Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Government Leaders Forum Americas Washington, D.C. April 27, 2005
BILL GATES: Well, good afternoon and thanks for joining us for our Government Leaders Forum.
It's very exciting to talk about the future because advances in technology guarantee that we'll be able to improve things in the future, improve education in a very dramatic way, improve education, improve products, improve the whole way that the world communicates.
And this is all happening very rapidly, so the opportunity to sit down together and think about how technology can change government and let it really advance the needs of citizens I think is a wonderful thing. We can share best practices, talk about what challenges people have faced, and really make sure we go at this together.
Certainly, for Microsoft, working with government is one of our top priorities. It's the sector where we've done more special work than any other, and I think that's fully justified. Within government, obviously, education alone is a huge area for us, both for providing software at low cost, for working with people on curricula and moving that over to a digital approach, because after all education is really the investment a country makes in its future. And if we think about the jobs of the future, we think about competitiveness in the future, you always keep coming back to education as the number one factor that makes a difference there.
An Economy Without Barriers
The world is changing very rapidly. Recent books like Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" that I recommend really chronicle this idea that more and more people are participating in an economy without barriers, so the opportunity to create products is much more based on your level of education than it is based on where you're located.
It's really this combination of capitalistic approaches in more and more countries including China and India and many others, and the arrival of Internet-type technology, that's changing the framework we live in. And for Friedman it was kind of a wake-up call to say, wow, when did this happen, how over the last decade did it all come together, and really saying that every country has to step back and think through its role, how it renews its excellence in this era. He highlights that developing countries, they need to get the network, the education, the policies in so they're participating in benefiting but even countries, developed countries like the United States need to look at the efficiencies and the policies and the renewal of some of the things in education that we aren't doing quite as well in order for us to have the appropriate role and contribution in doing this.
Technology as a Major Change Event
And so technology is a major change agent. Sometimes we talk about that at a very concrete level, disks getting twice as big every two years, optic fiber sending twice as much data every two years, the graphics performance, these flat-panel displays; the ability of the phone to be more than a voice device, the idea that you're going to get little maps on your phone, it's going to show you the things that are nearby, show you friends or colleagues who might be in the area, it's going to let you use that as the electronic wallet, the information that you care about would be brought to you automatically instead of you having to go get it. That's very straightforward, it's very clear.
So the PC is your desktop device and your portable machine with the big screen, your phone in your pocket, those are the end points that will get more and more intelligence. Those end points will have things like ink recognition so just writing on the Tablet-type PC will be a common thing. They'll have speech recognition, so giving voice commands; they'll have telephony capability, so being able to make calls, have your voicemail all be there; those things we'll take for granted.
The readability of that screen will be even better than paper, so getting, whether it's textbooks and avoiding that cost in your educational sector or government documents, avoiding the government printing, making it easy to search and find those so you've always got the up to date information, getting rid of paper forms; the quality of that screen interaction will really surprise everyone both in terms of how it comes down in cost and in its quality.
But if we look at education, we think about a Tablet PC for every student, and we know we need to get the price down from the $2,000 or so it is today. We can see over the next four years getting that down to $500 or $600 and then you're at the point where the amount you save on textbooks and having things be up to date actually is almost paid for to support that hardware budget.
So some very ambitious goals, one network, which is the high-speed Internet reaching out to businesses and homes, and a set of software technologies that allow software to interoperate in a rich way.
Three-Month Projects, Not Three Years
We're not saying to government that you need to get rid of your old systems and switch over to PCs and Windows; rather, we're saying as you're doing new things we can fit in with the software you have today. We're saying that software projects with the latest tools shouldn't be a matter of three-plus years, they should often be more like three-month projects where you can see the results and make evolutionary progress in building better Web sites, in having your workers in government take advantage of SharePoint or Live Meeting or ways that they can get their job done through software more effectively, and yet just leveraging the fact they already often have a PC, they're connected up to the Internet, but that the software and the practices aren't completely up to date.
Now, as we're developing our IT technology, really sitting down and seeing where the boundary between the government and the citizen can improve, that's an area of particular excitement for us. That's where we say let's eliminate the paper forms, that's where we say let's make processes more transparent, whether it's how quickly an application gets processed or how the bidding process for the government procurement gets done; those can be very, very simple software systems.
There are so many examples where the government procurement process was so expensive that it ate up the benefit of the bidding process. A good example in the United States is when a school district wanted to sell used equipment, it cost them more than the value of the equipment to go through the process. Now if they're connected up to the right software, it's almost no overhead at all, they can do it themselves, they can work through a third party, but it's really the Internet and software working for them.
More Approachable Government
So the government can be more approachable, government can be more efficient, citizens can take something like changing their address and do that once and not have to think about the national level, the regional level, the city level, they can think about seeing what's going on with their benefits or seeing what's going on with their children's healthcare or educational activities in a much better way.
A good example of that is in New York City; we allow parents to actually just call in on the phone and check their student's attendance and grades so that if their child is not really telling them exactly what's going on they don't even have to go to a PC -- they can but it's also just a simple dial-up thing so that they're involved in doing the right thing there.
There's a lot of standards that drive these new systems and make them richer, and they're standards that span all the different types of hardware and software. The Internet standards are a key foundation piece. The PC standard is a key foundation piece. Many Microsoft pieces, like Microsoft Office being a way that you can exchange presentations or spreadsheets, fit into that as well.
Interoperability
We have an overall initiative we call our Government Interoperability Initiative. and that's a lot of material to help people know how those standards come together to really help them and as they're doing new systems how should they think about interoperability.
We've been driving interoperability because the idea that, as you look at changing any part of your infrastructure. that we could come in with Windows and yet connect up to the non-Windows systems, that's very advantageous for us. The trend to use lower-cost hardware, to use packaged software to replace a lot of personnel costs and custom software, you know, that means the overall spend can come down even as these systems are getting much more effective.
We need to see partnerships between all the IT companies and the governments; we need to take a long-term approach in terms of what we're doing.
One of the things that has led to Microsoft having great success in South America is that over the last several decades even as software and IT sales would often go through peaks and valleys, we knew that, long term, that we wanted to be there and working together with the government. So as we kept our personnel very steady and working on those projects, and other people were kind of re-staffing according to the current economic conditions, that meant that we built up an asset with partners and in terms of the very tough long-term problems like educational reform, like using these systems for deep transparency.
And so the commitment to this sector goes back a long time. It's very recently that the state-of-the-art technology makes us very optimistic that so much can be done, that you can take projects that are very well defined, whether it's a portal or having a dashboard where government workers track what's going on, track quality and efficiency, make those things very, very easy to set up.
Technology Benchmarks
There are a number of policy issues around technology that go even beyond investing in education, issues like how do you get competitive Internet access so that you have broadband. That's something that makes all your industries more competitive. Every country should participate in the technology sector, but you should understand your benchmark of whether technology is helping you or on a relative basis. It shouldn't just be that sector, it should be the use of technology in every industry that you have because that will determine competitiveness; so in the government, in technology, job creation, startup but then everywhere. Education itself using technology, the healthcare sector, your exporters, your manufacturers, they need to do that.
As we look at China, which in some ways will set the benchmark for many things, the rapid adoption of technology there is certainly a best practice. The rapid effort to take their universities that have been behind and get them to catch up, maybe first trying to catch up to India and some others, but eventually with the goal of catching up even to the very best in the world, that is certainly a challenge to be watched and it's certainly an area where everybody can be a winner. If we all step up and make these investments, the goods and services that are sold on a global basis will raise living standards, and that's been the trend and technology should just make that trend go faster.
There are policy issues having to do with making sure computer systems aren't used inappropriately, things like spam, parental control. Microsoft is very involved in these things trying to make sure software does the right thing and making sure there's the right advice as you're looking at having your privacy laws. As you're looking at intellectual property protection, definitely in this new area having the incentive for people to do innovative work in your country will make a very big difference. When Europe looked at their so-called Lisbon Agenda trying to drive innovation, the idea they weren't incenting universities to get involved in creating intellectual property and getting some of the licensing fees from that emerged as one of the things that the U.S. had done that hey had not done. So this is definitely an environment where that will be more important.
Partnerships in Unlimited Potential
Microsoft also wants to be a partner in helping out with projects that, although not commercial in nature, really show off how software is empowering. We have two program names for this. One is particularly what we do in education, Partners in Learning, and I expect we're already working with every one of your countries, and we can do even more to take that educational connection and make sure that at the right age kids are getting that exposure, that your universities are getting the very best so they can create products that sell into the world market, sell to where the users are rather than creating something unique that doesn't drive that global opportunity.
The second area we call Unlimited Potential. That's everything outside of education where you're making access to computing more effective. Often that's with libraries, community centers. It's quite varied and it's done in different countries in different ways, and so we seek input on that.
Today we're announcing an expansion of one of those citizenship programs, and although it's just one of many, many that we do like this, I think it's a great example. This is with the Organization of American States partnership. They've created what they call Opportunities for Employment through Technology in the Americas. This focuses on people with disabilities and so what we've got here is seven different countries that we're giving grants of software and cash. In every country it's over a $50,000 grant and what will happen is that you create Community Technology Centers particularly focused on disabled youth in the seven different countries. And so just an example and I love being able to over time going out and visiting these places. Microsoft employees get a lot of their excitement from seeing software at work, not just in corporations, making them effective, but going out to community centers and schools and seeing that and often volunteering their time to help out as well.
Clearly technology is going to be part of how the world achieves the very ambitious Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations set for 2015. Those are going to be tough to achieve, particularly in Africa and parts of Asia, but technology is what is causing this rising tide of understanding, technology for literacy, technology for agricultural productivity, technology for government transparency and outreach.
We have a goal to bring technology by 2010 to 250 million people who did not have access to technology. Part of that is through community centers where you can come in and share the machine or Internet cafes where a private provider comes in and yet has the latest and greatest in software.
PC Refurbisher Program
Another outreach program that we've had that's been very successful is taking PCs that are used in corporations that are no longer state of the art but could be used in other settings, nonprofit or educational settings and making sure that they can get the latest software in those.
We piloted this program in the United States, it's called the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher Program, and now we're extending it to all the countries represented here. For example, we have a big company up in Canada that's going to jump on this and be able to put good software in these used machines and then we go around to corporations and see what they have available. And so far, since 2001 when we started, this we've done hundreds of thousands of systems, and by the end of the decade we expect that there will be more than a million systems out there. And just one example that can help and make accessibility quite a bit broader.
So software is going amazing places, solving the tough problems that have taken a long time, a lot of R&D, we're spending over $6 billion a year, but we know that speech recognition and visual recognition and all the tough problems, even dealing with the security challenges, are things that software can meet and be an even better tool for development.
And so we're very excited to partner with you and see where in your country, in the government, in the educational institutions, anywhere we can help bring that magic of software to bear and that's why a dialogue like the one we've had in this conference is so important to us.
Bill Gates-Government Leaders Forum
http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0504/24577/Bill_Gates_Keynote_300k.asx
Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Government Leaders Forum Americas
Washington, D.C.
April 27, 2005
BILL GATES: Well, good afternoon and thanks for joining us for our Government Leaders Forum.
It's very exciting to talk about the future because advances in technology guarantee that we'll be able to improve things in the future, improve education in a very dramatic way, improve education, improve products, improve the whole way that the world communicates.
And this is all happening very rapidly, so the opportunity to sit down together and think about how technology can change government and let it really advance the needs of citizens I think is a wonderful thing. We can share best practices, talk about what challenges people have faced, and really make sure we go at this together.
Certainly, for Microsoft, working with government is one of our top priorities. It's the sector where we've done more special work than any other, and I think that's fully justified. Within government, obviously, education alone is a huge area for us, both for providing software at low cost, for working with people on curricula and moving that over to a digital approach, because after all education is really the investment a country makes in its future. And if we think about the jobs of the future, we think about competitiveness in the future, you always keep coming back to education as the number one factor that makes a difference there.
An Economy Without Barriers
The world is changing very rapidly. Recent books like Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" that I recommend really chronicle this idea that more and more people are participating in an economy without barriers, so the opportunity to create products is much more based on your level of education than it is based on where you're located.
It's really this combination of capitalistic approaches in more and more countries including China and India and many others, and the arrival of Internet-type technology, that's changing the framework we live in. And for Friedman it was kind of a wake-up call to say, wow, when did this happen, how over the last decade did it all come together, and really saying that every country has to step back and think through its role, how it renews its excellence in this era. He highlights that developing countries, they need to get the network, the education, the policies in so they're participating in benefiting but even countries, developed countries like the United States need to look at the efficiencies and the policies and the renewal of some of the things in education that we aren't doing quite as well in order for us to have the appropriate role and contribution in doing this.
Technology as a Major Change Event
And so technology is a major change agent. Sometimes we talk about that at a very concrete level, disks getting twice as big every two years, optic fiber sending twice as much data every two years, the graphics performance, these flat-panel displays; the ability of the phone to be more than a voice device, the idea that you're going to get little maps on your phone, it's going to show you the things that are nearby, show you friends or colleagues who might be in the area, it's going to let you use that as the electronic wallet, the information that you care about would be brought to you automatically instead of you having to go get it. That's very straightforward, it's very clear.
So the PC is your desktop device and your portable machine with the big screen, your phone in your pocket, those are the end points that will get more and more intelligence. Those end points will have things like ink recognition so just writing on the Tablet-type PC will be a common thing. They'll have speech recognition, so giving voice commands; they'll have telephony capability, so being able to make calls, have your voicemail all be there; those things we'll take for granted.
The readability of that screen will be even better than paper, so getting, whether it's textbooks and avoiding that cost in your educational sector or government documents, avoiding the government printing, making it easy to search and find those so you've always got the up to date information, getting rid of paper forms; the quality of that screen interaction will really surprise everyone both in terms of how it comes down in cost and in its quality.
But if we look at education, we think about a Tablet PC for every student, and we know we need to get the price down from the $2,000 or so it is today. We can see over the next four years getting that down to $500 or $600 and then you're at the point where the amount you save on textbooks and having things be up to date actually is almost paid for to support that hardware budget.
So some very ambitious goals, one network, which is the high-speed Internet reaching out to businesses and homes, and a set of software technologies that allow software to interoperate in a rich way.
Three-Month Projects, Not Three Years
We're not saying to government that you need to get rid of your old systems and switch over to PCs and Windows; rather, we're saying as you're doing new things we can fit in with the software you have today. We're saying that software projects with the latest tools shouldn't be a matter of three-plus years, they should often be more like three-month projects where you can see the results and make evolutionary progress in building better Web sites, in having your workers in government take advantage of SharePoint or Live Meeting or ways that they can get their job done through software more effectively, and yet just leveraging the fact they already often have a PC, they're connected up to the Internet, but that the software and the practices aren't completely up to date.
Now, as we're developing our IT technology, really sitting down and seeing where the boundary between the government and the citizen can improve, that's an area of particular excitement for us. That's where we say let's eliminate the paper forms, that's where we say let's make processes more transparent, whether it's how quickly an application gets processed or how the bidding process for the government procurement gets done; those can be very, very simple software systems.
There are so many examples where the government procurement process was so expensive that it ate up the benefit of the bidding process. A good example in the United States is when a school district wanted to sell used equipment, it cost them more than the value of the equipment to go through the process. Now if they're connected up to the right software, it's almost no overhead at all, they can do it themselves, they can work through a third party, but it's really the Internet and software working for them.
More Approachable Government
So the government can be more approachable, government can be more efficient, citizens can take something like changing their address and do that once and not have to think about the national level, the regional level, the city level, they can think about seeing what's going on with their benefits or seeing what's going on with their children's healthcare or educational activities in a much better way.
A good example of that is in New York City; we allow parents to actually just call in on the phone and check their student's attendance and grades so that if their child is not really telling them exactly what's going on they don't even have to go to a PC -- they can but it's also just a simple dial-up thing so that they're involved in doing the right thing there.
There's a lot of standards that drive these new systems and make them richer, and they're standards that span all the different types of hardware and software. The Internet standards are a key foundation piece. The PC standard is a key foundation piece. Many Microsoft pieces, like Microsoft Office being a way that you can exchange presentations or spreadsheets, fit into that as well.
Interoperability
We have an overall initiative we call our Government Interoperability Initiative. and that's a lot of material to help people know how those standards come together to really help them and as they're doing new systems how should they think about interoperability.
We've been driving interoperability because the idea that, as you look at changing any part of your infrastructure. that we could come in with Windows and yet connect up to the non-Windows systems, that's very advantageous for us. The trend to use lower-cost hardware, to use packaged software to replace a lot of personnel costs and custom software, you know, that means the overall spend can come down even as these systems are getting much more effective.
We need to see partnerships between all the IT companies and the governments; we need to take a long-term approach in terms of what we're doing.
One of the things that has led to Microsoft having great success in South America is that over the last several decades even as software and IT sales would often go through peaks and valleys, we knew that, long term, that we wanted to be there and working together with the government. So as we kept our personnel very steady and working on those projects, and other people were kind of re-staffing according to the current economic conditions, that meant that we built up an asset with partners and in terms of the very tough long-term problems like educational reform, like using these systems for deep transparency.
And so the commitment to this sector goes back a long time. It's very recently that the state-of-the-art technology makes us very optimistic that so much can be done, that you can take projects that are very well defined, whether it's a portal or having a dashboard where government workers track what's going on, track quality and efficiency, make those things very, very easy to set up.
Technology Benchmarks
There are a number of policy issues around technology that go even beyond investing in education, issues like how do you get competitive Internet access so that you have broadband. That's something that makes all your industries more competitive. Every country should participate in the technology sector, but you should understand your benchmark of whether technology is helping you or on a relative basis. It shouldn't just be that sector, it should be the use of technology in every industry that you have because that will determine competitiveness; so in the government, in technology, job creation, startup but then everywhere. Education itself using technology, the healthcare sector, your exporters, your manufacturers, they need to do that.
As we look at China, which in some ways will set the benchmark for many things, the rapid adoption of technology there is certainly a best practice. The rapid effort to take their universities that have been behind and get them to catch up, maybe first trying to catch up to India and some others, but eventually with the goal of catching up even to the very best in the world, that is certainly a challenge to be watched and it's certainly an area where everybody can be a winner. If we all step up and make these investments, the goods and services that are sold on a global basis will raise living standards, and that's been the trend and technology should just make that trend go faster.
There are policy issues having to do with making sure computer systems aren't used inappropriately, things like spam, parental control. Microsoft is very involved in these things trying to make sure software does the right thing and making sure there's the right advice as you're looking at having your privacy laws. As you're looking at intellectual property protection, definitely in this new area having the incentive for people to do innovative work in your country will make a very big difference. When Europe looked at their so-called Lisbon Agenda trying to drive innovation, the idea they weren't incenting universities to get involved in creating intellectual property and getting some of the licensing fees from that emerged as one of the things that the U.S. had done that hey had not done. So this is definitely an environment where that will be more important.
Partnerships in Unlimited Potential
Microsoft also wants to be a partner in helping out with projects that, although not commercial in nature, really show off how software is empowering. We have two program names for this. One is particularly what we do in education, Partners in Learning, and I expect we're already working with every one of your countries, and we can do even more to take that educational connection and make sure that at the right age kids are getting that exposure, that your universities are getting the very best so they can create products that sell into the world market, sell to where the users are rather than creating something unique that doesn't drive that global opportunity.
The second area we call Unlimited Potential. That's everything outside of education where you're making access to computing more effective. Often that's with libraries, community centers. It's quite varied and it's done in different countries in different ways, and so we seek input on that.
Today we're announcing an expansion of one of those citizenship programs, and although it's just one of many, many that we do like this, I think it's a great example. This is with the Organization of American States partnership. They've created what they call Opportunities for Employment through Technology in the Americas. This focuses on people with disabilities and so what we've got here is seven different countries that we're giving grants of software and cash. In every country it's over a $50,000 grant and what will happen is that you create Community Technology Centers particularly focused on disabled youth in the seven different countries. And so just an example and I love being able to over time going out and visiting these places. Microsoft employees get a lot of their excitement from seeing software at work, not just in corporations, making them effective, but going out to community centers and schools and seeing that and often volunteering their time to help out as well.
Clearly technology is going to be part of how the world achieves the very ambitious Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations set for 2015. Those are going to be tough to achieve, particularly in Africa and parts of Asia, but technology is what is causing this rising tide of understanding, technology for literacy, technology for agricultural productivity, technology for government transparency and outreach.
We have a goal to bring technology by 2010 to 250 million people who did not have access to technology. Part of that is through community centers where you can come in and share the machine or Internet cafes where a private provider comes in and yet has the latest and greatest in software.
PC Refurbisher Program
Another outreach program that we've had that's been very successful is taking PCs that are used in corporations that are no longer state of the art but could be used in other settings, nonprofit or educational settings and making sure that they can get the latest software in those.
We piloted this program in the United States, it's called the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher Program, and now we're extending it to all the countries represented here. For example, we have a big company up in Canada that's going to jump on this and be able to put good software in these used machines and then we go around to corporations and see what they have available. And so far, since 2001 when we started, this we've done hundreds of thousands of systems, and by the end of the decade we expect that there will be more than a million systems out there. And just one example that can help and make accessibility quite a bit broader.
So software is going amazing places, solving the tough problems that have taken a long time, a lot of R&D, we're spending over $6 billion a year, but we know that speech recognition and visual recognition and all the tough problems, even dealing with the security challenges, are things that software can meet and be an even better tool for development.
And so we're very excited to partner with you and see where in your country, in the government, in the educational institutions, anywhere we can help bring that magic of software to bear and that's why a dialogue like the one we've had in this conference is so important to us.
Thank you.