RE: Creating Innovation on the Internet - Register NOW !
What do you think.
How do we get in on the Gold Rush ?
MY IDEA: Global Village Schools is offering an introduction to
innovation on the Internet. Registrar now by E-mail to
pflaump@msn.com. Fee $125.00. For the late breaking news visit
newbie.htm and first.htm of the synergy site above. CONTENT: 45
hr 3 credit class over six weeks to six months. Content involves
current activities on the Internet, and a skill base in
Communications, Web servers, editors, chat, ftp, etc. FREE
Software = cost of class. The intellectual content is on managing
change and RAPID innovation. Each student will develop a 100
point ( 1 pt = 1 hr work) portfolio on the Web site for all the
world to see. What is in fact learned will depend..on the
student, the changes, the synergy that happens in cyberspace..
Gates talks about the Internet as a gold rush.
There's really no other way to describe the kind of frenzy that's
taking place. 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.
I think the bottom line is that any company (or individual) who
has a PCs and companies that have connected them together into
LAN's will benefit immensely from intergration into the Internet.
They get a lot more leverage, out of that huge investment by
buying a little bit of extra software and coming up with the
internal standards for how to present these pages, data, charts,
publications, training, resource inventories, mail, conferences,
et al within a common world wide system.
The promise of the PCs and the information "society" will be at
your fingertips. The information age is now coming true by the
blending of the productivity technology of office systems, data
bases, and services within the Internet technology.
The Internet is the first stage for companies. There they don't
need to worry about bandwidth they don't need to really do
anything but pull in new software. But the long-term potential is
not only to share information inside the companies but to reach
outside and that's this electronic merchandising and electronic
commerce. Microsoft is working on a number of initiatives there,
media server in fact we announced a large partnership with
WalMart as a lead -- we asked Pierre De Vries to come out and
show us an example what do we think shopping looked like a year
from now.
Building Internet Applications from the Professional Developers
Conference San Francisco -- March 13, 1996
"http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/bill-g/speeches/pdc.html
Bill Gates on the future NEW March 15, 1996
"/~pflaump/winhttpd/htdosc/bill-g.htm", copied to this site
http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/bill-g/speeches/pdc.htm
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.
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. ... 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.
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... 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.
So, it's happening and really nothing's going to hold it back.
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.
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 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.
The Holy Grail, of course is .. 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 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.
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.
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 massaging package, what's a Web
server what's an administrative 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 massaging 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.
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.
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 forth. 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 forth.
It's turning the Internet into communicating rather than just
information.
What kind of markets are you looking at here?
I suppose a company can get together and do various sessions
here.
MR. NASH: Especially for 14.4 and 24 K modems. People on
the road can dial in, entertainment we see here, going online
and meeting people. There are other calls arriving, so, there
are a whole range of applications. I think it's not just about
an individual technology it's fundamentally changing the way
people community on the Internet.
Another big thing everybody is talking about now is the Internet.
Certainly, over the next couple of years it's opportunity for
all of us. Companies have made huge investments in PCs and
networks to let people run productivity and applications. The
investment they made there is 90 percent of what they need to do
great information sharing. Some companies are there -- they have
server names you know certain file names-- even in a technology
company that's a little too hard for people to go out and find.
So it's been very interesting as we've started to take Internet
technology and use that internally at Microsoft to take the
information that we've always had up on our servers but possibly
in a way that's easier to get to our user has gone up by a factor
of 5.
So, here I have an e-mail and what this is just a high-level
summary of what's gone on. You'll see I have an embedded Excel
sheet here.
I can get at a high level any way a really quick snapshot of
what's going on. Now, if that's not enough for me, I have a link
to our finance home page. I can get right to the supporting
content.
Let's go ahead and go to the finance home page and that's going
to bring up the browser. Now what's really interesting about this
to me, is that this is really the first time we've been able to
consolidate and centralize all of this information in one place.
This is really in its infant stages right now. When you think
about some of the things you've seen earlier this week, it's not
a stretch of the imagination to think this will be a starting
point for all of our finance content not just financial
statements but what I call our dynamic contents. Our query tools,
even an SAP client, you'll come to one place to get there as a
finance person.
I've gone from a high-level financial statement to something more
detailed. With some of the advances in the browser what this
allows me to do is I can go back to where I started by using the
navigation tools. I click on this, it's going to ask me if I want
to save the changes, I don't want to. Now I'm back in the
browser. Now, the really important thing about that for me is
that as a user, my whole experience is the browser it's not these
different applications popping up and me having to track those
and where is which document.
My experience is really just navigating and comprehending the
different content.
Certainly there's room for lots of new applications and there's
room for new versions of existing applications. For us, that
means going back and looking at everything like office and saying
how can it be better in this environment. I'd also say that
beyond the product business, there will be far more demand for
people who understand the Internet and setting up software
applications on it than will be available world wide for at least
the next decade. We're sitting at the center point and companies
who have that service aspect will be doing extremely well just
like the product companies.
Now the content business will always be 100 times more fragmented
than say software we see a good opportunity, getting out there
and being a pioneer and using this technology will help us to do
better on the other pieces and some cases actually show
the way.
I think it's critical to keep in mind that everything is
improving here. You can't think of the PC itself as static. The
PC we knew 5 years ago, I don't think any of us would be very
satisfied with.
The pace of innovation in this is faster today than in the past.
Whether it's the size of storage, it's going to be hard to buy
a PC with less than a gig byte a year from now. Even a $900 PC.
Processors, Intel and its competitors are doing, products like
Pentium Pro. That's a huge step forward, we're certainly in
partnership with Intel building compilers building extensions for
MMX which is their multimedia instructions which I think is a
great initiative by Intel. I believe that a lot of PCs will have
smart card readers.
Part of the security problem will involve smart cards.
MR. Steve Chase of AOL.
For example Bill mentioned earlier people still have 144 modems
and we're slowly moving to 288. Some of the things we do with
impression and caching help accomplish that. The most important
reason we think eve had the success we've had is we've had a
strategy of working with lots of partners and building a tapestry
of alliances and working together with a lot of companies in
trying to build this medium. In the last few days we announced a
number of alliances particularly technology alliance in the
Microsoft, Netscape and Sun.
There's been a lot of confusion about what we've done because of
so many announcements.
The opportunity is to partner with companies and figure out a
way to reach that mainstream audience. It's not just partnering
with big companies it's also about reaching out to lots of
creative minds and entrepreneurs to figure out their innovation.
I am pleased today to announce a new program an expansion of our
green house efforts to include software developers. A year ago we
launched a content green house and over the past we're he funded
dozens of start ups trying to find innovation in this new medium
and a few months ago we included software green house for AOL --
today we're supporting Internet developers. We want to talk to
you to provide capital and commit our distribution and marketing
to take their ideas to 5 million people. It's going to be the mix
of funding and distribution that's going to unlock the power of
this new medium. Sticking the out on the Internet and hopefully
people will find it will not -- get plugged into large audiences
such as we have in AOL.
We want to create a new medium to reach millions of new people
and take the concept of these online services to a mainstream
audience. We're look forward to working with technology partners
such as Microsoft and hopefully many of you to make this new
medium all it can be. Thank you.
MR. GATES: One key point that Steve made there is the growth
opportunity in front of us. Although every day we're out there
surfing most of the people aren't. It's a opportunity to bring
people in and what we're doing with AOL will foster that in a
major way.
A few key points. This should be a very up beat industry. The
Internet is an amazing opportunity for great software. It will
be intensely competitive but room for lots and lots of winners.
If there's one thank you walk away from this conference with is
it should be we're hard core about the Internet. With all the
positive connotations that implies. Finally, this communications
revolution, adds we're swept up in the day to day activity here,
it's easy to forget what this can mean broadly and it is fun from
time to time to go out to schools and see kids starting to use
this or to go to medical researchers and find out how it's
facilitating their work to cure diseases and see all the amazing
ways that this is pulling together. So, there is no better
business than the software business and it's great to have you
all here.
SYNERGY-NET on http://metro.turnpike.net/~pflaump
** Peter E. Pflaum Ph.D. , Headmaster GLOBAL_VILLAGE_SCHOOLHOUSE
225 Robinson Road, New Smyrna Beach, FL 32169-2176 (904) 428-9609
pflaump@MSN.com pflaump@interserv.com
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SYNERGY-NET on http://emporium.turnpike.net/~pflaump or
http://metro.turnpike.net/~pflaum pflaume@n-jcenter.com
** Peter E. Pflaum Ph.D. , Headmaster GLOBAL_VILLAGE_SCHOOLHOUSE
225 Robinson Road, New Smyrna Beach, FL 32169-2176 (904) 428-9609
pflaump@interserv.com
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