Gates’ Vision Shared With Netcue Web Developers (page 1 of 2) Gates Photographs © 1998 Netcue Internet Services. All Rights Reserved.

Netcue Internet Services staff members had an uncommon opportunity to meet Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates at a professional developers conference held in Saint Louis, Missouri. As keynote speaker at the conference, Gates shared his vision for the future with developers from Netcue and other participating companies. What follows are exerpts from comments made by Gates at a Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October 1998.

MR. GATES: Welcome to PDC. It's great to have you all here, and to talk about what lies ahead. I thought it was super to have Todd kick things off, it really set a professional tone for the whole conference. (Laughter.)

Microsoft Chairman/CEO Bill Gates shared his vision for the future with Netcue Web Developers at a conference in Saint Louis.

MR. GATES: I'll try to continue in that vein. I'm calling my remarks today, "Building Windows-based Applications for the Internet Age," because I think for all of us that's something where we're going to see incredible demand, really even beyond what the industry has seen so far.

The PC industry is continuing to grow at a very, very rapid pace. The fundamental structure, where you have lots of companies specializing on their pieces, and you have standards that allow these to come together and create customer solutions, that has been the successful business model. And there's no going back. Users have a choice of hardware that's independent of their choice of software. They've got a high-volume world that allows far more applications to be developed, far more peripherals, better chips than any previous structure in the computer industry.

In fact, if we just look in the last two years, the shift toward the PC part of this industry has been very, very dramatic. The key proponents of the PC approach, people like Compaq and Dell, have been growing fantastically. Compaq has picked up the expertise from Digital and Tandem and brought that into their total focus. We have lots of players, people like NCR, or Unisys, or Siemens, or the Japanese companies, that historically were far more focused on mainframe or UNIX activities, who are now making the PC the centerpiece of what they're doing. Even HP has made a dramatic shift to focus on PC activities.

And so, not only are we the fast grower, the high-volume, low-price part of the industry, we are by far the part of the industry that's doing the most R&D, over double what's going on in the rest of the business.

We can look at this on the hardware dimension or the software dimension, and see fantastic progress. Of course, Moore’s Law continues at its really unbelievable pace, giving us faster individual processors. But that's not our only performance win. We're also taking now more of those processors and putting them together. We're moving away from buses for sharing memory to point-to-point connections to switches, and this will allow us to get up not only to 16 and 32 processors, but with our uniform memory architecture will allow us to get up even to 64 and 128.

Next, we take those systems, and next year will be a big advance in this with NT 5, and we cluster them together. Not only for incredible scalability, but for reliability as well. In addition, of course, we're making the investments now to move up to the 64-bit world. And it's interesting to contrast how the PC industry addressed the 32-bit world versus the 64-bit world.

In the 32-bit world, of course, UNIX was there first. It had been there for five or six years. And we came in very late. Even coming in late, we took over the vast majority of all 32-bit clients and servers. Well, at 64 bits, there is no gap. In fact, we've had a 64-bit file system for a long, long time that UNIX doesn't have today. And as these 64-bit processors are coming out, we'll be there on day one. Actually with a simpler migration path for applications than in any other environment.

So, along with software dimension, the improvements in scalability, the focus on the very high reliability, the focus on distributed computing, those complement the hardware improvements and explain why we've seen such incredible growth.

I think it's very, very exciting how companies are seeing their information infrastructure as a key thing for their future.

Now, there's a couple of new opportunities being created that will affect how we design our applications. And that's certainly equally affecting the design work we do in Windows itself. That's the reliable, pervasive, always connected communications, very high bandwidth, and the traditional form factors, tablet-type devices, or TV-type devices. Microsoft has gotten very involved in these with Windows CE, with Web TV, and a lot of design work we're doing now around electronic books, and the PC that will be something you carry with you, even taking them to a meeting like this, and being able to take notes and review things very, very easily.

So, these new technologies are going to open up the information age. They're going to make it so that people's expectations on software are dramatically higher than they are today. In fact, when I sit down with businesspeople, they're constantly now talking about how their web sites, their sharing of information internally, the way they structure around these tools is going to make the difference in how competitive they are in the future. I think it's very, very exciting how companies are seeing their information infrastructure as a key thing for their future. And I think it's software in the same way it appeared to be the key element at the founding of this business 25 years ago. I think, once again, software will emerge as the most important element. And that's why all of us here have so many opportunities.

There's a certain irony in this, that at the same time we have 20,000 new software companies being created over the last five years, that at the same time we have this innovation where our industry is directly generating 25 percent of the country's economic growth, we have an activity of increased government involvement in this industry. And I will just touch on this very briefly, and get on to more interesting things.

I think it's fascinating that somebody could say there's a lack of innovation. There is no lack of innovation. There is no lack of investment. There is no lack of competition. Today, at this time of economic uncertainty, it certainly would be unfortunate if government involvement with companies like Microsoft, Intel, Autodesk, and Cisco were to stall the remarkable explosion of these new jobs, the steam of the economic engine.

For all of you who work at the engineering level, imagine the government coming in and saying that we shouldn't put HTML support into our operating system. We'd be doing a disservice to people if we didn't build HTML into the operating system. If we didn't use that as an opportunity to unify the way we present the shell, the way that we do forms, the way that we do help. Also imagine us not being able to go and talk to partners about technical activities.

For example, we went down to Apple to talk about taking Quicktime, and taking the work that we had done in our media player, and putting those together in something that we thought would be better for Apple, better for us and better for customers. Certainly there was some great work on both sides to be brought together. That kind of discussion makes sense, and the fact that Apple chose not to do that is fine. But, to find the government twisting that into a kind of discussion that should never take place, that's very scary to me.

So we are an industry that is doing a great job for the world, and in particular for this country. So I really want to thank all of you for your constant focus on new products and innovation. It's coming together like we do at this developers conference, to talk about these new horizons and then going back and making the investments, that have gotten the industry to this stage.

Well, the last year for Windows has been a year of great progress. Windows 98 is out, actually outselling Windows 95. Now it's over 2-1/2 million units sold. NT Workstation is gaining in the mix -- over 20 percent of business PCs are now coming with Windows NT Workstation. The browser, we've seen good usage gains there, with Internet Explorer now at a very respectable level, even here in the U.S., which is where we've always had the biggest challenge in growing that position. And finally, and probably most important, is the success we've had at the server level. Our shipments now exceed all UNIX, all the different flavors brought together, and NetWare, which is actually bigger than all of those brought together. And so now the vast majority of intranets, over 70 percent, are based around Windows NT.

I'd say if there's one thing that we really need to prioritize, and this became our top initiative just about a year and a half ago, it is simplicity. If there's anything that stands in the way of people getting at the incredible power that all these new devices have, it's the vast number of commands and the vast layers that people are exposed to in the software. And certainly Microsoft is the one that has the most work to do here. When I go back and look at things like our different error messages, this is the now famous DHCP error message, you know, this is not simple.

The DHCP client could not obtain an IP address. What a wonderful thing. Then you get to know, if you want to see these messages in the future, choose yes, otherwise choose no. Well, you really get a sense you're working together with the operating system. It's helping you know what yes and no mean there, but you have no clue what might have gone wrong.

And scenario by scenario, we really need to make the system vastly more transparent, vastly more helpful, even in the case where things go wrong. In the same way that for several years we had incorporating Internet standards as a top priority, now we've given simplicity that same position. And so everything we look at, in terms of designing the new products, comes down to getting the people from product support in, getting the people who thought through the scenarios in, and seeing what progress we make.

This is one of the toughest challenges we've ever taken on. But, it's one that I think is very, very exciting. We've got a little video we put together that kind of highlights what in the home environment people are facing with all these devices. So let's go ahead and take a look at that. (Video shown.)

MR. GATES: So there's a lot of work to be done there, and that's why it makes sense to have this as a key focus. The products that were designed with this focus in mind will be shipping in the next year. We’ve got SQL 7 coming out with things like auto-administration, we've got Office 2000 coming out early next year with a lot of major simplicity improvements there. But, of course, the most important product is the one that's the focus of the PDC, and that is Windows NT 5.

We've really looked at what's great about the web, what's been great about Windows applications, and said can we bring together the best of both worlds, whether it's the single click deployment, the client richness, where you have very fast applications that let you do a lot, taking advantage of the local intelligence, and of course disconnected use. And before NT 5 it was really a dilemma to know which world to live in. There were some combinations taking place, but you just couldn't have the best of both. And so that's really a centerpiece of what we've done with NT 5.

You'll really be hearing, again and again, two key themes in this conference. How we're taking NT 5 and reducing application deployment management costs, and how we're making it easier to build these distributed NT end tier applications. That's where we see the biggest opportunities, and that's where NT 5 really comes into play.

In deployment management, of course, active directory is very key. It allows you to use the directory for your application information. The installer capabilities are also very key, because they now let you do the self healing, and just in time installation. I'd also say intellimirror, that mirrors state back and forth between the client and server is key, because that means that for the first time you can have all the benefits of things being central, the common administration, constantly backed up, available from any device, but still have the benefits of local execution, the low latency and the portability, and not getting into a time sharing mode, where you're overloading the server infrastructure.

Everything here requires you as developers to take advantage of these features. And so we hope to make it very clear how we've made that reasonably straightforward. In fact, we'd like to show you an example of how File Net and SAP are doing that, and so I'll ask Todd Nielsen to come back out and give us a look. (Todd Nielsen makes presentation.)

Gates' Vision continued on page 2 >>>

Gates Photographs © 1998 Netcue Internet Services. All Rights Reserved.