Thursday, January 24, 2008
Seven Things We'd Like to See in Windows 7...
According to some reports, Microsoft might be prepping to drop the next Windows operating system, currently called Windows 7 by the press, sometime in 2009. I don't know if that's true, because Internet rumors aren't known for being reliable, but if it is indeed the case, now is the time for Microsoft to start making a serious list of necessary features. And lack thereof.
I have a ton of suggestions for Windows 7. The love-it-or-hate-it Windows Vista has left a great deal of users wishing it would just go away. I, personally, don't mind it, except for the fact that it almost takes a Cray supercomputer to run it smoothly. No operating system should have a kernel that so demanding that it requires upgrading a year-old computer to make it ready for the new OS.
Now, I don't give a crap about the gripes the European Union has against Microsoft. I want conveniences included with my OS, such as a decent browser, a very fast file system search capability, and other such goodies. Doesn't Mac OS X include a browser? Don't most Linux distros include catalogs of open source software? Why can't Microsoft include features without being harassed by people who obviously have nothing better to do? If I don't like the crapware that comes with an operating system, I can usually uninstall or disable it and load something else.
1. Fewer editions. By releasing Windows Vista in something like 49 different editions, Microsoft managed to confuse consumers who might have otherwise upgraded. You wouldn't believe the amount of email I got during Vista's first few months of release asking, "Which edition should I get?" Microsoft should create exactly two editions of Windows 7.
A full edition (call it Ultimate if you must) with every feature and every bit of inevitable bloatware that Microsoft wants to cram into it.
A stripped, performance edition. An edition for gamers. It should focus on being incredibly streamlined from its very installation, loading as little background garbage as possible, suspending virtually every service that a performance junkie can live without, and including a DirectX version that actually delivers on prerelease promises.
2. Better pricing. No one wants to pay $300 or more for an operating system. I'd rather deal with the trials and tribulations of Linux than pay to upgrade to a bloated OS, and that says a lot because I'm a hardcore gamer. That practically requires me to run Windows, as few games come out natively for Linux and the wrappers sap performance. The "ultimate" version shouldn't cost more than $150, and the streamlined "gamer's" edition should cost around $100.
3. More comprehensive installation options. I know Microsoft was trying to make Vista easier to install by asking fewer questions, but I think during the installation it should quiz you on how you plan to use your encounter and configure its services and features to your preferences. The scattershot approach of Vista, trying to be a jack of all trades, ends up forcing performance junkies to tweak the hell out of it before they're satisfied.
4. Less intrusive User Account Control. Does Windows have to ask me if I really want to do virtually anything I try to do? I ended up turning UAC off completely to purge my system of those pop-ups that verify my every action. I know UAC is there for security and to help prevent unauthorized programs from running, but most users I know develop the reflexive, Pavlovian habit to click OK on the UAC warning that they don't even bother to read the dialog box. Maybe UAC could incorporate some learning technology, so that it eventually stops asking about stuff you do all the time, and only halts the system when something unusual happens.
5. Easier optimization. The developers should take everything that eventually ends up in TweakUI for Windows 7 and incorporate it into Control Panel, thus avoiding an extra download and letting you tweak the interface as you see fit. Make it easier to get rid of unwanted yet included extras like those abysmal Windows games and cursory programs (I'm looking at you, Sound Recorder) that do little besides take up hard drive space.
6. Ultimate Extras. For heaven's sake, Microsoft, if you advertise for months in advance that people who buy the "ultimate" edition will receive extra stuff, make it happen! Personally, I don't need BitLocker or Texas Hold 'Em or whatever the sorry selection of Ultimate Extras includes. Animated wallpaper? No thanks. Let's get some of those promised, awe-inspiring goodies available now, and when Windows 7 comes out, make bonus releases a regular occurrence. Otherwise, don't advertise them at all.
7. And finally, throw away the kernel and make a new one. Make a kernel that can run on machines that don't require multicore processors, 128 gigabytes of memory, and a one hundred billion transistor GPU to run the OS smoothly. Remember, the operating system is there to allow you to use your computer; not to slow it down to a crawl. I have high hopes for Windows 7. I'd like to see a streamlined, lean and mean code base that doesn't crash and that puts Windows Vista to shame. Hopes are one thing, though; reality might be very different.
I hope not.
posted by Share@U @ 1:43 PM   0 comments
The VIA Isaiah Architecture....
VIA Technologies Inc. started shipping its current family of x86 processors in early 2000. Seven major versions—culminating in the VIA C7 processor—have shipped through the end of 2007. While compatible with the x86 instruction-set architecture, the internal architecture of these processors is very different from other x86 processor designs. This unique internal architecture yields processors that are significantly smaller (lower cost) and use significantly less power than other x86 processors from AMD™ and Intel®. While the current VIA C7 processors are a perfect fit for many users and applications, a new architecture was needed to keep pace with the rapid introduction of new functions and improved performance from Intel. Accordingly, over the last four years, VIA made a major investment in its U.S.-based processor design subsidiary—Centaur Technology Inc.—to develop a completely new x86 processor architecture. The result is a new architecture, codenamed the VIA Isaiah Architecture, that complements current VIA products by offering significantly more function and performance within the same low-power envelope. The initial products implementing the new VIA Isaiah Architecture will start shipping in the spring of 2008. These processors are built in 65nm technology and provide two to four times the performance of current VIA processors (at the same GHz) without a commensurate increase in cost and with little—if any—increase in power consumption. This article summarizes the new VIA Isaiah Architecture with emphasis on the major underlying concepts and some of the unique features.
posted by Share@U @ 1:37 PM   0 comments
Bill Gates- Harvard Commencement '07 - A Must Read
Remarks of Bill Gates Harvard Commencement
President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:
I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree."
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I'll be changing my job next year ? and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson has called me "Harvard's most successful dropout." I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class ? I did the best of everyone who failed.
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn't even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House.
There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn't worry about getting up in the morning. That's how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn't guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world's first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come see us in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn't written the software yet.
From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege ?
and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back ? I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world ? the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries ? but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity ? reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world's inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you've had a chance to think about how ? in this age of accelerating technology ? we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause ? and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year ? none of them in the United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren't being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can't be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism ? if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended.
It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end ? because people just ? don't ? care." I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing ? not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: "Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We're determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent."
The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
We don't read much about these deaths. The media covers what's new ? and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it's easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it's difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It's hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don't know how to help.
And so we look away.
If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks "How can I help?," then we can get action ? and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares ? and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have ? whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand ? and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working ? and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century ? which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
The final step ? after seeing the problem and finding an approach ? is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work ? so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life ? then multiply that by millions. ? Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on ? ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software ? but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that ? is a complex question.
Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new ? they can help us make the most of our caring ? and that's why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age ? biotechnology, the computer, the Internet ? give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: "I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation."
Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem ? and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don't. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don't have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.
Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?
Let me make a request of the deans and the professors ? the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:
Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world's worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty ? the prevalence of world hunger ? the scarcity of clean water ?the girls kept out of school ? the children who die from diseases we can cure?
Should the world's most privileged people learn about the lives of the world's least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions ? you will answer with your policies.
My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here ? never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected."
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given ? in talent, privilege, and opportunity ? there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue ? a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do that to make an impact.
For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort.
You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities ? on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.
posted by Share@U @ 11:22 AM   0 comments
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Microsoft's Bill Gates outlines his future vision for business applications
Microsoft's Bill Gates outlines his future vision for business applications At the Microsoft Business Solutions Convergence 2005 in San Diego, California yesterday (March 9, 2005), Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates made a keynote speech outlining his vision for the future of business applications
This is the full transcript of his speech.
"Well, thank you. It's very exciting to be here at Convergence and talk about business applications. In many ways, all the Microsoft R&D goes towards having that final application that allows a business to do a better job. Recently, I got a reminder that I should always use digital technology wherever I go. I was at the World Economic Forum and I'd gone to a press conference and not taken my Tablet PC. And so I just grabbed a piece of paper and doodled some notes, and this is actually exactly what I put down.
Consequently, I left those notes behind and the press captured them and mistakenly thought that Tony Blair, the prime minister of the UK, who sat next to me, that these were his notes. And so the British tabloids had a heyday with this because handwriting experts determined that only a weak leader would write things like this. (Laughter.) And clearly, he was confused about the press conference or something strange was going on.
Eventually we did get that straightened out, and now I can actually show you a little magnification of some of the key pieces here: Record '24.' (Laughter.) That could not have been Tony. Why does Bono wear sunglasses? (Laughter.) And finally -- oh. (Laughter, applause.) Oh, here we go, yeah. (Laughter, applause.)
So that's how we determined it wasn't the prime minister, it must have been me. (Laughter.) So next time I'll have my Tablet and won't have that problem at all.
We're in a very exciting period in terms of the advance in information technology. The Moore's Law exponential improvement continues to really change the framework that all software is developed in. We see this in many areas. We see the processor moving up to 64-bit, and 64-bit servers will be very, very inexpensive. In fact, they'll carry no premium over the 32-bit servers, but in terms of being able to have huge memory size, wonderful performance out of that, they'll just be a lot, lot better.
The speed of the network we're connecting up to, whether it's the backbone or inside the business, is going up massively and now many businesses are putting in Wi-Fi networks so you can be connected up even as you carry a portable or a Tablet machine around.
The disk capacity, letting us now think about things like video storage and data mining, click mining things that wouldn't have been feasible -- or at least cost-wise, practical -- in the past, are all now becoming very, very reasonable.
And so the hardware industry is delivering us these capabilities, big screens with great graphics capabilities, smaller portable devices. The premium cost for Tablet over a portable PC will come down from about US$150 to about, oh, say $60 over the next years; mobile phones with more capability, GPS location, Internet browsing, the ability to connect up to applications, the ability to notify you of things.
So it's in that framework that we say the opportunity for software is greater than it's ever been, whether it's for work activity, which we call the digital work style that is emerging, or whether it's at home, which we call the digital lifestyle. All of these things set us up so that software is really the only limiting factor in terms of the ease of use, the security, the willingness to dive in and take advantage of that.
Now, we see when it comes to new software things are moving fairly rapidly, a little bit differently in the consumer space than in the business space. In the consumer space, it's not as many issues about compatibility and aligning all those upgrades together, and so typically consumer type software is being updated on yearly or even sometimes a six-month basis, things like Instant Messaging and cloud-based capabilities. In the business space, it's more a stair-step where you'll get, say, a new version of Office and use that for two or three years and then get a major step up as opposed to that continual upgrade.
Now, making it so that these compatibility issues, the difficulty of getting things installed, making that very, very straightforward is important so that in the business space as well, those improvements are flowing through.
For applications, this has always raised the tough issue of, 'Can the customizations that are done by a firm be done in such a way that when you get upgrades to those applications they don't have to be reintegrated in?' The way the user interface, the data model, the logic comes together is orthogonal in a way that lets you get the best of both worlds there. A lot of innovation is taking place in that to make sure that we can finally get that so you don't have this big version tail, that we make it easy for you to always have the latest and greatest. And, of course, for us that's good because the pieces work together that much better and we get feedback on exactly the things that are out there. It's a very competitive space, but also a space with lots of opportunity.
We have many ways to measure the innovation that goes on. One that I've talked about in the past is the size of the R&D budget. It's now the biggest R&D budget of any company in the world. I was never sure if that was the right metric to use, so here I've got one that's just another slice of it, which is looking at the number of patents. It's an imperfect measure, but you can just see the general slope there that shows in the fiscal year we're in that ends the middle of this calendar year we'll apply for over 3,000 patents. That's up a factor of ten over about a six-year period, so a pretty steep climb there. And that's across so many different areas: the business applications, platform security, voice recognition, ink recognition, computers that can look at things and find patterns in a much richer way, data mining type things. And so software platforms are getting much more effective.
Now, all of that R&D typically goes into products that are available at exactly the same type of pricing they had before, and so the leverage for us is more volume but just a better and better software value because of the billions that go into those new capabilities.
People in some senses have more awareness of the changes in digital lifestyle -- photos, music, scheduling, Instant Messaging, communications -- than they do over in the work domain. And that's unfortunate because in terms of improving the economy, making things far more productive in terms of untapped opportunity, the work space is actually as rich an area as the home space.
If we think today about how people navigate to the information they care about, how they get notified whether something has changed, how they share information and collaborate, which has been e-mail for so long. SharePoint is now coming in and starting to change that, all the different mail addresses and modalities that they have to work across in communications -- the phone, the mobile phone, the mail -- trying to see things organized in the way that they'd be interested in, in either a work or home context, that's been very tough. We haven't been able to model things out. We hadn't had great business intelligence; meetings, you can't have digital participants at a distance in the way that we think that you ought to be able to do that.
And so, every business activity can be made better by advanced software and we talk about that as a new world of work. Of course, one of the main vehicles we have for delivering that is constantly improving Office, but then getting applications to connect up, and I'll talk about a lot of very specific things in terms of our applications where we're going to connect up in new ways.
posted by Share@U @ 6:39 PM   0 comments
BILL GATES: That connectivity is very powerful. (Laughter.)
Well, Doug talked about five different themes that are really the themes that we use when we look at the R&D plans but that's not just true of our Business Solutions, it's true for the entire software development budget, all of our R&D. And so it's really my role to make sure that we are delivering on each of these five areas, so I thought I'd step through them, talk about what that means for the different products, including the types of the applications and as I go through these I actually have three demos that will illustrate some of the great stuff, all of it coming out really in the next year with either the existing platform, or the improvements that come out and the newer versions of the applications that you've heard that we're coming up with.
Over the last few months as we've really plotted out this roadmap and I've seen the demos of these applications. It's amazing to me the progress we're making, really changing how you navigate the data, understanding about roles, letting people connect up in new ways. We're taking the application to a new level of flexibility and it's really driven by these five things.
Empowered Users
I'll start with empowerment. Empowerment has really been a theme of Microsoft almost forever -- the idea of the PC itself as changing the computer from something that's just there, just at the center to something that's sitting on the desktop and available to everyone. And so the nature of the software, the nature of how you think of your relationship to the device, it is very, very different.
One of the challenges that has emerged is that in business applications, you have very structured data, very controlled data, appropriately so, and then there's this whole other world of e-mail and documents. And the two do need to relate to each other, because after all, if you have, say, a customer that you're negotiating with or a problem with that customer you want the structured business data and track that. But then you also need to be communicating with that customer, drawing in your colleagues, thinking about different alternatives and that needs to be done in a way that you can link back and forth between these two worlds.
In fact, most of the exciting innovation taking place today is in this boundary -- collaboration is in that boundary, workflow is in that boundary, business intelligence is in that boundary -- and so it's really fascinating how we as a company with Office and with the business applications will extend both Office and the applications and make those two things come together. We'll publish the extensions so other applications can connect up to that, but we can pioneer those areas and really lead the way by the way that we do that connection, and so that's very, very important for us.
A great example of how this goes on is how we're thinking about the user interface across all of the different applications, and so here to show you an example of that is Matt, who's a little shy. I hope he'll be willing to come up and show us this at work.
MATT GUSTAV: Thanks, Bill.
You heard Bill mention the importance of understanding exactly how work gets done in an Office in a business and that really comes down to a personal level and understanding what people do in their roles within an organization. You heard Bill mention the importance of us understanding those roles and how that's going to manifest itself in some of the software.
So let's take a look right now at what you're going to see in Great Plains 8.5. We've touched very briefly on role pages for 8.5 throughout Convergence; we want to take a little deeper dive into it today and show you what that's going to look like as it spread across not just the Great Plains product, but you're going to see this common theme across all of the Microsoft Business Solutions areas of expertise.
And you can see as we look in here we've got Susan, her homepage. She's in our world. Susan is our sales order processing clerk, and as we've mentioned before, Susan wants to see things that are important to her as a sales order processing clerk. These are things that she does on a day-to-day basis and we've talked to hundreds of clerks and we know that things like these types of reports are important to her, and that she wants to have her Outlook front and center.
But its' also important that we understand other personas as well, and let's go in and take a look at another common persona. We'll go in and take a look at Phyllis. Do we have any Phyllises out there? OK, do we have any accounting managers out there? There you go. Well, guess what? In our world, Phyllis is our accounting manager and so what you're going to see here is how this homepage has now changed a little bit and morphed into what we expect Phyllis would want to see in her day-to-day basis, and you can see things that are important to Phyllis might be, let's say, the receivables. And some of the reports that are in there, for a trial balance perspective, one click away as opposed to several clicks away, empowering users to get at that data sooner and easier than ever before.
And Phyllis might actually want to see some metrics and track some different things on her homepage as opposed to trying to dig through them in some other fashion. Again, we've talked to hundreds of Phyllises, and again Phyllis and Susan share one thing in common -- they like to have that Outlook front and center. So there, we want to make sure that's available to her as well. And along with the quick links to exactly see receivable summaries, something Phyllis wants to see on a day-to-day basis, it's right there, easy to get at.
One of the more powerful features of the role pages has been pointing to things that Phyllis needs to do or reminders of things in her day that she might want to know about without having to go and dig through the system to get. Here are some tasks that the system has auto-generated for her. Here are some to-dos, let's say she wants to go and take care of these past customer transactions; she's one click away from having that right at her fingertips.
Now, none of this is all that wonderful if Phyllis wants to customize it and she can't. So we're going to build in customization obviously throughout this entire product where she can go in and select which metrics are important to her. She can go in and select if she wants the to-dos to show up, what level of detail she wants to see as well.
Let's say she wants to go in and create a new reminder, something that's important to her. She can go in and make a new reminder -- let's say base it on a smart list favorite, for instance, another concept that most customers are familiar with -- go in and say whenever I see let's say a customer on hold or over credit limit, whenever I have more than one of them, put that on my reminders window so I can go out and take a look at it. Again, we're taking that concept of roles based navigation and driving it forward into the first screen you see when you come into Great Plains to help empower users.
You also heard Bill talk a little bit about bridging the gap between structured and unstructured data. We're going to take a look at this now as we hop over here to our Business Portal running again on SharePoint. Take a look what's going to be coming in one of the future versions of Business Portal and that's this concept of searching across the entire domain to get my data.
If we go in here, this is the page that if you're running Business Portal you'll be familiar with, just the customer page where I can see all my customers. Here's where the power really comes in. I'm going to go in and search for a customer that I happen to know is Northern Family Hospital. So I'll just search for North, and you can see here that I've got all of the unstructured data in my SharePoint that has to do with that customer, whether it's a presentation that we gave to them or a proposal or a couple e-mail threads that have been going on; I've got all of that data unstructured right now.
Those of you that are using Business Portal today and SharePoint today can already recognize that it does a great job of doing that and those of you that aren't using Business Portal and SharePoint, shame on you. You should be; it's wonderful technology.
But the big addition that's going to be made in the future and unlocked by the Web Services technology that you've heard us talking about all week is over here on the right hand side where you can go in and see that we've pulled up data from the back office, from the ERP system. We've crawled through that to find out how many customers have a North in there. Well, we've got here's our Northern Family Hospital, here's the transactions that are associated with all those customers.
If we dig down a little bit deeper into that data you can see that, yes, there's the information and wouldn't it be nice even if we could go in here and we'll just make a change and we'll do something simple like change the name. And again using the power of Web Services we can go in and this is using an InfoPath form -- for those of you that haven't used InfoPath you should go learn about it, it's another wonderful Microsoft technology. We'll just refresh that, and voila. In the back office ERP system now those changes are reflected. Why? Because we're using a common toolset, a common UI, common Web Services, and again you'll see this across all of our Microsoft Business Solutions products to make it easier for everyone to deploy and get at that type of information to once again, like Bill said, empower users.
Thank you. (Applause.) BILL GATES: Thanks, Matt. Insightful
The next pillar was about meaningful information, making things insightful and here we've made a huge investment in our SQL product to have business intelligence capability, including a reporting services capability that really is unequal, there's never been anything quite as flexible and as rich as that.We have a model of the data that's very rich that understands the multiple dimensions, things like time and geography, and so being able to take that kind of platform capability and connect the applications up to it really is very, very high leverage, far more richness than anyone just building the reporting logic into an application itself could ever do.We have many other pieces that come into this. We need to take Excel and make it understand rich structured data even more than it does today. We've done a lot with XML imports, but we can go beyond that to have native understanding of the information. We can have a lot of workflow logic where if some business indicator is different than you'd expect we can have that trigger a notification or trigger an action that needs to take place. And then we have BizTalk that can take the data and move it around between the different applications including legacy applications.So this is a huge area for us, more and more connector type capabilities -- more in Excel, more in SQL, and then the applications connecting up to that and showing how it really is valuable.ConnectedAnother pillar was connected and here the dream is quite simple; it's that software on any computer connected to the Internet should be able to talk to software on any other computer, independent of where they are located, with operating system is being used, what language the application is being written in, and connect in a very deep way in that you can authenticate who's at both ends. You can make sure the information is reliably exchanged between the two systems, and you can have very complex protocols so that it's usable for business type activities.Now, this has been missing. We've had bit-level connectivity with the IP standards, but we haven't had software-level connectivity. It's been a dream for many decades but now that dream is finally being fulfilled with a set of work around Web Services. We started with XML, the data format, then we had some simple protocols -- SOAP, WSDL -- and now we have this full stack in a group called the WS-I group that blesses these stack profiles that really give the guidance for how software can connect together.This is very powerful. Some of you today when your applications want to connect up for shipping or taxes or various things, you're already using something that sort of either is a Web Service or was an early attempt to do this type of thing connecting out.Here where this can work for the different components of the application, work within a company across company boundaries, it really is a revolution. It's a revolution that we made a commitment to starting, oh, about the year 2000, but it will be the rest of this decade before all the software is enabled this way.We are very committed to this. You've seen with the Visual Studio we've had out, the new version coming out this summer, some great extensions there, and this is very important for us in everything we do, including the applications themselves.And I think a great example of this is what you're going to see us do first in Axapta but then in a very broad way, so let me ask Jeff Comstock to come out and show us how this integration works. (Applause.)JEFF COMSTOCK: Thank you, Bill.So, the first thing that we'll do in this demo is we'll generate some Web Service using a preview of the Axapta Integration Framework that we'll be shipping in 4.0. Then I'll show you how easy it is to integrate an application, InfoPath, with those Web Services, as well as how easy it is to program against those Web Services from Visual Studio .NET.So what we're looking at here is essentially a catalogue of Axapta Web Services and what all this stuff on the page is telling us here is that there are no Web Services available for us yet. So let's just jump into Axapta so you can see what it's going to take for you to generate your own Web Services, along with the Web Services that we'll be providing you out of the box.So on the right hand side we have a few classes that represent the business logic that we want to expose, and I just want to walk you through these classes really quickly.So, the first class is the customer service class and it contains the business operations that we want to perform. So we want to do things like create customer, get customer, update customer. These are also the business operations that we want to expose as Web Service methods and we'll see that happen in just a moment.The next class we'll look at is the customer class and this class represents the customer, so it has properties on it that you'd expect to see on a customer like city, country, name and those kinds of things. We'll use this class to generate the XML document structure that our Web Services will emit and consume.So just from these two we have enough to generate Web Services. So I'm going to click over here on the left, generate Web Service. What that's doing is going to through all the classes within Axapta, looking for those classes that are marked similar to the ones that we just looked at and it's generating Web Services for us.So let's bring back that catalogue, refresh this view and now we see we have some Web Services available, create customer, get customer, the same business operations we saw on the customer service class. So, great -- now we have industry standard Web Services available.But, of course, the important question is how do these Web Services make your integration projects any easier. To give you an idea of that, I'm going to be taking an application, InfoPath, and I'm going to use these Web Services to integrate with Axapta. InfoPath is just an Office program, this is just InfoPath right out of the box. We'll design a form on the fly here, we'll point the data connection to the Web Service that we just generated and we'll receive and submit data, so we'll call a Web Service to get some customer information, we'll change some of that customer data on the form and then we'll call another Web Service to update that same customer.So we'll just point it to our Web Service location, we see the business operations that are exposed,. So first we'll get a customer, next we'll update that same customer. We just need to point it at the data structure we're going to work with, which is the customer, and I'll finish this wizard.Now I just need to drag a few fields over, I'll drag the ID field and the query field and on the data side I'll drag over the customer with controls.So InfoPath gives us a default form based on the data, this will be fine for our demo here, I'll go ahead and preview that form, and let's bring up the information for customer 4,000. So I'm going to click Run Query here. What that's doing is calling our Get Customer Web Service, which is calling into Axapta, calling into the business logic, returning that customer information for us here in InfoPath.So let's just change something about this customer. Let's change the name of the company from Light to Light and Design. We'll click Submit and what this is doing, what it's already done, is called our Update Customer Web Service, again calling into the Axapta business logic and persisting that.So let's go back to Axapta. We'll list customers and we see on the top customer 4,000 is now named Light and Design.So we've very quickly shown we can take an application, integrate it with Axapta using these generated Web Services very quickly.So lastly, we've been hearing more and more from you customers, partners and ISVs who are building .NET applications and you're saying to us very clearly, 'Hey, make it easier for us to integrate these .NET applications with your business management suite.' So I'm going to just very quickly show you how Web Services helps us do that from Visual Studio .NET.What I'm showing you here is a very simple Winform .NET application, it takes some customer information, calls a Web Service to create a customer.So I promise not to walk you through all this code. There's just one key thing that I want to show you. I'm bringing up IntelliSense on a .NET C# customer class, and what IntelliSense is showing us is all the same properties that we saw on the customer class within Axapta, and this class was completely auto-generated for us by Visual Studio .NET just by pointing at the rich Web Services that we're generating. So programming against these strong types makes integrating with Web Services from Visual Studio .NET very straightforward and very easy.So let me just run this. Let's make sure it's as easy as I'm claiming here. So what I've got here is I'm pre-populating the form so you don't have to watch me struggle at typing this in, I'll hit create and that's taking the information from the form and calling the Create Customer Web Service, says it's created it. Let's go back to Axapta and let's list customers once last time, and we see customer 1,000 -- Fabricam -- has been created within Axapta.So we've seen how we can generate Web Services from within Axapta and easily integrate using those Web Services from applications as well as Visual Studio .NET.What I've shown you here today represents the work we're doing for Axapta, but you can expect to see Web Services capabilities in the coming versions of all of our business management suites. Thank you. (Applause.)BILL GATES: For those of you who haven't done much Visual Studio programming recently, let me assure you what you just saw there was very, very cool. (Applause.)Total Cost of OwnershipWell, the next pillar was cost of ownership and when we think of this we think of it in a very broad way. We think of all the expense of doing customization, we think of maintenance fees, we think of personnel costs, moving data around. We think of dealing with errors, we think of the inflexibilities of the systems not letting you change in a way that you want to.And so if you really look at it very broadly, the pie is very large, and the opportunity for software innovation to take elements of that and bring them down substantially is still very, very dramatic.A few of the pieces like the hardware costs, that's naturally coming down. The communications cost is naturally coming down. But it's the costs that are harder to measure, around maintenance and lack of capability, that really now I think everyone would agree, although it's tough to be numeric, that is the biggest piece there.Microsoft has always had a view to go for high volume and low cost of ownership, low cost for the software license and to have as much built-in capabilities so that the need to spend money beyond the software license can be minimized as much as possible.Now, one of the ways we're doing this is through integration, where we're able to take something like our Software Updating Service and have that work on the operating system, Office and the business applications -- one place you go to see what's up to date, what's changed there. That's a very simple thing, taking Active Directory, using that to manage group policies so that it manages operating system resources, Office resources, Exchange resources and the applications resources.So we see ourselves that one of the tools, one of many that we have to drive this down is that ability to have a stack and be able to turn to you and say, 'Hey, this is something that we've integrated. We have customers using exactly this and so there's no system integration that you have to do.' One way to think of us, although it's a fairly narrow way to think of us -- it's sort of a type of system integrator that does this by the design of the product rather than after the fact.Adaptive ProcessesMaybe the most visionary thing in the five pillars is this idea of adaptive process, really instead of thinking of code -- lots and lots of lines of code as the ultimate representation of what the business process is -- instead, using a very high level form that's far more visual in nature and captures at different levels of detail what's going on with that business process.We call that model-driven design, and there's been discussion about this for many decades. What it's been historically is simply a diagram that is unrelated to the code and very quickly the two become disassociated, and the diagram probably sits as a printout and isn't providing much help.What we see is where you start with that diagram, that model, and then as you provide levels of detail eventually you use code to do that. But we can check to see if the model and the code are consistent and view it as simply one document in the system, and a way that you can visualize things, visualize performance. Even a business decision-maker could take that process and see how many times did something wait in one stage for over a day, how many times did the error redo path get taken, how many customers are sitting at a stage and who are they. And so it's not just a design capability, it's a way of thinking of the entire system.And so this is something that you'll see us building in more and more and more. This is how we get the customization to be both cheaper and more and more orthogonal from the kind of improvements we're making in the base applications themselves.So as a great example of how this comes together, I'd like to ask Kari Hensien from the CRM group to come up and show us how this comes together. (Applause.) KARI HENSIEN: Thank you, Bill.All right, on behalf of the entire CRM development team, I'm very excited to be able to share with you today a sneak peak at the next release of Microsoft CRM. A key goal for Microsoft is to provide a CRM solution that is able to be tailored to the unique way that your organization does business.Now I know if you're like me, throughout these past few days at Convergence we've been hearing from customers talking about challenges around being able to manage information stored in multiple systems. And a key challenge with that is more than just managing that information, but getting that information to the right person to meet their needs.In the next release of Microsoft CRM we're going to be continuing our work to improve the workflow processes and make it even easier for you to call out to these back-end systems and use that information to make better decisions.So what we've done here is shown you and created a quick implementation of Microsoft CRM for Fabricam Corporation. They're a property maintenance company. And at Fabricam a sales rep has just received a call from an account looking for us to provide new maintenance services.So let's go ahead and kick off the workflow process for this by creating a new opportunity. So I've brought up the new opportunity form, and I'm simply going to paste in the title here quickly and we'll select the account that it will be associated with. Let's save and close.Now, what happened when we saved and closed is the workflow process has now kicked off. And it's important to note that at Fabricam there are basically two distinct business processes in our company: one for managing opportunities around new customers, and a second for managing opportunities around existing customers.Now, with new customers we obviously have to do a little bit more work to build the relationships, to do a background check on the account to see if it's actually a customer we want to be doing business with.And for the existing customer we've already got an established relationship, but it's still important for us to call and take a look at the financial information and see if this is an account in good standing.Now, each of these two processes in the past required several manual tasks, and any time, as you know, when you take a sales rep and you ask them to do things like paperwork, set up meetings, document what's happening with a project, you're taking their time away from doing what they do best, interacting with customers and closing new business.So let's now go back and take a look at that opportunity and see what the workflow process has now automatically done on my behalf.When you look at the opportunity, you'll notice that we now have a SharePoint Team Services link to the site. What that basically means is the workflow has automatically created a place for me to work on this opportunity with my virtual team.So what I'll go ahead and do is now take a look at that site, and you'll see that not only is this a SharePoint Team Services site, it's one that's been customized specifically for working on an opportunity with my sales team. You can see that it's provisioned the site with some templates and documents I need as a salesperson. It's started to populate the site with tasks that are important to managing the project around the opportunity. And finally, it's provided a place with insight back into the Microsoft CRM system.Let's go ahead now and jump back into Microsoft CRM and take a look at the next step in the workflow process. And that step is really about provisioning in Microsoft CRM the structured business process.Since this is an existing customer, I can follow a shorter process, and you can see here that Microsoft CRM has created a quick three-stage process and associated the activities I need to do right in that process.So in conclusion, what we've show you is how we've been able to simplify the life of a salesperson by automating a look-up and determining if this customer is a good customer. We've created a workplace where I can bring my entire sales team together and keep them on the same page. And finally, we've improved the organization's ability to manage the opportunities going on in the business.All of this was done with Microsoft CRM, its workflow capabilities and rich customization so that we could tailor the product to work the way Fabricam works.Thank you. (Applause.)BILL GATES: I thought I'd give you a quick glimpse of some of the things we're thinking about in terms of user interface in the years ahead. Many of you I'm sure have heard about the idea of Windows having an even richer presentation system, completely upwards compatible from what we have today, and that's going to make visualization richer than it's been. We're also thinking in terms of scenarios and how we can present information in a nice way there.This gives you a glimpse of a screen. Here you've got a worker looking at different invoices, some past due, some due and if the user would just click that they want to process a certain set of these things, then they get a button that comes up for that and then they'd see in the second stage those things have been moved down and now they can delegate those things out.So when we talk about better user interface, it's really not just the color schemes or the animation or those things, but it's actually mapping it into this part of our applications and thinking about the way the shell in Windows changes, Office changes and then these kinds of guided interfaces in the application, so the user feels very comfortable across all those different domains. They don't feel like the user interface is different and it is taking advantage when you have the latest hardware of that in a very, very nice way.When we talk about our platform being integrated, and I hope I gave you some examples of how our dialogue with you in terms of how you want the applications to be better, not only is driving the R&D priorities inside our Business Solutions group, but also all the way down into SQL, Windows, Office and the whole connectivity strategy we have to create more flexibility. Having us think about it that way and drive it into that high volume platform really means that these are things that eventually you'll be able to take for granted.When people ask me about why we have such an incredible commitment to this area, why are we increasing the R&D and driving these new things forward, it's partly because it's a great business, great opportunity to understand needs, but it also has been fantastic for us in all the work that we do. In the same way that building Office for Windows in the '90s allowed Windows to mature and gave us a sense of what was needed there, here the applications we're building and the needs they have for the platform are really pushing us in the right direction. And therefore we're going to get the combination of the great smart people on the platform side, the application side driving together, and making sure that we're getting that rich synergy is a really fun part of my job. So it's an integrated platform value, meeting as many of the needs as we can and then having the extensibility for everything else that's needed there.I hope we've given you a key sense that we see when you get to the overall value of software business applications are at the center of that equation, that they are the context in which so much of the work is done and even the unstructured work has got to come in and relate to that.I hope we've given you a sense that we see massive room for innovation. Today, work is not as efficient as it can be, and the tools of software, although they have scratched the surface, started to show us what can be done -- even the idea of the Internet and e-commerce and digital sales reports that you can dive into and see in the appropriate way and share that with other people -- even those basic things are still coming together for everybody to have those in their system.There are many big breakthroughs ahead -- the natural interface on these systems, the way you'll have them wherever you go, the way they'll hook up to higher speed wireless -- but the thing that will determine if that comes through in terms of value is the entire software stack, with the applications at the top.So again thanks for being here and thanks for all your guidance as we drive our software platform forward and letting us see the great things you do with it."
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