| (October 18, 2001, Shanghai International Equatorial Hotel)
Good morning!
I am very excited to be here today because I have this opportunity to share with you the vision of the software industry in the next decade. I would like to emphasize that global software development is undergoing rapid changes, and I would also like to point out how great the opportunities these changes bring to China's development.
Microsoft's view on computing is different from other traditional companies. We believe that computing should be low-cost. We believe that there should be a large software industry that can develop many applications, and the price of these applications should be very reasonable. This model has of course proven to be incredibly successful in the past. Around the world, computers have become the best means to improve productivity, and at the same time, it is also the best tool for people to communicate with each other. In China, because the cost of personal computers is relatively low, the computer market is increasing at a rate of 10 million per year, and most of these computers are manufactured by local Chinese manufacturers. The focus of the next stage of China's information industry development is to greatly expand China's experience and skills in software, including the development of Chinese enterprises' own applications, so that Chinese enterprises can succeed and a group of local companies that can compete in the world market will emerge. Microsoft has a strong commitment to help you succeed by sharing its Windows platform with you, and this is a great opportunity for China.
The software industry has experienced tremendous growth since the advent of the personal computer. At the beginning of the software industry, there were only a few hundred software companies in the world, and their products were relatively few and expensive. However, in the past 20 years, hundreds of thousands of software companies have emerged, and they have developed incredible and diverse products that can be applied to almost all industries. So in fact, software drives people's use of technology and software has made an important contribution to improving productivity.
In the past few years, some people have begun to ask whether software has exhausted its potential and whether there is more potential to be tapped. My answer is very simple: we are actually just beginning to plan and explore the huge potential of software. The work done in software in the past 20 years is only a small part of what software can do in the next 10 years. In order to move forward as quickly as possible, we need to make full use of China's rich talent resources and ensure that they have the education, templates, and tools they need to make the best use of them.
Microsoft itself has been adopting the latest development methods to maintain its leading position. We are always willing to abandon the old ways and create new ways. A good example of this is that in the 1980s, we bet our company's future on a graphical interface. At the time, many people thought the old interface was perfect, but we knew that the graphical interface was much better, so all our development work adopted that approach, and all development was centered around Windows. In the next five years, our approach proved to be very successful. Now people may begin to reflect: why was there so much controversy at the time, why did so many people question the importance of the graphical interface at the time.
And now, we are starting another transition, which is very similar to the transition I just mentioned. The key to this transition is that software will enable different computers to communicate with each other in different ways, and the way people use the Internet will be very different from the way we have used the Internet in the past five or six years. Today, everything on the Internet is actually centered around HTML. We use a browser to find a web page and look at the resources on that web page. This is of course a great thing, but it is very limited - users can only view one web page at a time, and they cannot do any creative work themselves, but just read some information. If you want to combine different data, it is very manual, that is, cut and paste, and then paste the data from the web page into Microsoft Excel. If you want to aggregate this data and share it with everyone, there is no particular way to do it.
Of course, HTML is still an important standard, but there is a new standard now, which is a new standard promoted by Microsoft - XML. I will talk a lot about XML today because XML is a key component of the next generation of products at a technical level. Microsoft's .Net strategy is dependent on XML, just as our previous products depended on graphical interfaces. Microsoft will make XML a standard for the entire industry, and the implementation of Microsoft's .Net strategy will become the best implementation case of XML, just as Windows was the best implementation case of graphical user interfaces in the past. The .Net strategy is a completely new concept in some aspects. Before .Net, software was written around a system. We wrote software with a system in mind instead of with users in mind. If users change PCs, they have to do a lot of work to transfer their documents, their favorite things, and their information to another PC; if they want to work with another terminal, such as an advanced phone or handheld portable device, they have to run some collaborative software to make these two different devices work together; if users want to communicate, they may use different email systems - different devices will have different email systems, and it is up to the user to combine these different things together.
But the starting point of .Net is: we cannot regard the system as the key factor. Admittedly, there will be different systems, but they should be able to work together naturally. Therefore, we regard users as the center of this concept. At the server level, we do not regard a certain application as simply an application on a server. We believe that this application can use many servers and can automatically take advantage of the expanded and more powerful functions brought by multiple servers. The people-oriented concept ensures that the resulting productivity and reliability will surpass the best applications in the mainframe era or the UNIX era. The huge scalability it brings gives us a lot of room. In this way, we only need to keep adding new systems, and we will have greater capabilities. In some places, this has already become a reality, such as the TPCC benchmark for transactions set for the Windows platform, which is more powerful and has a better performance-price ratio. So.Net is a huge change, it is a huge change in programming, it is a huge change in user interfaces, it makes user interfaces more natural, and it also makes a huge change in servers because servers make programming easier.
So, in fact, we have made some bets, and we are very confident in these bets. First, XML will become a new standard. XML can enable various programs to work together and communicate with each other on the Internet, and the intelligence of any terminal device can be fully utilized. With XML standards, programs written by two people who have never met can also work together. For example, in e-commerce, someone wants to buy your goods. The complex process of processing orders in the past - tracking the entire shipping process, tracking the quality of goods and price changes, etc., can be improved with advanced XML standards.
The second bet is that people will use new tools, such as new tools such as Visual Studio.Net, to write some applications, these applications can be run in new ways, and these new applications are easier to enhance and upgrade because XML makes the structure of software simpler, because XML eliminates the need for a lot of coding that was previously written. A lot of applications written for the Web are going to be better, and people really want to be able to build Web sites faster, with greater reliability and flexibility, and with XML support, and they're benefiting greatly from using these new tools.
The last bet is that we can make the user interface more natural. That is, when you sit there and browse information, you can not only use the keyboard, but you can also use a pen to write, that is, there is a handwriting recognition function. You may also use voice to operate, that is, the computer has a voice recognition system, and the information you need will be displayed on the screen, and the resolution is extremely high, making the screen very readable, even a long email does not need to be printed, this user experience is very important for expanding the role of the PC and for the full adoption of digital methods. These are all driven by the .Net strategy.
I want to tell you about the background of XML. XML actually comes from a structured file called XTML. As early as 1996, some Microsoft staff said at a standards meeting with some other companies, let's generalize this. We should not just talk about files, we should talk about any data, and this data can be relatively rich. Of course, in the normal data world, everything is in tabular form. Of course, this method is very valuable for data that fits this format, but it is not flexible enough. There has been a dream in the computer industry that there should be a more flexible data model, and people have done a lot of work on object databases, network databases, and now for the first time in history we have confidence that this XML approach can be used at the core of the database. XML is a profound change, and although you can't take existing applications and put XML around them, all the benefits of XML will only be fully realized when people use it from scratch. If you build an XML layer on some systems, you will build a brand new system for other systems.
For Microsoft itself, we use our operating system, databases, SQL Server, Office applications, and do some basic design push on top to promote the need for XML. For databases, it means XML at the center, not just tables. For Microsoft Office, it means products like Excel that understand XML design, so when people are doing forecasting and planning, they are not just cutting and pasting in tables, but instead, statistical tables understand solutions of different sizes and formats. So XML involves a lot of work at Microsoft, and that's why it's a big bet for us.
We started on this path about three years ago. We built Visual Studio.Net and launched it a few months later. We designed it around XML. We approached the standards committee and invited other companies to participate. In the past few years, the momentum of XML has grown tremendously. In fact, I can say that there is no doubt that this will become the only new way for all computer systems. I would say that XML does work across systems. The ultimate goal of Microsoft's efforts to establish it as a standard is to benefit the industry, and Microsoft will compete by providing the best price-performance platform.
Of course, the interoperability of XML means that even if someone has not used our platform in the past, they can use our platform and other devices to work smoothly in new application environments, which allows people to move forward in an evolutionary way. In the existing layer standards, XML is the highest layer. It is an application on the seventh layer protocol. It is above all other standards, so the TCP/IP layer below is below. If you really want to send a speech data, XML can support it, but for Internet programming, we have two exchange program data, and we use XML exclusively in this regard. We are presenting all the standards related to XML to everyone. There are a lot of acronyms associated with this, but one thing is clear, we have a basic standard that allows these new applications to emerge and be used. A huge milestone for us was the official shipping of Visual Studio.Net, and the applications built in the data age are already amazing. To confirm that we are on the right path, we conducted some competitions and surveys to see how people use XML, and the facts show that people's feedback on XML is still very positive. XML
is a format that makes data easy to understand and it makes data flexible. For example, you want to sell a certain product. Not all people who sell a certain type of product use the same table format to describe the product. They may have different choices. XML can match the common parts of the product description, and all the unique features of the product can also be included, which is why it is a big breakthrough. In the past, a lot of the code written by system integrators was just to connect the data of one system with the data of another system. Now that this data has this self-explanatory and easy-to-understand solution, we don’t need a lot of the code I just mentioned. A lot of the energy that system integrators used to write code can be used for data discovery, data mining, improving data reliability, and reducing the cost of building these systems.
Microsoft has always supported the idea of pursuing the best price-performance ratio. Now people have realized that they can enjoy these benefits and build low-cost, very pervasive, flexible servers that were only available in the past, and these features were only available in very expensive servers.
We have a lot of partners that have started using XML services for applications. I've listed some of them on the screen, and you can see that the momentum is growing, and all companies that produce application software believe that they need to adopt the new XML approach. Microsoft is the leading company in promoting XML, and other large companies, such as IBM, are also participating in and applying this standard. We do have our own implementation in the market, and we also provide interoperability testing for other XML-based systems.
In the past, many people in universities were very interested in seeing this progress and seeing that the Internet is not just a tool for viewing documents and images. Today, people are amazed at the speed at which everything is happening.
In fact, the .Net implementation includes code that runs on the client, the personal computer, and on small screen devices such as PDAs and phones. .Net includes the concept of servers that can perform rich storage tasks. At the same time, .Net also includes the concept of services, which are provided in real time on the Internet. We call them services. For example, if you want to confirm someone's identity, how do you do that? You must have a program that runs forever. This confirmation service is called a passport. Similarly, if you need to share files with others or you want to back up information, we don't want to set up a dedicated server, so Microsoft built some services around .Net. We provide these services ourselves, and other companies can also provide these services, and these services run on the Internet at any time. So on the Internet, whether it is stock prices or business forecasts, many people are publishing network services. This is a business model, and sometimes these online services are free. So, in fact, servers and services are built on the same architecture, and they can be converted to each other.
Microsoft has been involved in the Chinese market for a long time. We have been investing continuously. This is not just a matter of the amount of investment, but a matter of basic aspirations. We hope that Chinese software designers can truly become leaders in their field, and not be too far behind their international counterparts. Our willingness to work is still very impressive. Based on the above good intentions, our researchers in Beijing are cooperating with many universities across the country. However, we began to discuss how to spread software design methods to more leading Chinese software companies at a faster speed. We designed a project called Architect 2000, which is to train 2,000 Chinese software designers in China, teach them how to design software, how to host projects, how to divide projects into different parts to ensure that local and systematic testing can be carried out, and finally when they are put together, they can become world-class applications. Classroom training is only part of this project. We also have some online communities that can provide continuous support to ensure that these latest design methods are familiar to everyone and ultimately make these 2,000 designers successful. We hope that they can spread this concept and method to others and have a broader impact on China's software design structure and software design experience. We think this is a very good cooperation project, which is indeed a win-win situation.
I just mentioned that we are trying to see if developers are interested in this new approach to .Net around the world. In Asia, we organized a competition to select the best .Net work from various countries. Yesterday, I was in Seoul to present the awards for the best .Net applications in Asia, and I was very happy to learn that China won the grand prize in this competition. In fact, we have some very good applications in the competition, and the top three are very good examples to prove why we are so interested in .Net. Today, two of the top three winning team leaders will come to give presentations to everyone. Now, we invite students from Beijing University of Technology to give us a presentation.
Presentation: Application of .Net in business registration of enterprises (omitted).
Next, we invite the group from Nankai University to give us a presentation.
Presentation: Application of .Net in online smart book binding (omitted).
Everyone has seen these exciting things. First of all, the enthusiasm and ability of these developers continue to exceed our imagination. These applications show us why XML is important. XML provides us with a flexibility that allows us to divide applications into different services and use these applications through different devices. It does not require everyone to have a single interface. In fact, you will get rich functions from every interface, so I hope these development teams will spread our XML and its benefits.
I will introduce how people will use PCs in the future to provide users with a better experience. I am the chief software designer. One of the most important things in this position is to observe the development of technology, understand what new things our users want to see, and see how software can combine the two aspects. This is how we worked in the past, whether it was personal computers or Microsoft Office, or new things such as Pocket PCs, top-box games, etc.
Microsoft itself does not produce hardware, we just track the development of hardware. Hardware is made by our partners, such as Intel, which produces faster microprocessors, storage companies, which are constantly improving storage capabilities, and fiber companies, which want to quickly increase the speed of information transmission on optical fibers. The development of these hardware provides opportunities for software, and every few years, the software can be upgraded. In fact, I think the development of hardware can provide what software needs, such as the new LCD screen, whose resolution makes you feel very comfortable when reading, so you don't need to read paper books. Hardware vendors also provide a good foundation for the development of wireless networks, especially now that people can establish 11 megabit transmission capabilities anywhere, and the communication cost per minute is also very low. Around the world, every business, every hotel, every airport -- all places where people spend a lot of time will have this transmission capability, and any portable computer will have built-in Internet access to get a high-speed connection.
We think the hardest thing for hardware vendors to do right now is to bring broadband to the home. Broadband technology is developing very fast in every country, including China, but the adoption of broadband in the home is still relatively slow. In the past few years, we have seen substantial progress in broadband in Korea, Japan, and some other countries, but I think it will take another five to ten years for the vast majority of people to use broadband to access the Internet, and there is a price issue. Microsoft, as one of the companies driving broadband development, needs to promote this demand.
Where will the miracle of hardware take us in the future? In the next ten years, I feel it should be the digital age, that is, people will truly understand that the digital way is the best way to do things. I will talk about how the use of personal computers in the future will be completely different from the current one.
The first is software that can improve productivity. People will say that humans have made great progress in this regard, but in fact, we have not made enough progress. Now, we can use productivity software to do business planning and track customer activities, but we can do much better than we are now. With future productivity software, if you want to share information, you can control exactly who you share it with. People don't have to learn different modes of Office, but use a unified set of command programs, so they don't feel like they are using different applications.
Voice recognition and handwriting recognition should also be greatly improved to improve the functions of productivity software. We can have a portable computer with long battery life, good wireless communication, and a high-definition screen. We have a dream that we hope to make screen reading more comfortable, so that we can read emails and encyclopedias without having to rely on paper books. To do this, we must improve the form of data, otherwise most users will print out long files when they receive them. As long as the computer is fixed in one place, it is tiring for people to look at the screen for a long time. If we improve the form of data, we can output it to a portable device at any time and read it at any time like reading a book or magazine, so that people will not be distracted and always pay attention to the machine factors in the reading process. With this portable device, we can bring various documents to meetings, annotate them, and then look at the notes and share them with others after the meeting.
Now let me talk about communication. Email, instant messaging and messaging, video conferencing, and so on, are really all about elevating the PC as a communication device. The growth in this area is explosive. When people are communicating with each other, they want to not only communicate with each other by voice, but they also want to show the other person a document on the screen, to pull up a budget, a list, a drawing, or to pull up the information that is being discussed. There is no reason that we can't connect the phone to the screen when we call someone. We can have a single interface that ordinary users can use to see the schedule, business users can use it to see the price, and can point to the bill being discussed to see where there is a disagreement. So this screen is very, very important in all aspects of communication.
All we do is, we don't want to force people to have different phone numbers and email addresses, we want different devices to communicate with each other. Today, in fact, users are often interrupted by their emails and calls, and these are not necessarily critical things. So we want to merge all the addresses into one address and let the user control which emails and messages he wants to pay attention to, so that their time and precious resources can be used more effectively. The whole experience of email will be very different, with the boundaries between email and instant chat and messaging disappearing and people taking the lead.
Take meetings as an example. People can use 360-degree cameras to record meetings and then put them online. People who are not attending the meetings in person can see what is going on in the meetings. This will be very common in the future. People can participate in meetings remotely, which greatly improves the efficiency of meetings.
Of course, many dreams of the Internet, such as e-commerce, e-government and other business solutions, have not yet been fully realized. Some people say that these problems will be solved soon. However, in order for e-commerce to succeed, XML solutions must be used. Therefore, government applications will also use this method, companies that want to sell globally will also use XML methods, manufacturers who want to find more suppliers or better prices, track customer satisfaction, etc. All these efforts to make the market economy work better will use XML applications.
For consumers, how to create music files, not in the form of CDs or records, but in the form of data, will become very common and easier to operate. You can get these things with any device you carry with you, and you can edit it in the way you like; if your friend is interested, you can send him a sample, and if he really likes it, you can buy and sell it through online transactions. Pictures, music, and movies will all become digital forms, and people will wonder why they used something as cumbersome as records in the past. When you send a picture to a friend, you can describe the situation when you took the picture, not just the picture itself.
In the living room, we can improve the TV experience. People don't have to watch a specific program at a specific time. We can help them choose the program they want to watch at any time. We can also use three-dimensional images to let people play interactive games, which are hundreds of times better than the current ones. In this way, not only young boys like to play games, but people of all ages can play games, and games can also perform some educational functions. In this regard, television is also more in line with the scope of XML, and we can also use XML to improve the scope of television applications. Our current X-box is a prelude to future products.
We think these devices can complement each other. The full-screen device can become the center device of all devices. We think that keyboards will continue to exist, but in addition to keyboards, there will be other devices to help people get new information from the system. We think that the centralized system approach and the peer-to-peer approach should complement each other, so everything revolves around different user experiences. Microsoft will also build some demonstration applications, and Microsoft Office may be the most important of these applications. It can show what XML is, what workflow is like, and what kind of workflow it can use.
We have to make all of this very easy to use. By making speech and handwriting recognition technology more reliable, people will no longer be afraid to use these devices. If you have a problem with your computer, you can quickly give Microsoft feedback, and we will look at your problem, analyze it, and if it is a common problem with the software, we can notify all users through the Internet before the problem affects others, so that millions of people don't have the same problem at the same time.
Microsoft is making a lot of investments. In fact, we have been making large investments for a long time. We started doing this about ten years ago, which is why we are now seeing, for example, speech recognition technology becoming a mainstream technology. Our long-term commitment is to contribute to the continued development of IT.
Finally, I would like to say that there is indeed a big, global opportunity here. There is a great lack of software skills. Every country should develop these skills to meet the application needs within a country and should be able to provide products and services to other countries.
China can play a huge role in this because China has abundant human resources. The key is how much energy and interest people put into education. In the next ten years, if China's software skills increase, software companies and software workers can increase significantly, China will develop faster than any other country. Your advantage is that you are starting from scratch, without the burden of the old era, and you can adopt the latest methods from the beginning. Microsoft can do a lot to help you and ensure that everyone can get the relevant information and opportunities. We think we have a responsibility in this regard and should take responsibility, and part of this responsibility is also reflected in the commitment we have made in China. Now we have more than 800 people in China, and the number of staff will increase significantly. In this way, our staff are engaged in software development and also cooperate with Chinese partners.
I hope that everyone can understand our passion through my speech today. I started as an engineer, not a software developer. The reason I started a software company is because I like software, and I also know that everyone has to sit down and write a lot of code to ensure that the software is bug-free. We have improved various tools to help thousands of developers do a good job, and their work will also affect tens of millions of users. Therefore, the idea of connecting personal computers to the Internet is actually revolutionary and can greatly improve productivity. We are actually just getting started in this regard, and we look forward to working with everyone here to seize this new opportunity!
Thank you very much! | |
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