and then have all of these other ways of interacting simply connect up to that. So, for example, the calendar is easily available, you can decide how much of that you want to expose, your free and busy bits would be a good example of that. Connecting up through one of these SharePoint workspaces, again identity and presence is put at the center of that.

So when we think of integrated communications, it's something that's very rich in terms of how all these different pieces come together.

Sometimes your availability, your presence should be very context-driven. If you've put in an out-of-office message, that should show up as a presence capability. Over time, as you're working on different devices, if you're on your mobile phone, your presence should be different than if you're just sitting there at your PC.

The interface that you have to learn to do all of these things and navigate all of these things, we obviously have to simplify that so people feel comfortable working across these boundaries. Today it's very typical that some people are much more e-mail-centric, some are IM-centric, some are very phone-centric and yet we'd like to give them the best of all of those worlds coming together in a very simple interface. When you come back to your office, you should be able to quickly see were there phone calls that come in, the e-mail that came in, were people trying to connect to you in instant messaging, all of that being presented in a rich way, and if you want to slice that by this project which involves this set of people or work-related or non-work-related, you don't have to learn different ways of seeing those views depending on the communications modality; it's really just communication that's integrated in the deepest sense of that word.

Now, Voice Over IP is exploding. What we want to do here is enable this software richness on the PC to connect up no matter how quickly somebody is moving to do Voice Over IP. We want to be able to connect up to traditional PBXs so as the events out of that PBX are being exposed through gateway software, we want that to be there on the PC. If somebody is making a leap up to Voice Over IP, then even better because there are standards now that let all of those events be subscribed to and show up in that software interface.

We have some very strong partnerships with people to bring in all these phone events and these phone-control capabilities so that it's there on the PC. Siemens is connecting up to a lot of the different PBXs and a group inside Alcatel called Genesys has software to provide this.

And so the rich software value-added and the pace at which you move the underlying infrastructure over to Voice Over IP, those things are independent but they're strongly reinforcing each other. These voice gateways are exactly what we need in order to see those events and connect those things up.

So where we've thought about the PC and the phone, either the desktop phone or the mobile phone, as these very isolated devices, we'll think about those as a triumvirate that really work together and when you want to set up a policy about you're busy, people should know that or you want to add to your contacts or take the communication and even switch it, start on your mobile phone, move it over to your PC, you should think of those three tools working on your behalf in a very integrated fashion.

Now, as we sell these advances in communications, we need to sell it both to the worker, he or she getting excited about the benefit this brings, but we also need to show the IT organization exactly how they bring these capabilities in, in a way that can be managed.

IT Challenges

And, of course, there are many challenges here: connecting up to the directory, often Active Directory or somewhere that the corporation is investing in having a data structure that shows who is who, what groups they're in and keeping that constantly up to date, you want to only have one of those and have it connect up to your human resources tools, your business tools, your IT infrastructure tools, so having that directory be easy to manage and yet connect to these things, with Active Directory there's a lot we've done there.

With all these communication tools you want to be able to control the policy. Often now there is, of course, regulatory issues about logging certain types of communications and proving that those things have been kept intact the right way. There are various attacks that are made where people try to harvest employee names out of the directory or they try and send spam or spim -- it's called spim when it's in the instant messaging context, and mobile phones now getting some of those same things, SMS-type spam as well. We want to give the tools to IT to be able to set policies, again across all the communications modalities and make it very simple that they feel like, hey, they are in charge of these devices whether it's the security capabilities that they're controlling, or the resource allocations so traffic on the network is being prioritized the right way, or simply making sure that no time is wasted or resources wasted because of frivolous communications coming into the system.

And so connecting up to the tools we have for software updating and directory management, group-policy capabilities, that's important and every time we do a communications product we make sure it's tied into those rich management capabilities.

So that gives us the ability to not just think of this as a bottom's-up user excitement thing, which has always been the top strength of Office, that's really where we've gotten the incredible success we have today, but now also saying that we can enable this by showing people that they're not giving up anything in terms of the kind of management capabilities that they like to see.

Presence

All right, presence I mentioned, and today when we think about presence we think about it in a very simplistic way. It's simply I am logged into this machine and it doesn't have a notion that you could be with your mobile phone or with your machine that doesn't have a notion of what's going on with your schedule. That, of course, really needs to change. In the consumer market, in the business market, presence is this very central thing. And it's something that as we make it richer and richer we shouldn't have one type of presence in one world and one in another world; in fact, we should even let third-party applications get in and look at that information and use that context to decide, say, for a workflow activity exactly what they want to make available there. It's got to be very intuitive how you set up and how you control the visibility of that. Again, the IT people have to be involved in this. But as you can see, identity and presence really span all of these different worlds and all the different software contexts. Anyplace you see the name of the user in any application you should hover over it, see that presence data and simply right-click for whatever type of communication that you want to connect up to. And so any device anywhere, that's what we want to do with the presence information.

All right, so now let's talk about the particular products and exactly what the milestone is that we have here today. We've actually got upgrades of three of our products that relate to real-time communication. The first of those is an update for Live Communication Server 2005. We came out with this late last year, did very well with it, got it out into a lot of enterprises and they had a lot of demand and interest about things they wanted to make even better.

Microsoft Office Live Communication Server 2005 Service Pack

So you can view this release as the thing that takes all of the things that enterprises told us were high priority for us to make that product richer and build those things in now. This will be available this month and there are a variety of new capabilities. The ability to meet all these regulatory requirements, having all the audit ability that we're seeing now in the medical industry, the finance industry, inside any company that's doing Sarbanes-Oxley financial reporting, all of these type of audit-trail capabilities, there are things to enhance that.

Enhancing it for central management, being able go to into what we call MOM, which is our Microsoft Operations Manager, and see the information on this was very important.

Being able to connect up without necessarily doing a full VPN in, so that you can connect through, in fact, in this case through HTTP, and connect up in the same way that Outlook you've been able to run the full Outlook without VPNing in, now we take Live Communication Server and allow that same type of connection.

This is also where we pick up our interoperability capability, which we call Public IM Connectivity, so that you can just put in a connector and it allows the messages to flow in and out of all the popular consumer IM instant messaging services, so it connects up to MSN Messenger, the AOL instant messenger and the Yahoo instant messenger. And so corporations there get the best of both worlds; if they want to connect up to their customers, they don't force that customer to get some new IM client and work in a different way, but then because it's coming through the Live Communication Server, the ability to log those things and control those things, make sure it's not spim coming in, that capability is there in a very nice way.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005

The second product that we're talking about here is a client to this. It's a very new product, something we're very excited about. That comes out by the middle of the year, comes out during this quarter.

To date, what people have done when they want to do rich instant messaging-type things is they've used a client that's built into Windows called Windows Messenger, and we still support that, that's there, but we had a vision of something far richer than that that also would let you have all your phone capability. I mentioned the idea of gateways out to these phone capabilities; well, the Office Communicator 2005, this client is where that get exposed and so when you come back to your office you see the calls that you missed, if you want to have logic about how you route those calls under various circumstances based on the context then you get rich capabilities to do that.

So the idea of having your instant messaging, your phone control there in one place, this is a new kind of product, new for us, new for the industry but we think points the way in terms of the deep integration that people want. So presence is no longer just over there in that instant messaging world, it's here in this unified capability for doing office communications.

And so we have for consumers the MSN Messenger client, for people who just takes what's in the box we've got the Windows Messenger client but here for the office worker we're saying the thing that you want to sit in front of that lets you control the real time communications is Office Communicator.

So I've mentioned these two products that we're very excited about. The best way to understand why we think this really changes productivity and is a very big deal for information workers is to see the software in action.

So I'd like to ask Anoop Gupta, who's the vice president in charge of our Real Time group, to come on stage and show us this software at work. (Applause.) Welcome, Anoop.

ANOOP GUPTA: Thank you, Bill.

Thank you. It's my pleasure today to introduce and demonstrate the Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 today. We are very excited about it, it is our preferred client for the Live Communication Server 2005.

Bill has talked about the integrated communications vision and Communicator really embodies the core pillars of the integrated communication and brings them alive for the information worker, the end user.

These pillars are about rich presence driving communications and how we communicate with people; making sure that the various communication modalities, whether it is text and instant messaging, voice, video, Web conferencing, phone integration, all these are brought together in a seamless way for the end user and the information worker; and finally having all of these communication capabilities embedded inside the everyday user application so these are not siloed or separate places where you go where these are embedded into the applications and how we initiate and how we seamlessly communicate and having them available in a secure and friendly way.

Now, communications demos are very difficult to do by myself so I would like to invite up actually(Ed Simnett, who is the group product manager for the Communicator product. Ed, welcome. (Applause.)

OK, so let's get into action out here. We can get this screen up online. I would like to share with you what the Communicator looks like.

OK, on the right hand side is what you're seeing, my screen out here, you can see that Communicator has the look and feel of an Office application, some color schemes and I can see my status. I have my directs, some of whom are available, my coworkers, my partners. In fact, inside my partners I can see David Wright. We are announcing the public IM connectivity, you can see David is from AOL, Garth is from Yahoo, (Setu ?) is from MSN. So using the secure IM client, I am yet connecting to my partners, friends and family, who might be in these consumer clouds that are there and the connectivity is seamless.

Now, Ed is going to be doing the demo for me and I notice he's busy, so I'm going to like tag him so when he does become free, I know he's available for sharing and doing the demo with me.

The next thing I wanted to share with you is many times we are not just thinking of these set of people who I have as my buddies, you want to connect widely and find out who to communicate with. In this case I would like to go to Bill, and you can see that it's giving me all of the people with the name Bill inside my corporate directory and not only inside my corporate directory but inside Outlook who I might communicate with.

Not only that, it is also showing me the presence information of these people. In particular I want to highlight that if I'm looking at Bill, I can see that he's OOF. Normally what we end up doing is we take a message, we send a message and after we have composed and sent the message we get an OOF, out of office thing, oh, that person is not there, I should contact. Here such presence across Exchange and across Live Communication Server is made available. I know when people are in meetings and people are available; that rich communication is actually there.

I notice now that Ed has become available for demo. Remember I tagged him. Good, Ed, we can start going. Let me actually get the tag off him.

And we will first start from the simplest of the scenarios where I just do text IM with him. So we can do the basic capabilities of any instant messaging client that we have.

Now, I'm not the best of typists that are there, so I actually also like to see the motion and the voice that is there, I would like to go to video. Let's go and launch video with the latest Communicator. There we will start seeing some video across as we communicate with Ed. And similarly, of course, I can also be doing voice call and the audio is going to be a part of it, so it's rich.

Now, this video capability we've actually put a lot of effort in making the codecs much higher resolution and lower bandwidth for it and, in fact, I can go full screen so you can see video becoming much more an integral part, much higher quality than we would do otherwise.

OK, let's stop the video part.

ED SIMNETT: So that's great, Anoop, I think that video is really pretty compelling and you see the -- you're supposed to say how handsome I am; that was the other bit of the demo but I guess you missed that.

So the other thing, as Bill has been talking about, is really how Communicator also helps you work with telephony, so perhaps we can move to some of those scenarios.

ANOOP GUPTA: Absolutely. One of the advances we made out here is that people do want to use their telephone often for communicating and how do we wrap in such communications right into the Communicator experience, all of the integrated modalities integrated together.

ED SIMNETT: OK, absolutely. So if you want to call me there from Communicator.

ANOOP GUPTA: OK, so what I'm going to do is in this case Ed is online and I'll simply say call and here I'm calling his desktop phone.

ED SIMNETT: And I get a popup here to say that I can accept that, the call will go on speaker phone, turn off speaker phone, I'll pick it up to stop any feedback there.

ANOOP GUPTA: So one of the things you will see there, a subtle thing we have done is when you get the call it automatically goes to speaker phone mode. It similarly puts my phone on the speaker-phone mode so it becomes a very hands-free operation that is there.

ED SIMNETT: Great. OK, now, also another thing that you need to do in a call is you can't answer all your VP's questions so you may need to get your trusty sidekick in. So, as you know, it's very annoying, you look at your phone, okay, now I've got to conference a third person in, now is it conference first or second. So instead with Communicator with a couple of clicks you can simply add somebody to the call, so you just saw what I was doing there. I'm now calling my colleague Paul Duffy in the back who should be waiting here to be my trusty sidekick.

PAUL DUFFY: Hello?

ED SIMNETT: Oh, hi, Paul, how's it going?

PAUL DUFFY: Very well. How is the keynote going?

ED SIMNETT: Oh, I think it's going well. I hope you're enjoying it there, too.

So we've seen you, thank you very much, and we're going to move to a mobile phone scenario now.

OK, thanks, Paul.

ANOOP GUPTA: Paul, thanks so much.

So now you can see conference calling, call forwarding, a lot of rich functionality that exists in IPPBX and traditional PBXes but it's tough to control using just the 12 buttons that are on the phone, becomes an intuitive experience, then you have the richness of the applications to control it.

The other scenario we want to talk about is, hey, a lot of us are traveling, how does this help you in the travel scenario?. So what I'm going to do is call him again on the desktop phone and this time he will be on the road and we will see what actions he can take.

ED SIMNETT: OK, right, so again I can see it's Anoop calling, I have the caller ID there, but I might not perhaps be at my desk so instead I can simply forward the call to a mobile phone. So what the software has done there, as Bill was describing earlier, we have a gateway capability which is sending that call from my regular PBX to my mobile phone; in fact, here it is, it's calling me here right now.

Hey, Anoop.

ANOOP GUPTA: Hi, how are you doing?

ED SIMNETT: So I'm on the phone there.

Now, one thing we did mention also, I'd like to thank our partner Siemens that Bill talked about earlier, where we're using a HiPath 3000 IP PBX today and also the OpenScape HiPath Telephony Control Link to create these Communicator telephony scenarios, so that was an important thing to mention also.

ANOOP GUPTA: Great, thank you, Ed.

So as you can see, we can communicate across the stage, across the office buildings or across the world using this technology, making it similar when an important partner is calling you, your boss is calling you and you could be connected to people anywhere.

So to the final part of the demo, Bill talked about the importance of having all of these communications embedded inside your everyday applications. So while I might have this buddy list of super-important people to me who I'm always interested in watching whether they are around and I frequently communicate with, also all of the 55-plus-thousand employees at Microsoft in some sense are my buddies. So when an e-mail comes in, this is Outlook, I can see full presence. You can see that Ed is there, Dustin Gross is actually busy at a meeting, Gurdeep Singh Pall in London is at a meeting. So every e-mail comes in, I say this thread has been going on for too long back and forth, I can simply call them, I can IM them, resolve the issue now and move on. And we can make it work across partners with the public IM connectivity that we are talking about.

The other scenario we wanted to sort of show you is around SharePoint and team spaces and embedding inside that. So whether you are at a SharePoint team site or a Portal site or whether you're inside a line of business application, you can see the presence of your colleagues.

Now, imagine the legal department, the finance department, those are all very important departments, but those people are not really my buddies. When I need to get to them, I do get to them. And I can go to the portal, find out which of the lawyers are around, who has the right expertise, who do I know and then simply go click and, as you can see, call any of these people right inside that. Or if I'm looking at a document I can see whether the authors of the document are around, I want to interact with them and we can communicate very easily.

So thank you for sort of having this time and looking at the demo with us. Let me reemphasize the three points that we talked about: rich, presence-based communication that drives how we intelligently communicate with each other; making sure that all of the modalities -- text, voice, video, phones, Web conferencing, integrated into a simple, seamless experience for the information workers; and finally, making sure that all of these abilities are not isolated applications but these communications capabilities are embedded in the everyday user applications on which you can launch the intelligent communications.

Thank you very much. Back to Bill. (Applause.)

Microsoft Office Live Meeting

BILL GATES: OK, so there we have the new Live Communication Server release with all the enterprise capabilities and the Office Communicator client that really shows the kind of deep integration we're going to be building there.

The third and final new product release we have today is a new version of Live Meeting. We often refer to it as Live Meeting 2005, but because it's a service, anybody using it as soon as they connect up can get these richer capabilities.

Meetings are special. When you want to communicate with somebody, great, you hook up, you chat, you have the video, you exchange files and things like that, but meetings can be lots of different people connecting together and so that ad hoc aspect or it can be very organized where you want to schedule people, figure out when people are coming to the training session or the product demo session. And the scale of these online meetings can be very, very large.

This is an explosive area. As soon as people see what they can do with this type of digital meeting approach, they immediately see that it's a big boon for cost savings and productivity.

And so we have been investing very heavily in the Live Meeting product. 2005 is a pretty big advance. Everybody will have this as they connect up over the next week it becomes there.

It connects in to the Voice Over IP. Traditionally what you do is you use the IP network for the data piece, the slides and those things, and you have some sort of parallel connection off in a classic phone setup with voice conferencing or just direct dial for the voice piece. Here we make it very easy for them to also connect up over a VoIP type connection. And over time the voice and the data will all travel over the IP network but we want to make sure that we're giving high quality voice choices and so making that actually a very independent thing.

So we typically see lots of meetings that are kind of ad hoc, few-to-few type meetings and then we see these very large meetings, and we have this software interface that relates to those things.

So here I'll just quickly in this case turn it back over to Anoop to give you a sense of why this big release of Live Meeting is something we're very excited about. So come on back, Anoop. (Applause.)

ANOOP GUPTA: Good to see you again. Thank you.

So we've talked about the vision, we've talked about seeing how Live Communication Server and the Communicator come together and from the Communicator you can actually easily launch Live Meeting to get into a meeting and richer collaboration scenario that is there.

What we're going to do now is we have standing by around the world people who are going to help us demonstrate Live Meeting to you. We have Jeff Raikes standing by in Los Angeles. Jeff is the group vice president for the Information Worker division, which includes Office and real time and all of the capabilities we are talking about. We have Dustin Grosse, the general manager for Sales & Marketing, in Chicago; and we have Gurdeep Sing Pall, the corporate vice president for Live Communications, in London; so again a very international cooperation, as you can see, standing in London.

Hey, Dustin, Gurdeep, are you guys there?

DUSTIN GROSSE: We're here in Chicago with a room full of partners in the NBC Towers and customers, over 200 people here in our theater with us. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. (Applause.) And it's exciting to see how many people are here in person, but if you hit F5 on our screen we can also show you we've got over a thousand attendees that are actually joining us in this conference. Many of you may have thought that we were just showing PowerPoint slides with the full-screen views that we've been showing you on our screens, but we've actually been doing PowerPoint through Live Meeting and we've got over a thousand participants that have joined us remotely in this presentation. And you can see we can actually sort through those participants if we want to actually reach any individuals there and these are some of the screen shots of the controls that make that possible.

If you go forward, we can actually also see that we've got Voice Over IP controls now built into Live Meeting 2005. Most of the audio that people are receiving in the audience today is actually being streamed out over the Internet, which is a fabulous new feature, actually broadcast much more effectively.

Additionally, we are actually recording a lot of this information. We've got the ability to actually turn on a record and replay capability within our product, so for folks that weren't able to be here either live or in our studio sessions, we actually have an archived file that they can come back to and with Windows Media Player just watch this entire presentation, all the pieces of it streaming to them.

So these are some great new features and functionality that we've got built into this overall.

So that's a little bit of some of the new features and benefits that are provided. Let's go ahead and get into our scenario today.

As is the case in most businesses, we actually want to do a collaboration scenario, but we don't have everybody in the same location, we've got people distributed among all these various cities and we're going to brainstorm some ideas but it wouldn't really be all that cost effective to actually fly people into a single location.

So instead I've gone ahead, ahead of this meeting, and sent out by way of Outlook and my scheduling calendar, just like I would any kind of conference room, an invitation to the participants to actually join me in a collaboration session.

They received an e-mail that had a link on it, they clicked on that link and that popped them right into our meeting, very simple, a couple clicks to actually join us in this presentation. And that's what these slides are actually showing us overall.

I can also see the presence of people that have joined us. It looks like Jeff Raikes is actually online with us now. Jeff, can you hear us in Los Angeles?

JEFF RAIKES: You bet I can. We're right here in Santa Monica. I bet it's a little bit less windy and a little bit warmer here near the beach in Santa Monica.

DUSTIN GROSSE: You've got that right; it was blowing sideways here today, all the sleet and snow.

OK, well, I understand, Jeff, you've brought some experts.

ANOOP GUPTA: Audio challenges here a little bit.

JEFF RAIKES: Yeah, that's right, Dustin, we've got some experts here. In fact, I'm really pleased to be joined by Mr. Mark Burnett, the creator and executive producer of hit TV shows like "The Apprentice" and "Survivor" and, of course, last night's premier of "Contender".

Mark, great to have you here. Why don't you jump in and say hello to the audience?

MARK BURNETT: Hey, everybody. Glad to be here. I should have used Live Meeting last night to get the blue shirt memo, because it seems that everybody at Microsoft has a blue shirt and no tie; I'm sorry about that. But anyway, good morning from Los Angeles where we are, good afternoon in New York City and good evening out there in my hometown of London.

I'm glad to be here to take part in the launch of Live Meeting 2005. In my business specifically we are geographically split. I have people shooting right now in South America, Central America in Asia and things are changing all the time as we're shooting and we can actually use this technology very, very well to improve our business.

There are a couple of people with us who'd like to test drive today this new technology as we're working in the new "Apprentice". So joining me are a couple of my alumni. We have Kelly in New York City who recently won the last "Apprentice." And I want to reassure you we do not have Omarosa with us. (Laughter.) Yet we do have my favorite cowboy, Troy, who's out there in Chicago. (Applause.)

TROY McCLAIN: Thanks, Mark. Thank you very much.

KELLY PERDEW: Thanks for the invite, Mark. This is pretty powerful technology, quite a compelling value proposition, as you described, where I can be here -- and it's snowing here in New York City, everybody, and still participate with all of you, and I'm excited to be here.

TROY McCLAIN: And you guys, of course, from me, thank you very much. When Microsoft and Mark Burnett and everybody asked me to come here, one of my lines, I said I was happier than a frog on a hot plate, I was ready to pop; I mean, it was great, so thanks for having me here. (Applause.)

JEFF RAIKES: Great, it's great to have you here. And, you know, I think one of the things we ought to do is use the power of online collaboration and in particular the brainstorm tool that you see within the Live Meeting 2005 service and I think this gives us a great opportunity, Mark. What we can do is we can show how people can use these tools as a way to brainstorm and, in fact, let's brainstorm what would be a great new episode for season four of the apprentice.

In fact, why don't you jump in and give a synopsis of the show?

MARK BURNETT: Well, Jeff, that's a very Microsoft kind of thing to say because you know these guys don't want TV, they're on their computers. Even the Microsoft guys don't know what "The Apprentice" is. OK, let me explain it to you, Jeff. Bill, I'm hoping you know what it is.

So "The Apprentice" is a televised 13-week job interview. They typically divide into two teams, this year it's book smarts versus street smarts, so I guess the college degree dictates which team you are on and that would mean, I guess, Bill Gates, I'm sorry to tell you, you're on the street-smarts team because no college degree there and, Jeff, you do get onto the book-smarts team.

Every week we give them a specific business task to perform, they go out there, perform the task, we film it. After 36 hours they re-meet with Donald Trump, who will then analyze with some experts who performed the best business with their task and, of course, at the end the losing team comes in the boardroom and one person, as Troy McClain knows, will hear "You're fired."

TROY McCLAIN: Ouch, the boardroom guys, that hurts.

JEFF RAIKES: Yeah, does it bring back some painful memories?

TROY McCLAIN: It brings back more than painful memories. I tell you what, every time we were in the boardroom, we were sweating like a stuck pig.

JEFF RAIKES: All right, well we've actually got a solid team now of experts assembled in five different cities across the globe and let's put our minds to work actually coming up with some ideas here. You guys ready out there to actually do some brainstorm?

So let's jump right into the task here.

ANOOP GUPTA: I was going to suggest that we've been talking about information work here and how information work is evolving as the business climate and how the businesses function together. I think it would be cool for the two teams to come up with an idea of the next product or service that really enhances information worker productivity. Imagine the teams coming up with something that 10 years later is the next Word or next PowerPoint that they can really create. I think that would be super cool.

KELLY PERDEW: Well, Anoop, this is Kelly, that's a pretty challenging task. I don't know if Bill would like us to do that, but there are a couple ideas that I have. You know, companies are trying to figure out how to leverage the Web for business, every company that I know is trying to do that. I think it would be a good task to have each team design a Web site for an existing business that drives revenue. That's one idea.

Another one would be I really think that charity hits home and would be important for the viewing audience to see and be a good thing for us to work on so maybe having teams collaborate to create a dinner cruise that raises funds for charity, I think that would be a great task, too.

TROY McCLAIN: Kelly, this is Troy over here. That's not a bad idea, but let a street-smart hustler pipe in a little bit.

I think a great task probably -- the charity sounds wonderful, but I'm thinking that maybe we should come up with another task and maybe pit two teams to come up with a work/life balance against something, maybe professional daycare, and we have the teams market the professional daycare and then actually handle the kids. I think that might make some great entertainment as well.

DUSTIN GROSSE: You can see that we're actually using the white board that's in Live Meeting to actually capture these ideas real time, it's coming in in different colors because different people are contributing those ideas and typing them right in. This is a great way to actually use our tool to brainstorm good concepts and ideas here.

So, Mark, did you like any of these ideas?

MARK BURNETT: Yeah, this is very impressive, it's a great way to brainstorm new tasks. Yeah, one thing, I don't really like to repeat over and over the same task on television. And I can't even remember every task we've done at this minute. I believe I can load in here my Excel spreadsheet to analyze the previous tasks we've done and let's cross reference if any of these new ideas were done before.

JEFF RAIKES: Yeah, actually that's right, Mark. One of the things you can do with Live Meeting 2005 is you just drag and drop an Excel table right into the meeting view and here it makes it really easy for everybody that's collaborating to take a look at those old tasks.

DUSTIN GROSSE: Yeah, I remember the doggrooming in the park episode, I remember the airplane advertising campaign.

TROY McCLAIN: The airplane advertising, come on, the men won that episode, "Apprentice 1", we won that.

DUSTIN GROSSE: So actually I don't see any duplicates here. So, Mark, what do you think, are any of the ideas we've come up with actually worthy of the show?

MARK BURNETT: You know, you're putting me on the spot here a little bit. I don't like to reveal what I'm going to do in the future but I do like the sound of a couple of the things here.

DUSTIN GROSSE: You know, one of the things we can do, Mark, is you can use the polling capability to add on what we were doing in the whiteboard meeting. With the polling what you can do is you can go out and you can get immediate customer feedback. Here you can see people are voting, giving you a sense of what things they best respond to.

MARK BURNETT: Well, there's nothing we like more than feedback. In fact, the Internet has provided for television producers like myself much greater feedback than you could ever get before. There's nothing you can get like instant feedback from viewers.

DUSTIN GROSSE: Well, it looks like Troy's daycare concept is coming out ahead; pretty nice, as usual. (Applause.)

TROY McCLAIN: C'mon guys, that's what I'm talking about, c'mon.

DUSTIN GROSSE: And it is really great to get this dynamic feedback so this is fabulous.

All right, Jeff?

JEFF RAIKES: Go ahead, Mark, you were going to say something.

MARK BURNETT: No, I was going to say I actually love this instant feedback; this is a great way for me to run a meeting as we brainstorm and, in fact, involving NBC, even executives. It will really save a lot of time to get the feedback.

And I have to say, Troy, that was a good idea of the daycare because you can't beat animals and children in films and television for ratings.

TROY McCLAIN: Thank you, Mark. Thank you very much, Mark.

MARK BURNETT: You know, one thing I want to say though, I don't really want to give away ideas and what actually I'm going to do before it's on air, but I will let you know actually some real big news that we are going to be working with Microsoft in season four with the Microsoft Office Real Time Communication theme to put together a task in season four with Microsoft.

JEFF RAIKES: Wow, Mark, that's great news. I'm going to be looking forward to how we can use the real-time communications capabilities working with your team and see what kind of compelling business ideas the teams can come up with; that's going to be a lot of fun.

MARK BURNETT: Thank you.

DUSTIN GROSSE: Great. Well, guys, we actually have to wrap things up in this section of our demonstration. I want to thank Mark and Troy and Kelly for joining us. We really appreciate all the work you guys are doing. (Applause.) You're making heroes out of information workers.

I want to thank also all of our Microsoft colleagues for joining us and, of course, all the partners and customers that are here at the event.

And speaking of some of our colleagues from Microsoft, why don't I hand things back at this point to Anoop in San Francisco. Anoop, are you there?

ANOOP GUPTA: Yep, I'm here. Thank you very much. I hope you found the value that this technology can bring to people and I also want to thank all of our live audience, the virtual audience that participated. Thank you and back to Bill now. (Applause.)

Budget, Productivity Benefits

BILL GATES: Well, that was fun and to learn about the hot TV shows; great stuff.

Well, we've got here three new products that are a part of this real-time roadmap and the capabilities are just going to keep getting richer and richer, the voice being used as part of what we connect to with the PC, video being part of what we use as we connect up through the PC, digital scheduling, richer collaboration tools; all of these are defining a whole new level of productivity. So we're very interested in this communication scenario; you could say it's one of the big frontiers that Office is moving ahead on.

We have lots of customers we're working with on this and I thought I'd take two examples. These are, of course, outside customers who are using both Live Meeting and Live Communication Server. And the experience they're getting is very similar to what we've had inside Microsoft. Microsoft, of course, is a large-scale customer of these things; we're saving over $40 million in travel costs this year just by having these tools.

Even harder to measure is the productivity benefit we get, but I think it's important to see this, it works for organizations of all sizes. In fact, smaller-sized organizations have even more cases where they need to go out and communicate with partners, so somebody like FairIsaac is increasing revenue and saving travel expenses, so a pretty dramatic impact of the digital approach. Unisys, another great example there, a global company, they need the scalability and the security and yet they're able to get those things and get the productivity bottom's up benefits as well.

Now, all of this is done in the context of the investment we're making in Office. We invest billions a year on the Office platform. We're coming up on a very big installed base of the version we have out, Office 2003, and we're hard at work on the next version where we've gotten a lot of feedback.

A big theme here will be taking the real-time capabilities and building them into Office in an even deeper way. So many of the pieces fitting together, our development tools in our platform for the application vendors to use things like presence, our Exchange and SharePoint Server platform and then Office on the client itself giving people many scenarios where they can take exactly the tool that fits with what they want to do and yet find it familiar, navigate over to that application and use that in a very rich way.

Of course, we're built on top of the Windows Server System and there are lots of improvements taking place in the trustworthy elements, the automatic-updating capabilities, the ease of management and the richness of that as a development platform as well.

If you then take that and encompass that in, then you get pretty much most of our entire R&D investment, which has been growing quite dramatically because of the opportunities we see in these things.

So we think about collaboration in a very broad way, all the way from OneNote, somebody sitting with their Tablet using OneNote, somebody sitting and using Outlook to organize their communication, all the way up to how should training get done on a large-scale basis, how should products be presented, how should you know what customers are interested in.

The advances in business intelligence and workflow really just reinforce this idea of the digital approach and so real time communication has got to be there as a centerpiece.

We chose to invest heavily in real-time communications about three or four years ago, and you can see now the rapid progress we're making and there's even more to come in this space.

So thanks for coming and seeing this big milestone for us and we look forward to working with you to see how you can take this software and put it to use for your applications.

Thank you. (Applause.)