[00:13.74]It’s great to be here and have a chance to share some of my excitement with you.
[00:19.23]I got involved with computers at 18.
[00:22.25]And the computer was a very limited teletype that had to be connected through a phone line
[00:27.88]up to a mainframe like computer, but my friends and I became fascinated with understanding what the computer can do,
[00:35.81]what was the future, and how would it be used. When we found out about chip technology,
[00:42.28]and the miracle of being able to improve the power of the chip exponentially,
[00:47.91]we realized that computers had a very bright future.
[00:53.94]We spent a lot of our time writing software because we loved writing software,
[00:59.08]because we thought that the software being written by a lot of big hardware companies wasn’t as good as what we could do.
[01:07.50]I was 19 when I realized that if I wanted to be the first to do a software company for these new cheap computers,
[01:15.44]I needed to get my friends together and start right away,
[01:19.48]so Microsoft became the first company doing software for these new machines.
[01:26.17]Our vision was a computer on every desk and in every home. In the last 20 years,
[01:33.18]that vision is certainly becoming a reality. If we had to change it today,
[01:40.23]we would simply add that now we also want to have a computer in every pocket,
[01:45.90]every car - many other places that we had not thought about when we first started doing development.
[01:53.58]I believe software is the key element that really unlocks the power of all this technology,
[02:00.08]and the idea of making it easy to find information, easy to create information, easy to communicate with other people.
[02:09.90]Software is at the center of that, and so software will be the fastest growing industry in the world
[02:18.31]and one that will create lots and lots of great jobs.
[02:23.48]Certainly here in China the opportunity for hundreds of thousands of great jobs should be very exciting because
[02:30.52]there is a global shortage in terms of computer skills.
[02:35.21]The personal computer revolution got started in 1975, that’s when I left college and started Microsoft.
[02:43.12]These last 22 years have really been amazing, every prediction we’ve made about improvements have all come true.
[02:53.03]As we look ahead, that pace of innovation is not slowing down, in fact if anything it’s speeding up.
[03:02.89]Very high speed processors like 300MHz Pentiums, or new 64 bit processors that we’re already developing Windows NT for;
[03:12.84]incredible storage capacity, which will let us store, not just data, but also digital video as well;
[03:22.07]great screen technology to create a tablet like device that would be good enough for reading and writing;
[03:29.11]advanced graphics and now the ability to connect computers together at very high speed.
[03:36.76]The Internet is the way that all these machines can be connected together. And those standards,
[03:43.26]and the improvement of those standards, is very very important.
[03:49.93]Some people like to think about how the computer industry compares to other industries.
[03:55.53]I’ve shown before what the cost of the typical car was in 1980 in US,
[04:01.77]and that rose up to be about from 8,000 to 19,000 today, and likewise cereal has increased in price.
[04:11.27]How does that compare to PCs? If the same model was followed for PCs,
[04:19.01]you can buy a car for 27 cents and cereal for less than one cent,
[04:25.12]so there’s no other area of the economy that has this rapid improvement, and people just aren’t used to it.
[04:33.33]You almost have to tell people, “What would you do if Internet computing power was free.”
[04:40.22]Because that’s what we’ll be able to deliver with all these improvements.
[04:45.19]Microsoft’s vision of computing is global computing.
[04:49.39]We see PCs connected to the Internet making the world a smaller place, and that’s positive in so many ways:
[04:58.95]to bulid understanding between people, to share research in key science areas, including medicine,
[05:07.16]to allow world commerce to work very well. And the Internet is driving this already.
[05:13.82]Microsoft has set up cooperations around the world,
[05:17.82]and we are very pleased with the success we’re having here in China.
[05:22.97]We are doing significant software development on products here, and that will continue to increase,
[05:29.40]and key for us is having very very high quality software people,
[05:34.75]and we’ve been lucky to hire a great number of people from this university.
[05:39.74]Really I’d say that the core of the teams we’ve put together have come from here,
[05:45.00]and I’ve listed some of those employees here, and we certainly hope that in the future this list will increase dramatically,
[05:53.26]and the quality of our work continues to rise.(To be continued)
