Make PORTALS
your home page and use "wiredbrain" password "synergy" for set-up start
pages.
MSN now does the best search
Social
ergonomics
Bill Gates Keynote: PDC
Windows in the cloudy sky:
What Microsoft wants to do is control the servers with a MS provided next, next generation NT platform operating system called XML but not open and universal.
The .net system works with devices that have .net codes built it. Microsoft products will run on .net as a server - client interface - XML files, XML data base, XML storage, XML index, id, calendar, updates, notifications, out in the cloud on MS XML server software doing object imbedded codes.
The applications become notations or services on the page.
The universal canvas API. Hardware drives, across all the devices and the .net controller in the a cloud. Development applications are built on the XML kits connected to the browser. This was Netscape’s vision from the beginning.. This is why MS had to kill Netscape and the NOISE group and what the browser wars was really about.
The platform is in the sky - Microsoft idea is the new version of what Netscape and SUN - the NOISE group ( Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else ) started talking about five years ago.
The server ( web site ) company internets, the ISP, wireless devices, i-appliances, game panels, can all use audio, video, photograph, office applications - word process, presentation, spread sheets, data bases, in a interactive way using a server AGENT or personalized options given the application, the device used, and the pattern of application - on a rental or fee-for-service basics. In other words all the complex stuff is up stream - rich standards based on XML works between platforms and programs but at the server not on the PC - This is the critical and profound change.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
MSN now does the best search
Social
ergonomics
Bill Gates Keynote: PDC
Windows in the cloudy sky:
What Microsoft wants to do is control the servers with a MS provided next, next generation NT platform operating system called XML but not open and universal.
The .net system works with devices that have .net codes built it. Microsoft products will run on .net as a server - client interface - XML files, XML data base, XML storage, XML index, id, calendar, updates, notifications, out in the cloud on MS XML server software doing object imbedded codes.
The applications become notations or services on the page.
The universal canvas API. Hardware drives, across all the devices and the .net controller in the a cloud. Development applications are built on the XML kits connected to the browser. This was Netscape’s vision from the beginning.. This is why MS had to kill Netscape and the NOISE group and what the browser wars was really about.
The platform is in the sky - Microsoft idea is the new version of what Netscape and SUN - the NOISE group ( Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else ) started talking about five years ago.
The server ( web site ) company internets, the ISP, wireless devices, i-appliances, game panels, can all use audio, video, photograph, office applications - word process, presentation, spread sheets, data bases, in a interactive way using a server AGENT or personalized options given the application, the device used, and the pattern of application - on a rental or fee-for-service basics. In other words all the complex stuff is up stream - rich standards based on XML works between platforms and programs but at the server not on the PC - This is the critical and profound change.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
Windows in the cloudy sky:
What Microsoft wants to do is control the servers with a MS provided next, next generation NT platform operating system called XML but not open and universal.
The .net system works with devices that have .net codes built it. Microsoft products will run on .net as a server - client interface - XML files, XML data base, XML storage, XML index, id, calendar, updates, notifications, out in the cloud on MS XML server software doing object imbedded codes.
The applications become notations or services on the page.
The universal canvas API. Hardware drives, across all the devices and the .net controller in the a cloud. Development applications are built on the XML kits connected to the browser. This was Netscape’s vision from the beginning.. This is why MS had to kill Netscape and the NOISE group and what the browser wars was really about.
The platform is in the sky - Microsoft idea is the new version of what Netscape and SUN - the NOISE group ( Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else ) started talking about five years ago.
The server ( web site ) company internets, the ISP, wireless devices, i-appliances, game panels, can all use audio, video, photograph, office applications - word process, presentation, spread sheets, data bases, in a interactive way using a server AGENT or personalized options given the application, the device used, and the pattern of application - on a rental or fee-for-service basics. In other words all the complex stuff is up stream - rich standards based on XML works between platforms and programs but at the server not on the PC - This is the critical and profound change.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
What Microsoft wants to do is control the servers with a MS provided next, next generation NT platform operating system called XML but not open and universal.
The .net system works with devices that have .net codes built it. Microsoft products will run on .net as a server - client interface - XML files, XML data base, XML storage, XML index, id, calendar, updates, notifications, out in the cloud on MS XML server software doing object imbedded codes.
The applications become notations or services on the page.
The universal canvas API. Hardware drives, across all the devices and the .net controller in the a cloud. Development applications are built on the XML kits connected to the browser. This was Netscape’s vision from the beginning.. This is why MS had to kill Netscape and the NOISE group and what the browser wars was really about.
The platform is in the sky - Microsoft idea is the new version of what Netscape and SUN - the NOISE group ( Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else ) started talking about five years ago.
The server ( web site ) company internets, the ISP, wireless devices, i-appliances, game panels, can all use audio, video, photograph, office applications - word process, presentation, spread sheets, data bases, in a interactive way using a server AGENT or personalized options given the application, the device used, and the pattern of application - on a rental or fee-for-service basics. In other words all the complex stuff is up stream - rich standards based on XML works between platforms and programs but at the server not on the PC - This is the critical and profound change.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
The .net system works with devices that have .net codes built it. Microsoft products will run on .net as a server - client interface - XML files, XML data base, XML storage, XML index, id, calendar, updates, notifications, out in the cloud on MS XML server software doing object imbedded codes.
The applications become notations or services on the page.
The universal canvas API. Hardware drives, across all the devices and the .net controller in the a cloud. Development applications are built on the XML kits connected to the browser. This was Netscape’s vision from the beginning.. This is why MS had to kill Netscape and the NOISE group and what the browser wars was really about.
The platform is in the sky - Microsoft idea is the new version of what Netscape and SUN - the NOISE group ( Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else ) started talking about five years ago.
The server ( web site ) company internets, the ISP, wireless devices, i-appliances, game panels, can all use audio, video, photograph, office applications - word process, presentation, spread sheets, data bases, in a interactive way using a server AGENT or personalized options given the application, the device used, and the pattern of application - on a rental or fee-for-service basics. In other words all the complex stuff is up stream - rich standards based on XML works between platforms and programs but at the server not on the PC - This is the critical and profound change.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
The universal canvas API. Hardware drives, across all the devices and the .net controller in the a cloud. Development applications are built on the XML kits connected to the browser. This was Netscape’s vision from the beginning.. This is why MS had to kill Netscape and the NOISE group and what the browser wars was really about.
The platform is in the sky - Microsoft idea is the new version of what Netscape and SUN - the NOISE group ( Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else ) started talking about five years ago.
The server ( web site ) company internets, the ISP, wireless devices, i-appliances, game panels, can all use audio, video, photograph, office applications - word process, presentation, spread sheets, data bases, in a interactive way using a server AGENT or personalized options given the application, the device used, and the pattern of application - on a rental or fee-for-service basics. In other words all the complex stuff is up stream - rich standards based on XML works between platforms and programs but at the server not on the PC - This is the critical and profound change.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
The platform is in the sky - Microsoft idea is the new version of what Netscape and SUN - the NOISE group ( Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else ) started talking about five years ago.
The server ( web site ) company internets, the ISP, wireless devices, i-appliances, game panels, can all use audio, video, photograph, office applications - word process, presentation, spread sheets, data bases, in a interactive way using a server AGENT or personalized options given the application, the device used, and the pattern of application - on a rental or fee-for-service basics. In other words all the complex stuff is up stream - rich standards based on XML works between platforms and programs but at the server not on the PC - This is the critical and profound change.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
The server in the cloud does the transfer and integration - is the platform in the sky that can work with all kinds of devices. It can take a record from one place in one format and uses it in another program in a different format guided by the smart agent. Information can be used almost anywhere from almost anywhere.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
The devices can use keyboards, mouse, voice, hand writing, file transfer, clip board, as inputs as well as agent intelligence on the server and user interface.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
Not news - cloudy vision part two :
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
http://www.wired.com/news/lycos/0,1306,37168,00.html
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
Gates for the first time emphasized the Web browser as the central application of computing. Echoing remarks made by counterparts Marc Andreessen and Scott McNealy four years ago, Gates said the network is even more important than the computer.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/topics/f2k/default.asp
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that will meld computing and communications in revolutionary new ways; offer every developer the tools to transform the Web and all other aspects of the computing experience; and enable businesses, knowledge workers and consumers to employ technology on their own terms.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
See cloudy vision in http://www.wiredbrain.net/gates.htm
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
year Bill Gates ( reference to HTML ) Building Internet Applications Professional Developers Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996 http://www.wiredbrain.net/bill-g.htm
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
Maybe the only place to find these remarks
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
Building Internet Applications
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
MR. GATES: Well good morning. It's super to be here and
see the incredible enthusiasm that's builtup around the Internet and using that together with Windows. Today
we have not only the group here in San Francisco, but an even
larger group that's watching in theaters over 50 theaters around
the country and I want to welcome them to the professional developers
conference.
These conferences have really been major milestones in the history
of the software business. Going all the way back to the original
battle of character mode interface versus graphical interface.
We use the conference to bring people in to the graphical world.
That ended up completely - of software companies creating many,
many new opportunities.
The next big milestone was Windows NT.
That's been really gratifying because the investments that we
and you have made over many years are really paying off now with
the incredible volume of NT, not only on the desk top but also
on the server as well.
The last PDC was Windows 95 and that's been the fastest selling
software product of all time with well over 20 million users now.
The broad acceptance has been pretty amazing. It's hard to buy
a new machine now without Windows 95. In our upgrade rates have
been more than double in any previous product that we've had.
But, today's topic I think is even more exciting than any of those
because today what we're talking about is something that -- that's
not just about the software industry, it's about the whole way
the world communicates. Communication for business, communication
for learning to socialize and entertain each other.
The Internet phenomena is truly incredible. What happens when
you will get to critical mass and you get the kind of positive
feed back that we've seen only a few other times in this business
is hard to exaggerate what the impact of that is. With the PC,
it was interesting to see that over 50 types of PCs went on sale
when the IBM PC came out and even as that volume grew, the idea
of a standard PC was used as a seedcorn.
The IBM PC was in no
ways perfect. As the volume went up, those imperfections were
viewed as opportunities with companies like Compaq and dozens
of others. People rushed in to improve the product and the amount
of creativity that was brought to bear was enough to create the
PC revolution. With the Internet, the breadth of players is far
broader and the phenomena is happening even more rapidly. Part
of that is that the Internet is in a sense its own distribution
system. News about the Internet, new Internet software, it's all
there in the blink of an eye. So, we now know what the seedcorn
for electronic publishing and electronic communications is. It's
all these wonderful protocols many of which have been around for
over 20 years of what we're going to use as the foundation for
this new world.
Now, I've talked about the Internet as almost a gold rush.
There's
really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's taking
place. That's partly reflected in the rising and falling stock
prices. I think Internet stocks have greater volatility than any
category out there. Fundamentally, when you have a gold rush atmosphere,
people suspend disbelief. If somebody says hey, I can do something
on the Internet, no matter what it is people are fairly open minded
they want to invest, start a new company, do an IPO.
These high levels of investment are very, very positive for getting
this business going. In fact, as I've gone around the world over
the last month I've gone to some unusual places I was in Poland,
Argentina, all over and I wondered when I went to those countries,
what the level of interest in this phenomena would be. Is it just
confined to the United States and it's certainly not. If anything,
those countries are in their governments or even more anxious
about this because they worry about being left behind and so although,
for the first 15 years of Microsoft's history, I was very proud
of the fact that I never met with any politicians. Today as I
go around the world, I have met with many heads of state who are
just fascinated with the idea of what should they do to foster
the Internet phenomenon in their country and the make sure that
their human resources are able to reach out to world markets to
use this amazing capability.
We actually went to Bermuda, kind of a strange place, but we thought
it would be an interesting place to go find someone and see what
they thought about the state of the art, about all of these adds
that have URLs in them and all the frenzied activity taking place.
We found a musician down there and put together a little video
with his reaction to the whole Internet phenomenon. So let's take
a look at that.
(Video played.)
MR. GATES: So, it's happening and really nothing's going
to hold it back. But it is interesting to look at the factors
that prevent it from happening overnight. One of those is the
whole question about the business model for content companies.
Will advertisers be willing to pay lots, will people be willing
to sign up on subscriptions.
There's a lot of great experimentation
going on in this, but I think some people will hold back until
they see some great success stories. As I mentioned, we're all
having to think about the government now that we're in the communications
era, and there are a number of issues here. Just in the United
States, you've got the issue of strong encryption and what the
government's trying to hold us back there. You have the issue
of censorship, which is a hot one right now.
You even have a number of upcoming issues like the attempt to
take the Internet and put it under the same regime that long distance
operators are under which would be a major step backwards. But,
when you think of these problems in the United States, and just
imagine that the U.S. is the best case in terms of paying attention
this and having broadly a deregulatory approach to things and
because the Web is global, it's going to be a very tricky problem
to make sure government interference doesn't slow things down.
There are people who think well the answer is simple.
There should
be no restrictions of any kind to what people do on the Internet.
I wish it was that simple, but I imagine, just to take one scenario,
if you were a developer who's software product is being downloaded
from a server in a country with no copyright laws and you're not
getting much income, you would wonder if a wide-open approach
is exactly the right way to manage it.
When you get to scenarios like that, it's tricky to think who
is responsible since you can't get back to the server level, how
is there a mechanism to make sure intellectual property or whatever
other rules apply that those can be done effectively. So, we're
all going to put a lot of time into this, whether it's in Washington
D.C. or many other places around the world.
One of the great issues that's coming up is that because the Internet
is so fantastic, it should be broadly available. So, kids in schools,
people coming into libraries, urban or rural, richer or poorer,
getting that acceptability will become a priority for society
the same way making books available did which led to the library
system and focus to literacy. That may take some time, particularly
as you go around the world. That's another thing I think all of
us if faster and be involved in this.
We do need standards, we don't need too many standards, that's
always a tricky problem. I think the Net has a way of coalescing
around a few standards, that will make sure it's not a problem.
Once again, everybody has to do their duty whether it's committees
or proposals and making sure things are kept open in the right
way.
A final problem is bandwidth. Some of the scenarios require a
lot more bandwidth than the narrow band dial up.
The question
is how do we move to the next level? With the dial up modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) we
will be able to get simultaneous voice and I think that's a huge
step forward. In fact, I'm going to show some scenarios that involves
the use of voice that I think are very, very mainstream. So, there's
one more thing to do there in that narrow band world. But the
big question is how quickly can we get people up to midband, up
to a level of performance of 5 to 11 times faster where /images
are incredibly fast, audio is working and you can start to use
video data types.
The phone companies and cable companies and
ideally, they both do a good job so we can see vigorous price
and investment competition for them to get in and provide those
connections.
In countries where cable is not as well developed, then for local
access, there's really only one provider and so there you simply
have to convince the company to make the large investments and
to approach it as a high-volume low-price-type phenomena. We're
stuck with ISDN a little bit where the volume's not there so they
don't bring the price down. Until we can show them the incredible
demand and until they understand how they build up that capacity,
I think ISDN will be a little slow.
The most optimistic for band
will be about 10 million people in the United States connected
to midband by the year 2000. That's subject to a lot of things
going extremely well.
Even in the cable case where the focus of the industry is very,
very clear and their under understanding of the price it takes
is very clear, there's a lot of system upgrades that have to be
done in order to get out there in the very large numbers. It will
be interesting for content developers to think there's a lot of
users coming in narrow band, but yet you have other midband customers
or people corrected through corporate networks or university networks
that have those higher speeds in making content adapt appropriately
to the speed is an interesting technology issue.
The Holy Grail, of course is brought in, once upon a time the
phone companies told us we had get that very rapidly they'd go
out there and build that. As they stepped out and looked at the
business case.
They realized that's not a clear winner. Although
in some cases where you have lots of density and affluence in
Stockholm, what they've done with optic fiber in Hong Kong or
Singapore, there will be urban access to broad band within the
next couple of years.
What are some of these key standards. Certainly, today and this
entire conference, is focus on the idea of active pages. Making
it easy for code and new data types to get in. Electronic commerce
is an area that's had a lot of progress.
The credit card standards
that Visa and Master Card have had, the amount of business on
the Net. Securities, a particular issue for me, because about
90 percent of the electronic mail on the Internet that appears
to come from me does not come from me. So, if you get sort of
an unsolicited job offer, rude statements coming to you, you might
think twice about whether that's really me out there sending that
mail.
There's some people who send me mail that say thank you for visiting
our site; do you like our site; isn't it a wonderful site. Of
course I've never heard of your site, I'm not quite sure what
to say back, I don't want to disappoint people. Obviously, multimedia
data types -- it would be interesting to have people guess say
5 years from now what percentage of pages will simply be static
2-D pages versus 3-D pages that navigate
around. I think in terms of traffic by far the majority will be
3-D-type pages. That means there's a lot to be done with the hardware,
with the run time software, and haven't with the authorizing tools
to make that straight forward.
When does the Internet have quality service guarantees so you
know data will get from one point to another? Of course that comes
up for realtime data, like audio and video. That also comes up
for corporations. For efficiency sake, they should get rid for
all the least lines where he have around the world where they've
built up a private network. Before they do that they have to have
some there won't be traffic jams and security problems that prevent
their data from getting through.
The amount of business, the amount
of income that can come to the Internet as corporations really
say well this is it, this is how we'll move our data to all our
branches between ourselves and our customers is quite dramatic.
Getting the quality standards of service to the backbone and getting
software standards for that will be a very, veryimportant element and more involved with many others in trying
to make that happen.
Part of the unique thing that Microsoft is doing, and I hope this
was illustrated clearly in many of the demonstrations yesterday
is a strong level of integration into Windows.
The idea is when
you're using local data, using remote data, it should be the same.
What we want to do is have everything that comes up on the screen
use the browser, the browser will be at the center of the system.
What used to be the user, the central part of Windows that does
dialogs, that will be our HTML engine. So, extended HTML will
be everywhere. Forms packages, dialogs our help system won't be
a separate exe now.
The editor that we have built into Windows
will help you compose the HTML form that's the successor. By doing
that, the browser is always in the working set. That 3 meg or
so that's in the operating system, that will include the HTML
rendering. We want to have the unification of interface take place
not only for directories and pages which you've already seen,
but also for messages, documents, the way you navigate around,
find favorites, traverse links, there's no reason as you move
to what have been different storage systems, different containers
that you should see any difference there at all. That synthesis
is very important for providing ease of use.
Another key point here is that this quality of service thing I
talked about actually has to appear in the operating system as
well.
The idea of a task being able to say, I want to set aside
enough bandwidth, enough CPU cycles to be able to deliver this
movie or cycle and making sure that that guarantee can be sent
back so that nothing comes in and interferes, that's very important.
That's fairly deep scheduling technology that will be built into
Windows.
At the server level, integration is equally important. Part of
the idea is the common alt between the client and the server so
the code can move around, share the user interface. If an application
that's running on a client wants to do printing, why should it
just, instead of using client CPU cycles, tell it to run up there
and do the print command and free up the local system. If it's
the same operating system there's no development involved it's
redistributing the task for what's appropriate in a particular
case. So we take this approach of commonality, common object model
and in particular the distributor COM that we're giving out here
at this conference, we this that's a very powerful story. To administrators
who are looking at the complexity of managing user names and all
the different events that can come out of these systems, pulling
that out together and letting it filter in a rich way that's an
important step for these networks to grow as much as they need
to without creating much overhead.
If you imagine today a medium size business wants to set up a
server they have to think about so many things what's a relational
database, what's a messaging package, what's a Web server what's
an admin tool. All of those they have to buy separately, learn
separately, install separately and understanding what their various
roles are and how to work with those. It's way too complicated.
We have to have a server that's turn key, you buy it for your
business and messaging customer database management, telephone
integration, being able to public catalogs, all of that including
electronic commerce support is simply built in and you don't go
out and learn what's in side of all those things paragraph paragraph
is software industry and Microsoft in particular has a lot of
my gracious work to do with these pieces in order to make it turnkey
for every business in the world to go out and buy a box and put
out their products and be in business on the Web.
The breadth
of opportunities here on the Internet is pretty incredible. I
thought I would do a few demos today to show some of the incredible
progress that's being made here.
We're going to start out with a product that actually went --
it's MACH Warrior. I'm going to ask Kip Olson and Andy Cohen to
come out and take a look at this. It's a Windows 95 game. What
happened was when this game was written they supported our directed
play interface and direct play was part of the game STK we sent
out last October.
The first game STK Direct play 1.0 supported
users across the Internet.
What can happen when you simply plug in the direct play 2.0 and
see what happens with the Internet.
MR. OLSON: This is the game that came out last fall and
we were upgrading the direct play interface. I have a great job
because I can blow off Andy's arms everyday.
MR. COHEN: It works that way, too. It's a little dark here.
We're dialed in over Analog lines running over the Internet. Even
though this is highly interactive it's not a problem for this
game.
MR. OLSON:
The great thing about what we did was we weren't
just able to make a play over the Internet but we could slip something
in the existing game and give it new capabilities. More importantly,
we're going to be able to upgrade new futures. We'll be able to
have game service to allow you to plug in and have 1,000 player
environments. We're building a lobby interface where you can find
somebody on the Internet to play with. Like a chat field. 3-D
environments walk to spaces find people and talk to them and you
might see something like that today.
MR. GATES: It's great to see how people use the games with
high performance graphics.
There's a lot of focus on the entertainment
community and they've really responded well with lots of grated
games.
MR. OLSON: We look forward to a lot of great games next
year.
MR. GATES: Now, let's take that concept of a meeting lobby
and consider how could that be used? Say you want to sit down
and do a training session. Say you want to sit down and just socialize.
Say you want to get together to discuss a product. Today people
use chat-type interfaces but they're not very visual you have
to type in all the commands.
There's no reason it should have
to be that way. One of the companies that's been tackling this
challenge of creating great meeting spaces is on life. I'd like
to ask Henry Nash to show us some of the progress that they've
made in not only creating a visual way of getting together but
bringing audio into the experience in a fantastic way. This is
not just for entertainment it can be used for a lot of great business
scenarios as well. Welcome Henry.
MR. NASH: What we have here is a 3-D multipoint audio VML
browser. As we look around the space, it's like any other 3-D
space we can move around, but the difference about this space
is there are other people there. So, we're obviously imbedded
as an active document inside the shell, but there's actually people
out there connected on the Internet. To your point about socializing,
let's see how we can Interact with them.
Hi there.
DAVE (AVATAR): Hi Bill, hi Henry this is Dave online.
MR. GATES: You look good, Dave but were is you're body?
DAVE (AVATAR): You can decide to leave your body at open
when you go online.
MR. NASH: Well it's really a quite easy. Use your arrow
keys. Left to go left, right arrow to rotate right or the up arrow
or the down arrow to move forward and backwards. You can go through
some high performance moves like or you can spin.
MR. GATES: That's pretty good. Can you show a motion?
MR. NASH: Oh, sure one of the best things that we have
is the ability to show a wide range of a motion. Let me show you
show you what I would look like if I want to show emotions. You
know, I really like your avatar, Bill. Why don't you take us into
your appearance and show the ranges of avatars you can have.
MR. GATES: That's pretty embarrassing; I don't know who
made that one.
MR. NASH: Maybe we can improve this one by hairstyle, maybe.
MR. GATES: Looks like I have lipstick on there.
MR. NASH: You can also, as well as changing your appearance,
you can also morph your voice; you can carry it with you on the
net.
MR. GATES: Now can we hear multiple people and talk to
them all at once?
DAVE (AVATAR): People can also send you e-mail by say dropping
a document on your head. Let's bring of one of those other people
in. I think in the space we have Randy from online also, Randy
are you here with us?
RANDY (AVATAR): Hi, Bill, this is Randy.
MR. GATES: Hi, how are you doing? It's a little windy up
there.
MR. NASH: Show us some multiple talking.
DAVE (AVATAR): Why don't you join me in a session of row,
row, row your boat. I'll start out. (Singing. )
MR. NASH: Don't give up your day jobs, guys.
DAVE (AVATAR): We haven't gotten the singing online yet.
How about some musical accompaniment? think we have somebody else
online here. Are you with us, Mike?
MR. GATES: Wow, we have a guitar.
MR. NASH: Why don't you tell us the way you're connected.
MIKE (AVATAR): Sure, that's great, Dave is backstage and
I'm connected locally. Randy, how are you connected?
RANDY (AVATAR): I'm in Cupertino about an hour's drive
and I'm on a modem ( or digital connection to replace the analog ) connection.
MR. NASH: How about you, Mike?
MIKE (AVATAR): I'm in San Mateo.
DAVE (AVATAR): One of the best parts about this is the
way we've been able to mail technologies from Microsoft like direct
3-D rendering engine and sweeper technology that must be a well-integrated
Internet application as well as the technologies from online which
allow us to do the realtime audio over a low band connection.
We can run on a machine that's got Windows 95 on a Pentium processor
to a 14.4. We frequently have people dial in from Korea or Sweden
or Florida.
MR. NASH: I know you're going to have more people come
and join the party in cyberspace we'll take the volume down and
watch you play. We'll talk about what this means for the service
side of the Internet and so fourth. Basically what you're seeing
here is an HTTP server and an NT box running the voice server.
This is the way using NT we can turn information sites out on
the Internet into community sites.
The online traveler let's you
travel the Internet visit these communities and Interact with
the people once you meet them and exchange e-mail and so fourth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
Professional Developers Conference
San Francisco -- March 13, 1996