It's my great honor and privilege to be here.
It's nice to receive the "Golden Computer". I will tell you a secret: The Golden Computer Award does weigh more than most laptop computers these days.Today is a big day I'm sure for Microsoft and I think a big day frankly for the computer industry.
For me Windows XP product is the biggest, most important Windows release we've done really since Windows 3.0. Some people say, "What about Windows 95? Wasn't Windows 95 the big release?"
But in almost every sense, I think Windows XP is more. You stop and say, "What was Windows 95?".
Windows 95 was an integration of MS DOS and Windows, we brought together the operating system and the graphical user interface, we moved to 32-bits, but there was no real new functionality for software developers and there was a new user interface.
Windows XP, what is it?
We merge OS systems technologies by essentially dropping MS DOS after 20 years and converging on the very excellent Windows NT base. That's job no. one.
Number two: we've dramatically improved I think - made a little more fun and simple - the user interface in XP. But unlike Windows 95, XP has so much more in it: for software developers, for peripheral vendors, for computer vendors - to build from. To build exciting new applications, the .NET passport in alerts, the media technologies, for wireless technologies, the help and support technologies, the real-time technologies. It's really a milestone product I think for the industry.
Some people say to me, "but is this the right time to put a new operating system in the market?" I think what the PC market needs today is innovation, it needs a platform that enables an innovation. We need new experiences. Nothing will take care of the global economic problems and the turmoil in the world, but Windows XP is really a product that I think will bring a lot of energy and excitement and enthusiasm to the PC industry. So we're very proud about launching this product today.
I think it's important for me to set a context on the overall direction of software.
Bill Gates likes to call this the "digital decade".
The digital decade is a decade that will be defined by software working on new hardware devices and shaping new experiences. There is much we need to do. The world sometimes has the opinion that the technology industry has done so much over the course of the last 20 years, 30 years, that there's nothing left to do. I think that when we look back ten years from now, we will see this next decade as perhaps more important and having seen more advances than the last decade.
Software integration
It's still very difficult to get apps to work together, devices to work together, businesses to work together. The problem is just making two pieces of software connect. How do I make sure that my cell phone has the same contacts as my laptop? A simple problem, but one which everyone wants to do. How do I get my computers to talk to my viewers' computers? A simple problem, but lots of people have a hard time making it happen.
Inside my company
How do I take my SAP system and my Seabold system, how do I make them communicate? I think the range of devices people use will expand. Sometimes people say to me, is it going to be mobile phones or is it going to be computers? My point of view is that most people will have more than one device and one intelligence in all of those devices, whether they fit in the pocket, they sit next to the TV set or it's the PC/notebook itself.
I think that the world will change in a lot of ways.
If I look carefully into our audience tonight, I see a lot of people with paper and pencil. I don't see a lot of people carrying laptop computers. What we need is a computer that is like a laptop, but it's smaller, it's thinner, its lighter, you write on it, it's great for reading, it's great for note taking - I'd love to be beaming this whole presentation - my picture, heaven forbid (!) - the slides, over an 802.11 network. You could be receiving it, recording it on your hard disk, making annotations - "He's not making sense right now. Oh, I like that!" Whatever your thoughts and reactions are, whatever you want to share with your colleagues. We would be a virtual community in cyberspace. Perhaps you'd notice that a friend of yours is at the back and you'd want to meet later for a coffee, you'd send them an instant message.
That's the world of the future.
Reading, note-taking, digital media, real-time communications.
Windows XP is the first major platform release for this "digital decade", the first decade of the 21st century. And it is important, as I said, in the way that we bring together DOS, and the world of DOS, which was followed by Windows and Windows 95, and 98 and ME,... and the world of Windows NT.
NT represented business reliability, but never had compatibility with the range of devices and applications used in the home. When I first took Windows 2000 home and installed it for my wife and children, I was told to remove it the next day. I said, "why, did it crash?" they said, "no, it doesn't run Quack2, our favorite game." Quark2 runs on Windows XP.
We wanted to combine though that reliability with the usability and compatibility that came with the DOS world. And we have done that. There are still two versions of Windows XP: a home version and a professional version. But the professional version is the superset of the home version and all applications run, all device drivers run, seamlessly on the two products. And they run on the much more reliable Windows NT code base.
If you take a look at what it took to create Windows XP.
It took about 5,700 people focused on the project. We have 11 people actually focused on doing the German version literally in Seattle. The actual translation doesn't get there, but German, English and Japanese are the three most significant versions that we develop to make sure that we really have a worldwide product. We tested over 5,500 applications, and over 15,000 different peripheral devices. We had a beta test of almost ¾ of a million people, including over 50,000 people here in Germany. And those users identified almost 2,000 "opportunities" for improvement. That's a nice way of saying "BUGS!".
We also had over 19 Enterprise Development Partners who participated with us really from the start of the product, to make sure that it was a product that really made sense, not only for he consumer world, but also for the business world.
We claim that Win XP really will be the new standard
Expect to see it on all new machines. Corporations will certainly still be able to get earlier versions. But in order to meet that high #volume, we not only had to deliver on that compatibility that I talked about, but we also had to be better in every sense. More reliable. Well, we're about ten times more reliable than Windows ME and with greater reliability even than Windows 2000. Faster - more secure - more useable, easy to deploy. All of those tests were met. If Windows XP is to replace all that has come before it, those were necessary.
That doesn't take into account all the new capabilities for users and developers to build on. But simply to be a replacement that could bring together the world and emerge as THE standard for the Windows world.
From a benchmarking perspective, if you just take a look on commercial benchmarks, we do very well.
Boot time?
We are much faster than we've been, but we still haven't realized our goal of "instant on", but the machine is much faster coming up than we've been. I frankly never turn my machine off; I just "stand by". And we're much faster resuming from standby and hibernation. And if you look at the start up time on applications, again, we've made a set of improvements.
The thing I'm most excited about really, despite the fact that users will notice that the system is much more reliable, is the new capabilities we've built in both for the home market and for the business market.
From the home perspective
there are some things that are really worth noting. The first is digital media. Digital camcorders dig cameras. The sales are booming up really rapidly. But the number of people that are really able to comfortably operate their digital image devices with the PCs is really quite small. So whether it be music, video or photos, we've included the capabilities to easily plug the device into an XP system. To have it recognized, to capture the information, to manage it. Just even things as simple as renaming all of your pictures automatically is built into the system. We have the notion of burning CDs built-in, if you want to save your digital movies, that's easy. More and more homes around the world have multiple PCs, they want to share a broadband Internet connection, and they want to share printers and other expensive devices. We've built in simple, easy support for home networking. And I think just the infrastructure here is interesting, not only to the end-user, but also to people building new devices. New services, photo printing, video management services, as well as people building next generation digital media applications.
From the business perspective
and one of the questions I get asked a lot is: "Is there something in Windows XP for the business customer?"
And I point primarily to three things. The first one applies frankly just as well to the home market. But that's this notion of communication. We've built a platform for real-time communication directly into the system. The interesting applications aren't the ones that are built into the system. It's the applications that people will build on top. Applications that allow us to collaborate, to have videoconferences, to share spreadsheets and documents. Real time, at once, while we're having meetings.
Mobility and wireless networking support was enhanced. I think 802.11 and GPRS networking for laptops is a huge idea. And the support that we have started to build in to XP really enables 802.11 especially to take off.
If you forget a document on your machine at work? When you go home. No problem. We actually let you access your desktop remotely with capabilities that are built into Windows XP. Need to help somebody else with a problem? No problem. On top of the real time communications infrastructure built in to XP, we've built a very nice help and support application.
My wife's mother doesn't always get everything right first time on her computer. She sometimes has questions. Now we both have XP, she simply lets me know she needs help, and I just take control of her machine and show her how to do something, and I'm sitting there in my den two hundred miles away from where she lives. Simple, easy, convenient and built under the real time communications infrastructure of Windows XP.
One of the questions that I get most often is: "How does Windows XP relate to what we're doing with .NET?"
.NET is
of course, our new platform that we're in the process of rolling out, that will allow users and developers to benefit in an application integration sense from the so-called "XML standard" that is developing in the Internet. XML is a platform for integration.
When I think about what I'd really like on my computer, I'd like to be able to set up a page. It'd have my calendar, my email, my wife's calendar (because that's the "Mission Critical" application in her life). I'd like to have the reports on all customers that I'm seeing on a given day on my desk, I'd like some stock leads, I'd like my little Excel spreadsheet that I use to calculate, some "what-if" analyses on companies MS ought to buy. That's what I want on my desk. And I want to be able to connect these things, display them on one computer and connect them.
For example, my wife uses the MSN calendar; I use the Exchange calendar. My wife wishes I would just compare those two things. How do I do that? That's just one of the problems that we're trying to confront with XML and .NET. That kind of bridge integration.
Some of that will happen on clients, some of that will happen on servers, but some of that really happens best out in the Internet itself.
A very good example.
I was in the UK earlier today. They have an online bank in the UK. They want to notify people when something changes in their balance. They don't want to have to issue the person a password, figure out how to send them email or instant message. They want to use the infrastructure that exists in a platform. If you take a look at Windows XP and it's support for our first .NET services: passport .NET, the way the Windows XP Messenger accepts the .NET alerts, the extensibility for photo sharing and photo-printing. I was with travel companies today, auction companies today, financial services companies today, retailers today. And all of them are viewing the real time infrastructure, as well as the .NET services that are built into Windows XP, as a platform to do interesting new applications and web sites.
In addition
XP has support for key technologies and protocols like SOAP, XML and .NET, available as it comes to market.
For Windows XP to emerge, frankly, it will require a lot more than just the work of Microsoft. This is a product, like all Windows releases, that only succeeds to the degree third parties: software companies, computer companies, peripherals companies, do exciting work.
People think that Microsoft has a broad ambition.
The broad ambition we have is to galvanize the work of others. There are 12,000 devices supported just on this CD. There are thousands of applications, 3,200 to be precise, that have already been redesigned for Windows XP. We have 200 partners working - logo certified 550 more signing up, each week. The major system vendors are all there. We've worked more closely with Intel on Windows XP than any other earlier Windows release, really optimizing it for the Pentium IV. Software vendors, computer vendors, web site builders,... we need the industry now to get with the process of building a set of new and exciting experiences.
Windows XP itself delivers a lot for users.
But it will become more and more if the industry delivers. There's already in the market place over 30 million Windows XP-ready PCs and we've have preorders for over 100 000 copies. People will purchase before we even ship. If you take a look, we have commitments from enterprises to deploy over one million units: including citigroup at 80, 000, Reed Elsevier in Holland at 42,000, Enel.it in Italy at 23,000 and Wells Fargo Bank in the US at 100,000. Certainly the rate of uptake and acceptance of XP as a potential new standard is a lot more rapid even than Windows 95 itself.
I think this is an exciting launch.
It's a product that is getting very, very good reviews, from customers, from reviews, from analysts. I read a quote to day in the newspaper from a journalist that said, "I'm not a journalist who is inclined to like Microsoft, I'm not inclined to like them at all, but I have to say that Windows XP is absolutely the best operating system that I have ever seen and I wouldn't be with out it."
I hope you get an opportunity to really dig in and look at the product. I know we've shown you some and it's a really rich product. We could demonstrate it for over an hour and still not be able to show you all that's really there.
So we are excited and enthused to have a chance to do this launch and we appreciate so very much your taking the time to be with us these evening and welcome to the "digital decade" an welcome to Windows XP. Thank you all very much.