The Future of PC Market The first Developers Conference in China marks a major milestone for Microsoft, because the success o

The Future of PC Market
   Good morning. It’s a great pleasure to be here. Today is a major milestone for Microsoft as our first Developers Conference here in China. The key partnerships we build with software developers around the world are central not only to the success of Windows but also to realize the great possibilities that PC technology provides. It’s through applications of every variety that businesses will be using the personal computer as the tool of the Information Age.
   The PC industry is one of the few industries that can deliver both lower price equipment at the same time as improving the capabilities. The storage systems are now delivering gigabytes of storage as the standard capability. Over 80 million PCs are being sold a year. And the server market, the higher performance machines that these PCs networked with, that’s the fastest growing part of the business.
   Microsoft has a vision for where the PC is going. That vision says that PCs will become a central element of how companies share information inside the company. The name of that vision is, so called Digital Nervous System (DNS), allowing companies to reduce paper work and make better decisions. The DNS means that not only do you have the PCs that are connected together, and not only do you have standard elements like electronic mail but also you have really thought carefully about what information is important, as well as all of the processes —order taking, sales planning, personnel management, project management —all of those have been set up to take full advantage of the capabilities of the computer.
   Another major vision that Microsoft has is that writing the programs, writing the applications for these machines needs to get very easy and we need to be able to do it, so we can write programs that run across the entire Internet which is millions of machines. So this is a new approach to programming that draws on what was done previously. DNS says that developers should be able to focus on their particular task and not have to learn a lot about management of the machine resources.
   Let me talk about another area, which is computer vision, a very key area. Because if you want to make the computers disappear they’ll have to see who is in the room, what they’re saying, they have to see writing on the bulletin board or any kind of gestures you’re making. And the cameras, the hardware for this, they’re becoming very expensive. We’re just at the beginning of this, but with a powerful chip, I feel confident this will be a standard built-in PC feature.
   I think a key summary for the research, is that interacting naturally with the PC will become a standard. By that I include handwriting, talking, listening, and finally the most difficult is learning. Having a computer in the same way that human systems work, is what we are interested in doing and making. All these connect up to these future applications that I talked about today.
   Great chips and systems developed by our partners who are here with us sponsoring this event, make this all possible. There’s an incredible opportunity for developers. The applications that are written today will sell to an even larger base of machines out in the market. There is a lot that we’re doing to increase the work of developers —make sure they understand where the PC is going and how tools can help them and we’re even helping them now, with more and more marketing type of activities making sure they get out in good with the customers.
   And this is something that we are just going to increase year after year. And so the overall DNS message is one about helping developers seize that opportunity by bringing together the different architectures, making things automatic and allowing this to be done in a great evolutionary fashion. And so I think it’s a fantastic time to be a developer and we appreciate your being here and look forward to the opportunity to work with you more.
   Thank you.