Bill Gates keynote from Microsoft CEO Summit 2006 "The Next 10 Years"

BILL GATES: Well, it's pretty amazing that it was 10 years ago that we started this event. I had a chance to go back and look at the various slide decks I've done over the 10-year period, and for better or for worse I have to say I'm very consistent, software it turns out is a pretty important thing all 10 years, and the power of computing is really changing the way business is done, and so we've seen an evolution of what that means in a very concrete sense.

We've actually used this CEO Summit to try out lots of new things. Some of those, like some of the real-time meeting so that got shown here first, has gone to be very, very popular, some like the Tablet are on its way to becoming popular, but clearly a phenomena that is not as mainstream yet as we expect it will be, some evolution still to go there.

One of the most interesting slides I had from that very first speech was speaking to the idea of exponential improvement. In chips we talk about this as Moore's Law, the doubling every two years, optic fiber gets better faster than that, the disk storage industry has actually done even better than that.

And so it really leads to a different way of thinking about capacity, a different way of thinking about what you can do. You know, today in a company the idea that you digitally record every meeting, that you have all your training information online, and that it's easy for people to access that anywhere is commonsense, the actual cost of doing that storage is almost a rounding error, you wouldn't even know it was there, whereas 10 years ago it would have been completely impractical, just way too expensive in terms of not only storage costs but network bandwidth, network access costs, and so it's just a mindset change that as you move up that exponential curve more and more things become possible to do in a digital approach.

And we don't see this going down. The breakthroughs that are required to keep on that curve are coming very rapidly. The actual clock speed of the computer won't go up as much, but instead we'll have more computers, so parallel processing and techniques that allow us to run software across many machines are becoming increasingly important.

In fact, there was a whole field called supercomputing that was doing things that way that is now actually becoming part of the mainstream of computing, it's no longer a niche, but those techniques are being used in systems.

The very high-end systems, the most expensive systems used to be different in terms of how they addressed memory. In fact, all those techniques are now in the standard sort of Windows Server, Windows PC, and the computer industry is as unified as ever along this high-volume, low-cost model.


http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2006/05-17CEOSummit.asp

To watch the 58 minute web cast
http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0605/27736/BillG_CEO_Summit_MBR.asx