Bill Gates' Web Site - Speech Transcript, CEO Summit 2003

Bill Gates' Web Site - Speech Transcript, CEO Summit 2003 "The idea of collaboration, sharing information, this is another area where the choices have been pretty limited. Web sites are very hard to build. If somebody in the office says, OK, I want to make a new Web site, they have to go to IT and get it approved, they have to use complex tools, so they're not likely to share that way. Sharing files -- all you get is a list of files up there. And the final way of sharing, that's the most common right now, is just doing enclosures in e-mail, but that doesn't let people see the different versions, your e-mail gets flooded, you have different people working in parallel with documents that may be out of date. Really what you want is that Web site, but you want the Web site so that anybody can just sit down and create one without having to go to IT, without writing a line of code, and pick a template to choose for the Web site, and then easily customize what they want to create on that. This kind of sharing and collaborating is a big step forward for us. We call it using SharePoint."
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It's interesting, that getting the phone and PC to work together; a lot of people thought about that as requiring you to change the whole telephony infrastructure to work across the Internet, so-called IP-based approach. But it turns out that that example is a traditional PBX, it's a fairly simple piece of software, that talks between the network, the computer network, and the PBX network. And so even without changing out any of the existing infrastructure you can start to get these benefits. Likewise with PlaceWare, what most people do, because the Internet telephony, also called voice over IP, isn't high enough quality yet, they're placing a traditional phone call in parallel with that screen connection. And so they're the best of both worlds, they're getting the screen interaction, and yet the voice quality and all that is the same. And yet, it all gets set up, when you click to join Net Meeting, in one simple step.
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"I thought I'd do one last thing, which is just to give you a sense of how I work in a typical day, using these tools; what am I doing sitting in my office. I've got here a pretty nice system, this is a 23-inch LCD, you can see it's got an interesting aspect ratio to let you see lots of information across like this. This is still a pretty expensive display, they're about $2,500, they've just come out, it's a Sony display. These will come down in price over the next three years, we think, to about a third of that, to $700 or $800. So even though today, maybe only the executive staff should have these things, these are going to be commonplace. You've probably seen a rapid shift in your company from CRTs and desktops to LCDs because the 15- and 17-inch LCDs are already at that $600-700 price point. So we're reached crossover where for any new system the LCD is superior, partly because of the text readability, partly because it requires less desk space. But as those LCDs get larger you'll see a couple of cases where that extra screen area really is very helpful in terms of that productivity you get out of it."