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This slide shows some other technology and how quickly they caught on. We see radio, electricity, telephone and TV. We can see it in the past most technology have taken 40 to 80 years before most people are using it. My view is that the Internet and the PC are moving faster than that and so here we see some of the new things like VCR and TV. The final two things I've added are the Internet and PC. We have moving very quickly in just about 10 years see from the chart that a lot of people are not using the PC and the Internet. Even in the United States today, only 40% of the home have personal computer. There is no doubt in my mind that it will become as popular as any of the other technology. It will be based on the work that the industry is doing today.
Another major vision that Microsoft has is that writing the applications for these machines needs to get very easy and we could write programs that run across the entire Internet which is millions of machines. This is a new approach that programming draws on what was done previously. DNA says that developers should be able to focus on their particular task and not have to learn a lot on management of the machine resources.
Looking back to previous programming approaches, in the 50's and 60's,the mainframe - the central machine - was how things were done in a single machine. The focus was simple financial management - general ledger and billing materials processing. All the applications are around one machine. The exciting breakthrough was simply being able to use one language like COBOL to do the development.
As we move into the 70's and 80's,we started to have multiple machines and some set of batch processing and on-line transaction came along. We have terminals that were connected up and for the first time some intelligence in those terminals. Resource planning was the key application. Here we move up to not just use high level languages but also to use databases and graphical interface. We made it possible to split an application into two parts with the data on one machine and the interface as well as the application execution on the other machine. This is a two-tier approach - a client/server type of approach. It's a huge step forward and was very successful.
What does the future look like? What are we going to be doing in application from this point forward? We are going to have computers everywhere, not just in offices but in home, cars as you travel around. I must say it's an interesting challenge because those machines will be connected at some of the time at very high speed, some of the time at very low speed, and some of the time not connected at all. We need to allow for occasional connections.
Applications won't just work for a single server but they'll work for thousands of servers. In fact, we have to write them so that the application doesn't even know how many servers that it will be working with. The network needs to automatically take care of that. The key applications are electronic mail and bringing in a wide variety of form factors to let you connect up to the application.
The great breakthrough will be letting people create their business rules and not have to worry about the programming models. There is still a lot of work to be done here to make this application architecture easy to work with. It's not simply a case of taking what's good on the mainframe and putting it on cheap computers. Even mainframes with have all their nice capability aren't powerful enough to deal with this Internet environment- the number of transactions, the need for great interface... We are talking about inventing something new - inventing that by building on the strength of today's personal computer industry.
The architecture that Microsoft is providing to developers is what we called DNA, an architecture that includes all our development initiatives. It is based on the idea of different users in different locations with different types of execution and different kinds of databases. The key part here is cooperating component, letting different programs to work with each other. Standing out from simply thinking about databases to thinking about any program working with any other program, extending from a headquarters or a branch office to the customers of the company. If we use banks as an example, it moves from having systems that went batch to the headquarters to systems that ran out in branch offices. Now we are saying that any customer that is connected to the Internet should be able to connect to that bank, not only to see their information but do transaction. So this application architecture has to take advantage of personal computer and yet maintain compatibility and security.
What are the key abstractions that let this happened? Cooperating components are the key that draws very much on the object oriented techniques that have been explored over the last decade. But it goes beyond simple object orientation. That goes to the point of letting programs run on different computers without knowing that they move from computer to computer.
The application architecture let you separate things up not just into two pieces but into three... So that the data, the business logic and the presentation can all run very separately. What needs are these aim at? First, taking advantage of the Internet and all the technology around it. The phenomenon will simply continue to grow - communications cost coming down, more and more information is made available... We have achieved critical mass and so the pace of adoption will exhilarate in the years to come.
Companies want to extend their investment in their core application and we're talking about a new approach. An approach that lets you migrates from the current software and hardware without giving up compatibility. You can move one application at a time. Certainly the simplification of this computer environment is key. Today the computer exposes too much the details to users. Thing like registry, customers shouldn't have to think about that. Keeping software up-to-date is a lot of work today, we need to make that automatic. Some of the error messages that come of these machines are incredibly confusing and certainly Microsoft has been guilty in many cases. So we need to step back and say how do you use the power of the machine to hide the complexity and yet let these programs run anywhere.
Finally, customers want lower cost. When they think about cost, it's not just the hardware, it's the communications cost, the development cost, the data center cost and those costs that go with it. In fact, the hardware is the one that we've seen the most improvement. That means it's become a real priority to focus on all those other costs.
The great thing about that is that's a software problem. We should be able to do it very rapidly and there is no difficulty in delivering that while keeping the investment level very low. The environment that people are developing for today has separated between the Internet and the classic data processing environment, which will decide the client/server network. There are bridges between them but they are not seamless. The way that security and directory are done as well as the key product costs are different. We need to get the Internet much more embedded into what it's been the corporate client/server network. We need to do that by improving the tools and Windows itself to have all of that available.
The idea is integrating the Web and PC computing. What's good about PC computing? Graphical application, they are fantastic and they allow people a lot of rich interaction. They need to be here and improve on. Our choices are in hardware and software, Why has the PC industry outdistanced the rest of the computer industry? It's because of the choice that is provided. If we go forward, we need to make sure we retain those choices.
Finally powerful economy of scale. Eighty million systems a year means that companies are having incredible incentive to improve every element of the system, from storage to screen, graphic chips and certainly to the software application. What's good abort Web computing is that simple access of information. You don't have to think about deploying software. You don't have to think about the state of the machine. It feels like you go somewhere and the information appears to you Even though underneath, it may involve downloading software and updating things. To you, that is completely invisible. That is very exciting to data processing department because they don't have to spend so much time updating software and making sure that they run in the same way. That's the key that Web computing has done in the right way.
