Bill Gates and Jeff RaikesUnified Communications LaunchWord下载.docx

1、 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Chairman, Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates.BILL GATES: Thank you. Well, its exciting to be here this morning. Welcome to our Unified Communications Launch. Whats this all about? Well, Microsoft is all about the magic of software, taking software and letting peo

2、ple be more productive, and more creative. And what todays announcement is about is taking the magic of software and applying it to phone calls. We dont just say phone calls because, of course, once you get software in the mix, the capabilities go way beyond what anybody thinks of today when we thin

3、k of phone calls. But really the milestone that were at is that were finally bringing to this idea of trying to get in contact with somebody, knowing what number to call, knowing how to connect many people together, knowing when theyre available, were bringing the magic of software.In fact, this is

4、a complete transformation of the business of the traditional PBX. The PBX in some ways is almost like the mainframe was many years ago where all of the functionality was there in that one piece. And the way that you had flexibility to add value, to customize, to bring in third parties to do new thin

5、gs, it just isnt there in that structure. And so by moving phone calls onto the Internet, using the powerful industry standard servers, weve got a very different way of being able to do things. And that can lead not only to lower cost, but far more effectiveness in how your employees work within you

6、r company, or with customers and partners outside your company.So what are the factors that are driving this forward? Well, we have some very big mega trends. We have the incredible performance improvements in hardware, the magic of Moores Law, that exponential improvement where the chips get twice

7、as many transistors every 18 months. It means that the speed of your network continues to go up. In fact, the people who put information on optic fiber see no limit in sight to the constant improvement they make. So youve got the capacity in the network.The performance of the computers in terms of d

8、oing things like taking and processing the video, or processing the audio, we now have the full capacity to do that. So hardware is not holding us back at all. In fact, youve seen the explosion of audio and video essentially being an essential part of experiencing the Internet. The Internet in the b

9、eginning was about text, slowly but surely pictures came in. People with dial-up didnt like that, but there were less and less of those people. That came to be taken for granted. And now, music, video are a standard data type, and thats the performance in bandwidth that weve got available here.The d

10、igitization of the economy means that as a company youve got digital records about your customers and whats going on. When they call in, of course, that should just show up on the screen. If you pass the call around the information about who is doing what, what the issue is, all of that should just

11、pass around. So as we digitize, the idea that the phone call is outside of that structure becomes more and evident that it really is the one thing that hasnt been pulled in and subject to the software and hardware revolution.The advances in software are very important here. The way that we do this r

12、edundancy to make these systems incredibly high quality. The way that we can take, even when the connections arent happening, find new ways to make those connections, so we get extreme reliability. And then finally the end devices themselves, the portable computers you take everywhere. PC sales are

13、growing, but portable PC sales are growing as a share of PC sales. So not only the phones themselves being far, far better, but the Windows PC that youve got with you on the road also being far more pervasive and far better than it was. So these are the trends that we build on in order to be able to

14、 say that now is the time when communications will be revolutionized.So starting with the phone call, but bringing in screen sharing, bringing in video, bringing in collaboration, bringing in the ability to put even in a business application the richness of this unified communication.We can look aro

15、und our office and say, theres a lot of changes that have taken place. If you go back 30 years, the computer of 30 years ago was either hidden away in the data center, or it was a kit computer. Ive shown there the Altair, thats the computer that got me to drop out of school. Looks good, its got swit

16、ches, and lights, and it had paper tape. Very impressive. So youd have to say that even every 10 years or so what you think about that personal computer has been very different. In 1987, by then the IBM PC style with MS-DOS was standard, so called 16-bit computing. By 1997, the graphic user interfac

17、e had come in, and the Internet was starting to be central phenomena. And here in 2007, were starting to get speech and video and ink and things that go way beyond even just 10 years ago.Likewise with your mobile phone, 30 years ago only a few people had these huge briefcase things. Ten years later,

18、 the first big device came out. And then in 1997, you could say things like the Motorola （Starpack ?） really brought mobile telephony into the mainstream. And today we have devices that have little keyboards, and cameras, and thats pretty phenomenal the software revolution thats taking place on thos

19、e mobile phone devices. In fact, the key players in that mobile phone business over time are more likely to be people who are great at doing software. Its not just the hardware of connecting up a voice call, its a lot more because thats the device you carry with you.In contrast to the great innovati

20、on weve seen with the PC in that mobile phone, consider the business phone that youve got in your office. It still looks pretty much the same. Most of them have, if they have any display at all, its a fairly small display. They do have a lot of buttons, and you look at those buttons and say, wow, I

21、wonder who uses those buttons? These things, because its so opaque whats going on, and because you dont like dropping a phone call, people really dont even use the features thats there. Its kind of frozen, and theres nothing a third party could do to make it richer, or to make it better. So it reall

22、y jumps out as the element in our life of rich digital communications as the thing that needs to be changed, and it can be changed.We surveyed people recently about how they think about that desk phone, and we found that one in three have successfully transferred a phone call. Now thats the most bas

23、ic functionality you can imagine. Even less people have been successful at setting up a standard kind of conference call. So the buttons, adding the buttons, and all that, thats just not going to work. In the PC world, with things like Exchange and Active Directory, the idea of knowing who an employ

24、ee is, their relationship to other people, being able to figure out what information theyre granted access to, this idea of a directory as an important tool in the company, having groups and things like that, has become mainstream. While the PBX has stood out by itself, where that directory, in term

25、s of keeping it up to date, managing it, has been very, very different. So this has been in its own world, not touched by the magic of software. So that central power of innovation, software innovation is being brought to the business phone experience.Now, this is also not just a technological chang

26、e, but its a change in the business structure so that the opportunity for people to come in and do new things is much larger. In the older world everything changed in a kind of vertically integrated communications stack. The person you bought the server from, the person you bought the directory soft

27、ware from, the person you bought the applications from, the person you bought the hardware device that sat on the desk, that was one company. And that model worked just fine, because the pieces worked together, and this was a fairly large market.But, it meant that once you picked one of those PBX ve

28、ndors, that was it. And, in fact, often the business model there was that even if they didnt make a lot of money on that initial sale, things having to do with, oh, you want to move a phone, now were talking, now we can make some money off of you, because you want to move that phone. For Microsoft j

29、ust to set up, say, a new office with a phone was over US$700, and the lead time was about a week.So that actually became a critical task. We move people around a lot, as were getting people working together in different groups and things like that, its a real point of frustration, because we think

30、of it as just, hey, its an entry in the directory. You type in their new office number, and tell them to walk over there, and that should just be done. But, because of the way this had its own network, its own directory, its owneven wiring, the way it was connected together, there wasnt much you cou

31、ld do. And so people just accepted it in that form.So how is that going to change away from a vertical model? Well, the answer is that weve seen this before. This is just like the computer industry was before the personal computer came along. And the change agents there were Microsoft, as a software platform, Intel and the other chip companies that took the magic of doing the hardware piece and brought that down to the chip level, did a fantastic job on that. So it became a horizontally oriented structure.So we can take that vertical approach and turn it on its side, and now say, oka