From: Rohit Khare (rohit@uci.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 18:45:04 PST
>Remarks by Bill Gates
>CTIA WIRELESS 2000
>February 28, 2000
>New Orleans
>Gates also demonstrated how Microsoft Research is looking at the
>question of how software can help users manage their communications
>by understanding the context and priority of information. He showed
>how a user might set priorities, define thresholds for different
>types of notifications, and even receive reminders while away from
>the office, aided by intelligent software that can determine when
>and where to send notices.
>The second key thing that the application does is really provide a
>notification platform. And that means it gives me the capability to
>customize how I'm notified when various communications come in to
>the system. Let me give you an example. So what I'm going to do is
>just choose the application, and show you that I have a number of
>different options. The first is, how do I determine personally what
>is a low, medium and high priority message, and what do I want to
>happen if I'm sitting at the computer. I can customize different
>sounds or things to happen in this case.
>
>The real power happens beyond the desktop, and this is when I'm away
>from the desktop, the system can detect when I'm away from the
>desktop and send me notifications of higher priority items that come
>into the system. So, for instance, you can say, notify me about new
>mail when the priority is greater than 75 for instance. So send me a
>message to my phone, send me a message to my pager, call me at some
>other number, do something like that only if I'm away from my PC.
>
>One of the challenges we have today is people set up systems for
>notifications, but you get notified even if you're sitting there at
>your computer. The other thing is, there's is some view of where you
>are throughout the day. So, for instance, if I'm at home, I don't
>want to be notified, and things like that. The other thing that is
>very intelligent about the system is that it will look at my Outlook
>calendars, and it will determine when I'm in meetings, and when I'm
>free. And so, for the lower priority messages, I can be notified
>when I'm not in a meeting, for instance.
http://microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/02-28ctia2000.htm
[heavily excerpted, well worth reading]
I think wireless is probably the key component that's really going to
take the scenarios of empowerment that we've always believed in and
make them a reality. The idea now that we can take the voice world,
the data world, and let people access that stuff from any size
screen, anywhere they want to go, that's an incredible opportunity,
and Microsoft wants to be there and provide the software that helps
make it happen.
Today, if you think about people and all their different phone
numbers, their different email addresses, how their voice mail is
different from their email, managing your communications is a lot of
work, and we can shift that burden onto the network, onto the
software, and give you a lot of control with user preferences.
Even things like documents should roam automatically. Today, they're
kind of stuck on an individual PC. And so, if you want to take them
home, that's a lot of trouble. All of those documents should simply
be out in the clouds, and even if you go to a device that you don't
own, it's not your device, if you authenticate yourself -- and that
could be smart card, password, finger print, however it's done -- you
should be able to then connect up to everything that you care about.
Not just your electronic mail, but the spreadsheets, the word
processing documents, anything that's of interest should show up
immediately on that screen.
We also need to have real-time collaboration. Not just voice calls,
not just video conferencing, but the ability to take these powerful
tools and work together, work on a spreadsheet, work on a word
processing document, go through a support scenario very easily using
these wireless networks. A key point here is letting the user decide
exactly how it all works. Today, if you ask people what's the thing
that bothers them the most about electronic mail, it's the junk mail
that they get; it's the fact that they don't have that much control.
And the fact that if you look at the way they work, they're often
interrupted by a piece of mail coming in that's not that important,
but because it appears there in their in-box, they feel like they
should go pay attention to that. Giving control back to them is
something that will be very, very important.
We have a site called Hotmail that alone has 60 million people
connecting up and using their email many, many times a month. A year
ago, that was about 15 million. So we're expecting over the next
couple of years that we'll have 300-400 million active email
accounts. These are very significant numbers.
we want to show MSN Mobile 2.0. For those of you who aren't familiar
with MSN Mobile, about six months ago, we launched the 1.0 service.
So today anyone with a cell phone that can get email or paging
services can get data sent, or pushed to them. They can get stocks or
the weather, news, any kind of Internet content pushed. But it's one
way -- you get it pushed out to you.
With the 2.0 service, with phones with a micro-browser, you can
actually have a two way service. So not only can you get things
pushed to you, but you can go out and retrieve more information in
more depth. Today we're launching in conjunction with our first
partners, Nextel and Air Touch, so there will be service providers
out there that we can go and get this from. Let's take a look. Now,
in terms of what we're trying to provide, obviously we can't take the
entire MSN screen and put it on the cell phone.
on the back end, the MSN Mobile service is smart enough to decide
what type of content to send to a phone, versus the type of content
to send to this type of device, a little bit of intelligent filtering
there. She's interested in the Disneyland kind of stuff.
One important thing, again, relative to Blue Tooth, is that these
devices are going to come with these Compact Flash Blue Tooth cards
that allow me, again, to share information between these devices. If
I liked that song, and I wanted to download it to my car, I could use
the Compact Flash Blue Tooth to go download it to my Auto PC and add
it to my play list.
MR. GATES: Well that was a very rich experience. I'm curious to have
you show us exactly how you set that up. How did it know what you
were interested in?
MR. GUGGENHEIMER: That's a good question, because a lot of people
don't understand that this is, one, very easy to sign up for, and
two, I don't have to enter all of the information using a cell phone.
If I, again, had to use the nine keys for the alphabet and everything
else, it would take a while. So here's the MSN Mobile sign-in page.
It's available off the MSN home page. This is for the new 2.0 service
-- it will be up in about two weeks. It's got the new UI to it. Here
I can edit my account.
But, on the flip side, if I do make a change from the phone -- let's
say I make a change to my stock to my portfolio -- it actually shows
it back here. So the two are in perfect synch, and I have a central
storage. It's pulling from my MSN Mobile preferences and all of my
accounts, but available in multiple places.
I have a simple goal here, which is that all of those portable PCs in
the next four years should have a wireless modem and, therefore,
they'll be paying significant monthly fees to the wireless industry
to get the rich connections, whether it's simply gatewaying back to
their corporate email, browsing the Web, or doing the kind of
collaboration that you want to do when you're out on the road, that
will be a very competitive way to do it. And so Windows will continue
to evolve to put in wireless support, but we took a big step with
Windows 2000 itself.
The PC hardware is going to continue to get better for these things
-- building in a very high quality microphone so that voice
conferencing, video conferencing, works very well. We're building in
the echo cancellation software, and some of these new microphones
we're seeing are both very inexpensive and very high quality. Some of
them are what are called phased array microphones, so you can
actually do noise elimination in a fantastic way that helps the voice
recognition software. Of course, when you're working with voice,
sometimes you simply pass it through to another user, sometimes you
record it, and sometimes you pass it through software that does the
recognition. All of those things are being built into Windows.
Location-based applications where you have a phone or a PC in an
airport or a stadium, and you're offered up different things that
relate to that location: those are just being designed now, but the
kind of infrastructure things the wireless industry is doing will
make those possible, and the advertising and transaction fees that
can come out of those is just a whole new revenue source that will be
a big use for the mobile industry.
I would like to ask Pat Fox to come up and talk to us a little bit
about how the mobile professional will use this. Welcome, Pat.
MR. FOX: Good morning, Bill.
Well, what I'd like to do first is give you an example of a solution
that really begins to deliver on a request that we hear all the time
from business users. And that is, "enable me to get access to
information and lists from inside the corporation whenever I want
from a variety of different types of devices." What I have here is a
mobile phone with a micro-browser on it, and I'm going to demonstrate
one of the solutions available today -- and this is from a company
called Wireless Knowledge, it's a joint venture company between
Microsoft and Qualcomm -- and just last week Wireless Knowledge
announced their new product called the Workstyle Server. The
Workstyle Server is a product that lives within the corporation, and
what it does is gives mobile users access to the information that
lives there behind the firewall.
I'm showing access to my Exchange Server, where I have all my email,
calendar and contacts, which is the core of my communications life.
So, during the course of the day, as I'm moving from meeting to
meeting and locations change, and new meetings get put on my
calendar, and other changes occur, the critical thing here is, I have
a live connection back to my server. So I don't have to work about
syncing the information in the morning and then being out of sync
throughout the day. It really is a live connection back to the
server, so I have access to that information.
with NetMeeting, we can have a full videoconference over a mobile
network, really taking advantage of the improved bandwidth that can
occur. But that's not all. If Aaron and I wanted to actually
collaborate on a document, Aaron can use the capabilities of
NetMeeting to share a document, and I can actually go up and take
control of the application that he started. I can type here and then
Aaron in the back can take control back and then he can type. So this
is all core-capabilities built into Windows 2000 that highlights
Windows 2000 is a great communications platform for the wired world
in addition to the wireless world.
MR. GATES: Super. Well, now talk to us about how a user would be able
to take all the different things going on in the world and make sure
that they're not going to be overloaded by everything that's changing.
MR. FOX: Well that is a real challenge. As the numbers of devices
proliferate, and as we get inundated with more and more
communication, the vision that you articulate about letting users
control their communication becomes important. And Microsoft research
has been thinking about this problem for some time, and they have
developed a prototype application called Priorities that begins is to
show how users can control their communication from a variety of
different types of devices.
So, if we switch to the screen, you can see that I have a typical
view of my in-box.
MR. GATES: A lot of mail.
MR. FOX: A lot of mail. And I'm going to go ahead and run this
Priorities application, and what the application does is two key
things. The first thing it does is, as the name implies, it goes
through my in-box and prioritizes all the messages in it, and it does
it on a variety of criteria, and the user can then customize it. The
criteria being, is it sent directly to me? Was it sent from a broad
alias, or was it sent from a person inside the organization? How high
up in the organization is that person? Is there time sensitivity? Is
there urgency?
MR. GATES: So, it's actually reading the message and seeing things like the --
MR. FOX: It will go through and read the message and say, Pat, can we
get this done by Tuesday. And it will say, wow, that's more urgent.
Today is Monday, so this needs a higher priority. So it is very
intelligent in that manner. So the first thing it does is, it goes
through and assigns the priorities, and you can see this is how it's
chosen to assign the priorities on these messages. And, if I want to,
I can customize outlook, of course, to give me another view of my
in-box that will show me how my messages are prioritized by the
system, so I have my high priority messages, my medium, and then low
priority messages.
The second key thing that the application does is really provide a
notification platform. And that means it gives me the capability to
customize how I'm notified when various communications come in to the
system. Let me give you an example. So what I'm going to do is just
choose the application, and show you that I have a number of
different options. The first is, how do I determine personally what
is a low, medium and high priority message, and what do I want to
happen if I'm sitting at the computer. I can customize different
sounds or things to happen in this case.
The real power happens beyond the desktop, and this is when I'm away
from the desktop, the system can detect when I'm away from the
desktop and send me notifications of higher priority items that come
into the system. So, for instance, you can say, notify me about new
mail when the priority is greater than 75 for instance. So send me a
message to my phone, send me a message to my pager, call me at some
other number, do something like that only if I'm away from my PC.
One of the challenges we have today is people set up systems for
notifications, but you get notified even if you're sitting there at
your computer. The other thing is, there's is some view of where you
are throughout the day. So, for instance, if I'm at home, I don't
want to be notified, and things like that. The other thing that is
very intelligent about the system is that it will look at my Outlook
calendars, and it will determine when I'm in meetings, and when I'm
free. And so, for the lower priority messages, I can be notified when
I'm not in a meeting, for instance.
And so you can begin to see the integration of the various
communication components, and the power that you can provide users to
better control their communications, and then combined with the
intelligence inside the carrier networks, there's a real opportunity
to provide rich solutions to enable users to control their
communications.
MR. GATES: That looks great. Thanks a lot, Pat.
As we are looking at how we allocate our R&D resources, we decided
that the wireless area would receive the greatest increase of all the
things that we're doing, and a lot of that is focused on sitting down
with the partners and saying, okay, given the rich platform we have,
what can we build for you?
So, the devices themselves will be surprising us all with the great
things they can do. There will be a lot of magic software there. The
networks are going to be surprising us. And we're very, very excited
to be working with all of you to seize this opportunity.
[bottom line: the other shoe hasn't dropped. What about truly
event-based applications? There's not much here the software
engineering community would recognize as event notification, but it's
still much more compelling to users...]
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