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Bill Gates's Keynote Speech at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference Beijing, 11 December 1997
Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here. Today is a major milestone for Microsoft as our
first Professional Developers Conference here in China. The key partnerships we build with software developers around the world are only to the success of Windows but also to realize the possibility that PC technology provides. It's through applications of every variety that businesses will be using the personal computer as the tool of the Information Age.
It's rather amazing how fast this innovation is moving. Even to keep the like of myself who are deeply involved in the industry to go and see the improvement and every element that are taking place on a yearly basis is quite fantastic. Of course one of the driving factors of this business is the exponential increase in processor performance. There is no doubt that the magic of chip capability has delivered through the advance in microprocessor allows us to think of application which never would have been possible before.
The PC industry is one of the few industries that can deliver lower price equipment at the same time as improving the capabilities. The storage systems are now delivering Gigabyte of storage as the standard capability. Over 8 million of PCs are being sold a year. And the server market, the higher performance machines that these PCs networked with, are the fastest growing part of this business. The performance of those servers is increasing not only because the individual processors are faster, but also because we are using multiple-processor machines, so called SMP designs and clustering nodes together.
We are also improving the high end software on the server level. So a year ago, the fastest transaction benchmarks are using PC technology, that is about 6,000 transactions a minute. Today that is more than double to over 14,000 transactions a minute. And I can say with great confidence that next year we'll more than double that again.
It's fair to say that even the most demanding applications now can be handled with PC technology. At the same time as we have this power, we also need to improve the simplicity of the machines and to make interface easier to work with. I will talk today at the end of my presentation about some of the research that we are doing, in areas like handwriting, vision and linguistics. These will make the machines far more natural than they are today. These tools of the Information Age are for everyone, not just people with particular expertise in computer technology.
Microsoft has a vision for where the PCs are going. That vision says that PCs will be a central element of how companies share information. The name of that vision is the so called Digital Nervous System(DNA), allowing companies to reduce paper work and make better decisions. The DNA means that not only the PCs are connected together, not only you have standard elements like electronic mail and also if you really think carefully about what information is important - all the processes like order taking, sales planning, personnel management, project management - all of those have been set up to take full advantage of the capability of the computer.
By empowering every one in the company to have the information they need and allowing them to focus on what really counts, not only will customer service improve, but the ability to collaborate with partners around the world will be very straight forward. It's fair to say that the key platform for DNA is the combination of the Internet with the PC. The benefit of this kind of system is even clearer when you are dealing with surprises.
In this economy when there is all kinds of surprises whether it's new regulations or customers who want a product in a different way or something that the competitors are doing. These systems are particularly good at allowing one company to do better than other companies in dealing with these unplanned events. So truly saying that modern companies will not only have the technology but use it in a very deep fashion for competitive advantage.
The building blocks that allow companies to have the world's best DNA are very simple. In fact, most companies are investing in these things today. The up-to-date computers, the productivity tools, the email which I think will become very standard. Today's business card is not that common to have email address. I think in five to ten years here in China, most business people will have an electronic mail address. It won't just be simple messages that would be exchanged but all the things that would have done in paper forms today where you have to fill out information. Those will shift over into the electronic form.
Since every business has particular means, a lot of business applications are important to fill out the picture. These are not applications that Microsoft will be building. We and other companies build the vertical applications. On a global basis, that includes companies like SAP, Bond or Peoplesoft. I think there are important opportunities for lots of companies in this new area. In fact, one of our big priorities in China is to help companies build these new business applications. In some cases these are applications that in the past would have been built on Unix, that are now moving into Windows NT. In other cases, these are new applications that are to be build in the very beginning to take advantage of NT and its rich server capability.
I've mentioning that the Internet many times. Of course the Internet takes on many forms. The share of information using Internet inside an organization which is often refereed to as Intranet. There's the use of the Internet to allow different companies to work together and that eliminates distance as a problem. Companies no matter where they are located can do that. The Internet will really help promote global trade, not just trade in manufacturing goods, but also trade in services. A Company has engineering skills that it wants to make it available. It can find somebody who's interested in those skills across the Internet because the will be directories of customers and suppliers. Once they have been matched, the actual delivery of that service can use the Internet. Using of video and audio type of capability are becoming standard features built into the personal computers.
So DNA is a big vision - one that won't be realized overnight, but one that will be the direction of the industry that modern companies will go. People sometimes ask how far along has the personal computer come. Are we reaching the peak, now that we have over 18 million machines a year? The answer is that we are just in the very beginning. The machines in terms of their complexity and limitations are not fully penetrating the home and business market. But with this innovation I have no doubt that will change.
