Remarks by Steve Ballmer
Office 2000 Launch
June 7, 1999, San Francisco, Calif.
STEVE BALLMER:It’s my pleasure to have a chance to be with you today, and to keynote this launch event.This is a very significant event, not only for the Office product line, but for the entire PC industry in a variety of ways.
Office productivity applications in one way, shape or form, have been an invaluable and essential part of the PC revolution from the start.And I want to put a little bit of context, because I think we’re going through some important generational changes and the launch of Office 2000 really demarcates those in a very strong way.
I want to start by looking back to the founding of Microsoft in 1975.When our company was started, Bill Gates and Paul Allen articulated a vision, an aspiration for our company and for our industry.Let’s put a computer on every desk and in every home.On every desk and in every home.We’re here 25 years later, and while there’s not a computer on every desk, and there’s not a computer in every home, the world has certainly come a long, long way.
If you take a look at it, in the last 12-month period, there were roughly 100 million personal computers sold around the world.Now, I happened to have the extra time to be watching CNN in a hotel room the other day, and I learned that this year there will be 100 million bicycles sold around the world.So personal computers have finally passed bicycles as one of the most popular devices of modern times.
And for me, I think it really characterizes very strongly the importance the personal computer has had to society and to the ways in which people work.Over the last four or five years, we’ve seen great productivity improvements in the United States economy, and no less an expert than Alan Greenspan has certainly attributed a lot of that to productivity gains that have come through the adoption of personal computers.
The real focus for the personal computer has been the people we call knowledge workers, people who need to use the computer as a tool to communicate, to analyze, to think of as a fundamental extension, in some senses, to their brain, and the tool that lets them add value through the use of their brain.
If you look around the world today, roughly 60 percent or more of the computers that will be sold this year will be sold to people who will use them as a tool to extend their knowledge handling capability, and it’s really that aspect of the personal computer that has represented this fundamental change which has enhanced and improved the productivity in our economy.And I think it’s important to always return to that essential ingredient, despite all the wonderful new things we’re seeing with the personal computer, the new ways in which it can be used in the home, the new devices that we see, it will always be an important thing for us to look back and focus in on the ways in which the personal computer can continue to make us all smarter, more effective analyzers, communicators, understanders, expressers of our ideas, because that’s been the heart and soul and I think will remain a very vital part of the personal computer revolution for the next years to come.
If you look back historically on the role of not only Microsoft Office but productivity applications, the productivity application has been the tool for the knowledge worker.If we go back to the early ’80s, the tools for knowledge workers were individual DOS character mode productivity applications, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and that was a point in time and a generation of applications for the knowledge worker.I’d call that the first generation, lasting from the early ’80s to perhaps the early ’90s some time.
In the early ’90s, I think we saw the advent of the second generation of tools for knowledge workers, and just as the first generation was defining for the first generation of personal computing, so I think the second generation of tools for knowledge workers defined another era for personal computers.And I’d say Microsoft Office and Windows, in many ways, characterized that second generation.Still tools designed for knowledge workers, but no longer just a spreadsheet and a word processor.We started to see databases, and PIMs, and presentation packages become part of the basic tools of the knowledge worker.We saw the world evolve from a world in which people could work with one application at a time to a world in which people worked with multiple applications.We saw the evolution from character mode user interface to graphical user interface.
In 1999, there are over 100 million legitimate Office users worldwide.Piracy is a real problem in this business.But there’s over 100 million legitimate users worldwide.And there are over 50 million Office licenses distributed in just the last 12 months.So, it’s had a very profound effect.But, I think it’s fair to say, just as we saw two early generations, with Office 2000, we’re really at the dawning of what I might characterize as the third generation for knowledge workers, the third generation of tools.
And if we in the second generation had taken a narrow view that said, word processors and spreadsheets and character mode were all the knowledge worker would ever want, we would have never had this second generation that had this amazing impact on the way people work.Similarly today, if the view is Office has some static definition, that it’s not an evolving thing that continues to expand what it does on behalf, and what services it offers on behalf of knowledge workers, we and our customers will be missing the boat.
So, as we talk about the product, and as we show you some of the fundamental technology innovations in the product, and some of the new user scenarios, particularly focusing in on the way the Office product and the Internet grow together, I think you’ll agree with me that we’re at the start of the third generation of tools for knowledge workers.And, as it took 10 years for the first generation to develop fully, and as it was 10 years before the second generation fully eclipsed the first, I think Office 2000 is just the start of this third generation, and there will be an Office 2000X, and an Office 2000Y, that will take even more steps towards fulfilling the vision of this third generation of tool for knowledge workers that I’m going to talk about.
Before I do that, I’d like to just stress again the kind of value that people derive from these tools for knowledge workers.And what I’ve asked to have happen today is Lyle
Bowen, he runs a company in Iowa, it’s an online bookseller, competing with Amazon and other people, and he started his own little bookstore in the middle of Iowa, and he needs tools that help him be more productive in operating his store.
And so, before I talk about where we’re going in this third generation, maybe I’ll let him tell you a little bit about how valuable the second generation of productivity applications has been to him.So, if Lyle will join us, I’ve asked him to do a little bit of a PowerPoint presentation for you in something of an unusual format.
Please, Lyle.
MR. BOWEN:Hi.I’m Lyle Bowen, the president of Positively You.And we needed to find a solution to compete with the big guys when it comes to online bookstores.Office 2000 gives us that solution.Excel and Access allow us to get the information we need from our customers, but we also have to respond to our customers.Outlook lets us communicate with them in a timely fashion.All this works well in Office 2000 because it saves time.It’s easy to use, and it’s easy to learn.Once we’ve learned it, though, we still have to get it to the Web.How do we do that?Very easily.Any application in Office 2000 can go directly to our Web site.In a matter of seconds, we can respond to the competition and to our customer needs.That’s what allows us to compete with the big guys.
MR. BALLMER:You may notice we asked Lyle to give a little PowerPoint presentation, but he couldn’t be here today.He was busy operating his business back in Iowa.But I thought he did a pretty good job, talking, being here as best he could, giving a little PowerPoint presentation.But we asked Lyle, and we kind of helped him use Office 2000 for part of his presentation.That was actually one of the new features of Office 2000, it lets you do live broadcasting, as well as taped broadcasting of PowerPoint presentations.So the presentation was all actually embedded into Office 2000.
You can see I’ve now minimized the screen again, but that’s a replayable set of communication that Lyle put together for us, which we can use in this event, and other places.So, we’re trying to show you a little bit some of the new capabilities, and some of the new ways in which knowledge workers like Lyle won’t only benefit in terms of the things they’ve always done, but get new tools and new facilities that help them communicate and express themselves.
Okay.Let me talk a little bit about the third generation, then, of tools for knowledge workers, and what we think that means for Microsoft Office, and frankly the rest of the Microsoft product line.About three months ago, we announced a new vision for our company, and we hope for our customers, and partners and other industry participants the world of a computer on every desk and in every home was a great one.And, as I said earlier, that vision has not been achieved.But sitting here in 1999, the vision of what’s possible in general with electronic devices is very different than it was in 1975.And it really requires some view of what the next generation is for electronic devices in order to have a view of the role of tools for knowledge workers.
And so, building on this theme of the personal computer as a tool for empowerment, letting businesses and consumers do what they want, and thinking about what this will all mean in the next generation, rather than pursuing the dream of a computer on every desk and in every home, we’ve asked our people, we’ve suggested to our partners that a more appropriate vision in 1999 will be to focus on giving people and organizations the ability to do what they want, where they want, when they want, on any device connected to the Internet.
I might call this the PC-plus generation vision.And while we still don’t have a computer on every desk and in every home, that’s certainly encompassed in this vision.But it goes beyond.It talks about devices that let you access information anywhere.It encompasses devices which are not personal computers, which are hand-held devices, for example.It explicitly says that the marriage of electronic devices like the PC with the Internet is essential.It talks about organizational productivity in additional to personal productivity.And all of those themes are important themes for the knowledge worker and the broad constituent set for whom PC technology, both client and server, will be important.
There will be new devices.There will be high-end PC servers, there will be hand-held devices.There will be TV attached devices.But the personal computer itself as a device will remain essential in this vision, but it will be augmented and enhanced in a variety of ways.And the vision of what we can do in this world for knowledge workers will be enhanced as we move forward.
We talk in this context, the context of this vision, of what we want to do for the knowledge worker as eliminating, shall I say, barriers.Let knowledge workers work without limits.And it’s going to take a lot to sort of tear down the barriers that stand between the knowledge worker today and full productivity, but Office 2000 is part of that vision.Today, when we talk about the limitations in front of knowledge workers, both individually and in teams, in companies, in groups working together, it’s fairly easy to point out that it is often difficult today, as a knowledge worker, to find the information you want and need when you want and need it.
It’s a bit crazy in a certain sense.About 80 percent of all the electronic information in most companies is stored in Office
documents.It’s not in SAP systems and mainframe systems, 80 percent of the information is stored in Office documents.Yet, the discoverability of that information, the ability for people to find it and use it, is not what we would like it to be.
I had a customer lament to me the other day about a major project proposal they did two years ago for a customer.They really worked hard, they assembled the proposal, but they didn’t get the business.Two years later, that customer was back asking the same company to come re-bid the project.And their corporate memory, their ability to find old documents, old information, was so limited they never could find all that work they had done just two years ago.So, these tools need to evolve to make it easier to find, access, and retrieve information.
People often point out to me a different problem, which is almost the flip side.Our problem is not that we can’t find or access information, our problem is that we have too much information.And these tools, these barriers to knowledge workers, need to also encompass the notion of tools that help you filter incoming information, that helps focus your attention on the information you want, when you want it.We talk about this concept of digital dashboards, and we’ll show you a little bit of how Office 2000 implements that concept as a way to help you filter incoming information.
Today, a large percentage of the information in the world is still in paper format.And while we make it reasonably easy today to go from the screen to paper, we make it very hard still to go from paper to the screen.We make it very hard today for many people to read documents online.I’ll bet if I did a survey here and asked how many people in this room routinely read documents of over 10 pages on the screen versus printing them, I bet about 80 percent of the people would respond that they print those documents.And, because of that, it’s harder to organize, bind, work with the information set that’s relevant.
Most meetings for knowledge workers today must still be physical.If I want to meet with you, you and I have to be physically present.Well, I want to meet with Lyle.I want to run through a PowerPoint presentation with him.I want to be able to talk about it.I want to be sharing the same information in the same way.And in order to do that, the tools need to evolve to support that way of working.More and more human interaction is required in addition to electronic interaction.Yet, the tools do little beyond email to facilitate that, especially for real-time collaboration.
We’ll show you the same capabilities that I’ve shown you with PowerPoint here, that can be used for a live collaboration and discussion of a spreadsheet, an Office document of any type.Knowledge workers move around.I’m embarrassed to say that if I opened up this pocket and showed you, I’ve got a piece of paper in here.I don’t have a little palm based computer on which I take notes.It’s still too complicated to sit there and try to take notes and look at something.I don’t have my office with me in my pocket, I have one piece of paper.If I’m missing the information I need to answer your question or your question, I just can’t get it.I have to go log in, et cetera, et cetera.So we see a move towards wireless, handheld devices.And while it’s not a theme for Office 2000 in any sense, over the future we certainly need to see computers that are better at listening and learning.Every time I come down here I get all of the trip reports from my last two trips to San Francisco, and I get all of the contact information on the customers I’m coming to see.My computer knows that, it’s seen me do it before.My computer knows I’m coming to San Francisco, yet I have none of that from my computer automatically, I do all of that work myself.
And this is just a start, as we talk about other needs we see in knowledge workers, it’ll continue to grow.And the question is, is the role of Microsoft Office just to be a spreadsheet and a word processor, or is the goal of Microsoft Office to continue to evolve, to remain the essential tool for knowledge workers, something that helps take down these limitations that knowledge workers face?And that’s how we see the goal for Microsoft Office.
In the third generation, consistent with these limitations, and consistent with the kinds of opportunities the new vision implies, we see a world in which people don’t just work by themselves, a computer on every desk in every home, but where people want to share information in teams.And yes, we have email, and yes, we have groupware today, but those are top-down ways of sharing information.They don’t let knowledge workers create information organically, from the bottom up.And so we need to see an evolution, where the knowledge worker can express himself, as well as having information organized for them, in formal knowledge management systems.
We need a world in which there is much less difference between paper and the screen, a world of improved scanning, a world in which it is easier to read text on screen.Last COMDEX we announced a technology called ClearType, which on an LCD screen dramatically improves readability, to print style quality for text on screen.And while that’s now included in Office 2000, it’s an important next generation technology for Windows and Office to embrace.
There are new applications, I said Office is not just a spreadsheet and word processor, more and more people want to be able to work with pictures, and we need to provide better tools for people to have diagrams and pictures, in the ways they express themselves through Microsoft Office.We need to continue also to improve on the personal productivity capabilities of prior generations.Scott McNealy at Sun likes to joke, in a way I passionately disagree with, but he jokes that all anybody needs in a word processor is a backspace key.He hasn’t talked to our user community.Our user community is chomping at the bit for ways in which to be, in even small ways, more productive.And we’ll show you how Office 2000 extends on some of the classic capabilities of Office to deliver personal productivity.
So Office 2000, which we’re announcing today, and which you’ll be able to buy starting on Thursday in thousands of resellers around the country, is actually a family of products.It’s a family of products that’s scaled from small business users, on up to our new highest end premium edition.It includes not only the applications of before, Access, Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, but also now includes our FrontPage Web site management tool, our photo and drawing management product, Photodraw, our Publisher product, some new products and tools which I’ll describe later, targeted at small business.And all of these tools in Office 2000 have been evolved to embrace the Internet, and embrace the notion not only of personal productivity, but group productivity.
One of the key themes, I think, for this third generation of knowledge worker tools is the notion that applications really change.In the third generation of knowledge worker tools, Office meets the Web, just the way Windows and Internet Explorer have grown together into a seamless experience, so with Office 2000 do we really take a quantum leap forward, in integrating the Internet, or Web-based experience, which is an essential technology for the new vision, along with the traditional tools of the office worker.
So when we think about a document today as something that you look at on the screen, and you print, the next generation of Office is really very different.This is a next generation Office document, or Office application.It’s got a bunch of HTML text mixed into it.It’s got live applications bound into it, into charts and tables.It’s got the ability for a user to collaborate with somebody else, to track revisions, to discuss documents, to subscribe to changes in the documents.
In a way you could say, the whole notion of how we think about documents really changes.These are now living applications, and every time I create an Office document I’m creating an application on which others can contribute, and participate, and add value, because of the built-in capabilities in Office 2000.So Internet meets — or Web meets — traditional office productivity is certainly a theme of this third generation of knowledge applications.
One of the things we’re announcing today, which I think is very important, relates to the way these applications are available, and not just in larger organizations, but smaller ones as well.When I’ve gone out and talked to users and said, isn’t it great with Office 2000 as we see you can author corporate intranets seamlessly using Office 2000, they sort of look at me and say, huh?Office 2000, intranets, that’s a big business thing.Well, in fact, what we’re announcing today in conjunction with two ISPs, Concentric and Verio, is that you’ll be able to host the Office applications that I was talking about out on the Internet.
So, for example, a small law firm that wants to collaborate on a lease with its client the landlord, with the landlord’s client, the tenant, with the tenant’s lawyer, and they all want to look at one document, they want that document to be secure, they want to share one copy, they don’t want to be emailing around different revisions, and different copies of the document, they want one copy, they want to be able to commonly annotate that document, and they want to be able to know that they’re always all current and looking at the same document, people like Verio and Concentric will offer that as a service.So these corporate intranets, we can now also begin to think about as extranets, very important extranets, for smaller businesses.
I know a real estate development firm in Seattle which has tried to do this, in order to manage its relations with all of the tenants and landlords, and lenders and lawyers that it works with, and it’s been hard to create this kind of application.But, with Office 2000, and with host ability of derived Office applications through companies like Concentric and Verio, this gets much easier with Office 2000.
If you take a look at the various issues facing knowledge workers in this third generation of applications, in Office 2000 there is something that addresses almost every one of those points.We talked about electronic paper.Well, one of the most important things is to help people spend more of their time reading documents electronically.And the fact that every Office document now can automatically be a set of Web pages is important.One of the reasons I think people print things is you go and you find a file server, and you try to open documents, it’s sort of complicated.If most file servers were replaced by webs of documents, still authored in Word and Excel, and still with the same rich capabilities, but much easier to find, much easier to read, take project specifications, in the average technology company, should those be a set of Web pages, or should those be in sort of contained files?I think one is easier than the other.So the adoption of the HTML file format is an important part of getting to electronic paper.So are some of the scanning improvements built-in to Office 2000.
Meetings without walls –I talked a little bit already about presentation conferencing.Corporate memory — we’ll show you some capabilities that respond to that in Office 2000.Digital Dashboard, or filtering of incoming information, the enhancement we’ve made to Outlook, the so-called Outlook Today features, are essential to addressing some of these issues.And I’ll talk a little bit later about the work we’re doing in palm-based computers, and improvements to Windows CE to address that environment.
This is the most uninteresting screen shot of the day.It shows you an Excel document, as you see it in Excel 2000, and as you see it in Internet Explorer.And what’s interesting about this, they are exactly identical, so you create a document in Excel, you save it as HTML, anybody with a browser can take a look at it.If you reload that HTML back into Excel, it’s live Excel data again, and you can pivot it and change it in exactly that way.So we have 100 percent fidelity, in terms of output of these applications with the HTML standards set.
I get asked a lot, how do you expect this Web-based collaboration to evolve?Corporate memory, Digital Dashboards, will it come from on high, from the corporate IT department, or from top management, or will this stuff come from the bottom-up?And the answer to that is, truthfully, it will be a little bit of both.But, the thing we’re missing today is the bottom-up phenomenon.That’s where a lot of the great work is being done by knowledge workers.Most people in this room, if I did a survey, would probably say, you don’t know how to use some large percentage of Office.But, if I did that same survey and I asked the question, how many people in this room use advanced Office functions, where somebody else has built a great presentation, or a great spreadsheet, or a great scenario in Office, the answer to that question would probably be close to 100 percent.
I personally love the pivot table feature that’s been in Office for a number of years, and is enhanced in Office 2000.But, I’m ashamed to admit, I have never built a pivot table, never.But, I get them from other people, and I use them, and I manipulate them to really dig in and drill into the important information for me, in terms of the way we think about and run Microsoft.
In the area of corporate memory, you can talk about the data which is locked in structured systems, like SAP or Seybold, as well as the notion of sharing information and best practices, and we’ll show you how using Office 2000 you can attach Excel front ends much more easily to a variety of back end SQL data, and OLAP data, and how easy that makes it to drill in and navigate, and answer the kinds of questions which knowledge workers get asked every day.We’ll show you how web documents that you author in Office 2000 become more searchable than they were when they were just traditional files, how that makes information more findable, how with the server extensions to Office we make it possible for you to subscribe to a document.Let me know whenever something changes here, otherwise I’m not going to go look at that document again, for specs, for project schedules, a very important feature, and how we add discussions, so that knowledge workers can collaborate on documents.
First demonstration of Office 2000 I’d like to invite to join me on stage Larry Liebrock.Larry is the associate dean and chief technical officer for the University of Texas, and Alex Hanken, who is an MBA student at the University of Texas.They’ve been an early user of Office 2000, and they’re going to show you some of the things that they’re doing to bring alive this notion of Office collaboration.
MR. LIEBROCK:Steve, it’s great to be here.
MR. BALLMER:Welcome, Larry.
MR. LIEBROCK:This is Alex.
MR. BALLMER:And Alex.
MR. LIEBROCK:Steve, I’m with the University of Texas and we have about 50,000 students.I’m directly associated with the college
—
our business school.that’s where I’m associated.And I’m here today to really talk about how we have really exploited Office 2000 to really help our students collaborate in teams.How we’ve used this product in our earlier courses this spring.
My job as the technology officer of the school is to have a tool that allows me to connect our users to each other, and users to knowledge.However, I’d like Alex to go ahead and perhaps show you an application that we used this spring.
MR. BALLMER:Super.
MS. HANKEN:Thanks.
Office 2000 really allowed my team to work as a virtual team, because just as in the real world, we all have very busy and very different schedules.What’s great about it is, we can use the tools we already know to create documents and words which we now just save as .HTM files to our project’s Web server.
This right here is a white paper my team is working on for one of Dr. Liebrock’s classes.We now use Office 2000 in-line discussions to comment on this paper right here in our browser.And as you can see, Dr. Liebrock has already commented that perhaps we should expand the scope of our project.So, I can reply back to his comment and let him and my teammates know that this change should be made.
Now, in the past, when I wanted everyone on my team to contribute to an essential team document, I’d have to email that document to everyone and collect their very different revisions, and then try to formulate a final version.Office 2000 really takes care of this problem with round-trip editing.Since everyone can view the most recent version of the document right in their browser, they can simply take it into Word, and then make any of the necessary changes.
MR. BALLMER:So, you’re just loading essentially an HTML file back into Word, and now you’re going to show me how you edit it.
MS. HANKEN:Exactly.And as soon as I click save after I edit it, I can publish it right back up to my Web server.
MR. LIEBROCK:Now, I want to jump in here, Steve.This, I think, is a real powerful asset to Office 2000.This enables a student to really focus on the content and not be concerned about those arcane FTP, HTML, HTTP all kind of commands.It lets them really deliver their assets on the Web.
MR. BALLMER:You’re saying, once you’ve revised the document, all the discussion, everything that was going on in class is still there.But you were able to update with new information?
MS. HANKEN:Exactly.
MR. LIEBROCK:Right.
MS. HANKEN:Another really great advantage of Office 2000 is the subscription feature.This allows me to be notified by email any time somebody in my team either makes a change to the document or even contributes to the discussion.And as a project team leader, this really allows me to manage my team without micromanaging them.And I can even choose whether I want to be notified every time a change occurs, once a day, or once a week, what ever I really need to keep tabs on our most current project status, which is pretty important when you report to somebody like Dr. Liebrock.
MR. BALLMER:So, if this was a document you weren’t very interested in, you might say, once a week, let me know if it’s changed, you can go out and read it.But if it’s something where you’re real-time trying to finish the paper and get it submitted, maybe you want to see everything all the time.
MS. HANKEN:Exactly.Another great thing about Office 2000 is it very easily let my classmates and I create this project connect tool, which lets me see in real-time everyone’s most current contact and project status.And using Web components, we did things so we can manipulate the data, so I can sort to find somebody to send them an email, or even really drill down and see somebody else’s project information.
MR. BALLMER:This is all an HTML document? This is all an Office document? Both?
MS. HANKEN:Exactly.And we put this thing together in about five minutes very easily, and you can get people’s emails.I can go into other people’s team documents and see what’s going on.
MR. BALLMER:And you’re just, what, mixing and matching across Outlook, and Access, and Excel?
MS. HANKEN:Well, this is actually all Excel, but we also were able to incorporate Outlook 2000, because Outlook 2000 allows me to save my calendar, and everyone else’s calendar, as a Web page right up to our project Web server.So, that when Larry calls one of his infamous last-minute meetings, I don’t have to face him alone because I know exactly where I can find everyone else.
MR. LIEBROCK:Now, Steve, I also want to jump in here from an IT point of view.We took Office 2000 directly out of the box, and had it installed and running in less than half a day.And this really enables our students to really get value out of Office 2000.
MR. BALLMER:Super.Super.
MR. LIEBROCK:Well, Steve, I also want to say that I know today you’re announcing other products, but the college has already deployed Office 2000, and I think it’s a great technology.I think it’s fundamentally going to change the way students learn, and faculties teach.Thank you very much.
MR. BALLMER:Thanks very much, Larry.
Thanks very much, Alex.
MS. HANKEN:Thanks, Steve.
MR. BALLMER:I sure appreciate it.
(Applause.)
MR. BALLMER:I guess I should say, it’s not your father’s Oldsmobile,
it’s certainly not the way we all think about and work with Office today.Yet, very quickly, very interesting things are happening, new ways of collaborating, new ways for students — who are the quintessential knowledge workers — get together, interact, and add value.
The next concept I want to show you is this concept called the Digital Dashboard.While the demonstration that Larry and Alex did gives you an opportunity to understand how you might manage information, make it more discoverable, more available, more easy for people to find and access and comment on, and through subscriptions filter, I want to really highlight this Digital Dashboard capability.
We have so many customers who say, how can I go one place and get my view of the world, with all the latest and greatest information.And so some of the ways in which we integrated Web technologies with Microsoft Outlook and the rest of Microsoft Office, through Office components and some other technologies, are essential to that.
I’m going to invite to join me Deanna Sanford from our Office team, and ask her to show you some of the capabilities of our Digital Dashboard technologies in Office 2000.
MS. SANFORD:Hi, Steve.
Well, knowledge workers today are faced with information overload with hundreds of emails, thousands of Web sites, and look at the line of business applications.And with the customizability of Office 2000, we can create a Digital
Dashboard so knowledge workers have the information they need and the tools they require in one unified place.So, let’s take a look, and I’ll show you the Digital Dashboard we use in Office marketing.
Across the top, I have access to the critical information I need to get my job done.
MR. BALLMER:No, no.What are we looking at here, this is just Outlook?
MS. SANFORD:Right.This is an Outlook today page.
MR. BALLMER:This is some customized view.
MS. SANFORD:Absolutely.It’s a very highly customized Outlook today page.
And across the top I have access to information, it really doesn’t matter, I don’t care where it’s coming from, it just matters to me that I have access to this.So, on the right here, in this page, I can very easily be updated on the events that are going on, projects, what other teams in Office marketing are working on.And over here, I have my personal information.And what I really care most about is my email.But, you know, I don’t always have time to read through my entire in-box.So, here I have a filtered list that just shows my urgent messages from key people.And you notice I have a few messages from you in there.
MR. BALLMER:We were getting ready for this presentation.
MS. SANFORD:Sure enough.
I also need quick access to my calendar, so I can see what I’ve got going on each day this week.Now, this information is being pulled from Outlook, but it really could be coming from anywhere.So, for example, I also have a traffic cam that pulls data from the Internet to show me different views of traffic around the Seattle area.
MR. BALLMER:That’s a mission critical application for you getting to work, or getting home from work?
MS. SANFORD:Well, both.I need to be efficient while I’m at work, so to save time, I don’t want to get stuck in traffic.
I can also go in and check out the weather around the world, again, coming directly from the Internet, and as usual it looks like we’ve got clouds headed for Seattle.Again, this just shows how Outlook today can be customized to the information that’s most important to me.
MR. BALLMER:So, what you really have here is a Web page.It’s a Web page, though, that was built in Office, and it’s a Web page that has access to other live Office
information, your calendar, your schedule, your email, your email contacts, plus any other information you want to customize in, such as live information off the Internet, or other corporate intranet information as well?
MS. SANFORD:Absolutely.And let’s take a look at the information that I use to get my job done across the top.So, when I go into customers here, I see a list of documents that are relevant to upcoming customer visits.I can go in and search for previous customer reports or find certain information.I also have a list of the key contacts from each customer right here.So, if I need to do any follow-up, I’ve got all the information I need.
When we go into presentations, I have a list of all the Office 2000 presentations that have been created for customers, for internal audiences, delivered by executives, and even my own presentations.Now, let’s say I need to give a presentation to a developer audience, and I haven’t done that before.So, I can just go through here, and I have a list of all the presentations that have already been created, so I can leverage that and really learn from the information that’s already been pulled together.
MR. BALLMER:So, here you’re using the categorization capabilities of Office and Exchange to provide a little bit more structured view of some of the information that you’d want to work with.
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.And it gives a great example of how these views can be customized.You can sort or display this information and show whatever information is important to you.
We also have budget information, and your competitive information that I can go in and use to make smart decisions about the projects I’m working on.Now, we created this area for the launch of Office 2000, a huge project managed by hundreds of people around the world.Now, one of the most important things when planning events is registration and attendance.So, we created this geographical view using MapPoint, so we could easily see using colors and rules that we set up what areas are above or below their expected attendance.And it looks like Missouri is a little bit below their goal.So, when I click on St. Louis, I get a list of contacts for the people that are involved in planning those activities.
MR. BALLMER:So, for all those people who are connected to us over satellite in the Missouri area, you’re red.And the mapping technologies in Office tells us that clearly, but we’re certainly happy to have the folks who are on satellite with us today.
MS. SANFORD:Right.And it’s easy for me to go into a particular contact.I can assign a task, schedule a meeting, or even schedule an online meeting using the integration with NetMeeting or NetShow.
Now, we also have an overall launch calendar.So, this at a glance gives me a view of all of the activities that are going on in the month of June.
MR. BALLMER:So, this is a calendar that you built in Office, not for a person, but rather for the launch itself.
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.
MR. BALLMER:It’s still built in Outlook.
MS. SANFORD:In Outlook, right.This is a shared calendar.So, unlike my personal calendar, anyone can go into here and make some changes, update a schedule, and always have access to the most current activities.
Under advertising, I have immediate access to the latest plans, budgets, and also creative ads.So I can go in and take a look at the latest bus wrapper.And you may have seen these driving around the city today.
MR. BALLMER:I’ve got to admit, I didn’t see those driving around the city today.
MS. SANFORD:Well, you will.
I also can go into radio promotion and this gives me a view of an Excel pivot table, and a new pivot chart.This is actually linking to a SQL server OLAP database.But, what’s really cool is this is being presented to me in a web page, and it’s interactive, and that’s enabled by the new Office web components.
MR. BALLMER:So these are like little pieces of Office that you can embed directly in a Web page?
MS. SANFORD:Right, and the great part is that it’s not static data, it’s interactive.So what I want to do here is a what-if analysis, and evaluate the budget allocation for each city, based on a radio promotion that we have coming up.So right now it looks like Chicago is just going to blow away their numbers for registration targets.So I’m going to take away about $10,000 and you can see the chart being dynamically updated on the right and I’m going to reallocate that $10,000 to St. Louis, and we can see now that all of the cities are in the green, which means they’re all meeting or exceeding their registration goals.
MR. BALLMER:And this is all Office working in the context of a Web page, where you’ve filtered the information in the Web page back through Office, through the Outlook product?
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.And what allows me to dynamically change this data in the chart is a third party add in, called [email protected] this really is a great example of how developers can customize a digital dashboard, and really use the tools that they know to extend the functionality of Office.
Now, what is really great about having all this information in one place is that it’s easy for me to bring it down to my desktop and work offline.So if I’m going out to visit customers, I want to bring the information I need with me.In fact, using my digital phone, I can even sink my information right down to my palm PC, so I’ve got easy access to the information I need when I’m traveling on the road.
MR. BALLMER:This is the start of your office where you want it and when you want it.The integration and synchronization between the pocket Office applications on the Windows CE palm devices and Office 2000.
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.
MR. BALLMER:Super.Thanks very much, Deanna.
Maybe I’ll pick up on that theme.This is one of the new Casio palm-based devices.It runs Microsoft Outlook, it runs pocket, or reduced functionality, versions of Word, of Excel.We have new synchronization technologies, Active Synchronization 3.0 we call it, that matches up with some of the synchronization capability that Deanna had a chance to show you.And we’re moving very strongly, both with the handheld devices, as well as with notebook PCs to cell phone data capable versions of this device, as well as wireless LANs.Where literally you could roam the campus with a device like this, or with a laptop computer, and get full LAN speeds.By this time next year the entire Microsoft campus will be wired with a wireless LAN, enabling people to walk literally anyplace on the campus and get 5 megabit speed to the device that they’re carrying with them.
Meetings without walls — I talked earlier about some of the broadcast capabilities for recording live interaction, which unfortunately we won’t have time to show you today, some of the capabilities in Office 2000 that integrate with the NetMeeting technologies in Windows.So literally, you can have two people talking on the phone and simultaneously editing the same presentation, the same spreadsheet, the same budget.If you have Internet phone capabilities you can do all of that entirely over the Internet or intranet connection that you have available.
In addition to these new capabilities, capabilities which really sort of set Microsoft Office 2000 up to be the foundation for this third generation of Office applications, we’ve also put a lot of attention into the issues which customers have raised today.We’ve put a lot of attention, for example, for the IT community, in making Office 2000 easier to manage.Today if you delete part of the Office installation, it’s a call to the help desk and a big wait.We’re trying to make it easier so that the applications install on demand.If you make a mistake and automatically delete something, Office will reassemble itself over the corporate network.We are supporting, in addition to the Office native format, an HTML instantiation for Office files, so that even people with just a Web browser have access to information authored in Office.
This is the first truly worldwide application we’ve ever shipped.We will have exactly the same code in China, in Japan, in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, in Russia, in the United States, which allows you to mix and match spell checkers, menus, in a way that lets multinational corporations really have a great deal of additional flexibility.
I’d like to roll a short video, if we might, in which some of the IT professionals at Nortel have a chance to comment about their early experiences with Office 2000.
(Video shown.)
MR. BALLMER:Great.There’s a lot of rich features in Office 2000 designed to improve the manageability from an IT perspective.I’m sorry we don’t get even a chance to show you those features today in the short time that we have.Office 2000 is a very rich product.It’s very rich in addressing the issues customers have raised, as well as positioning us for this third generation.In Office 2000 we take some really very significant strides in addressing the kinds of concerns and opportunities our small business customers have raised.The new small business tool suite, which is part of the Office 2000 family is a key part of that.We’ve integrated something we call the Small Business Customer Manager, which lets you sort of have views of financial information and customers from Microsoft Office, even if that information is stored in traditional accounting packages from people like Peachtree and Intuit and others.
We’ve included capabilities and templates which let small business create business plans.We have services that let you use Office as a front end talking to back end services that provide mailing lists and do mailings, people like Pitney Bowes, and Info-USA, and Neopost.So a set of things that are designed to integrate Office with the fabric of what and how small business operates.We thought what we would do today is ask some of the folks from Maverick Productions, a small business customer who has had some early exposure to Office 2000 to talk to you a little bit about their experiences.If we could roll that video tape, please.
(Video shown.)
MR. BALLMER:I’ve talked a lot about the future, I’ve talked a lot about the vision for the next several years.I’ve talked a lot about the third generation of applications.We showed you the kinds of new things you can do with Office, really integrating Web components, Web collaboration, HTML authoring.And it’s easy to get very excited about that, and doing that not only on a corporate intranet, but out on the Internet in a hosted way.But, there’s still a lot of things our customers have wanted to see us do to make Office 2000 simply a better version of Office 97, easier to use, and more productive for an individual user who is trying to get the current kinds of things down, create information, create documents, get those things printed and rendered, et cetera.And do show you a little bit some of the ease of use improvements for individual productivity workers in Office 2000, I’d like Deanna Sanford to come back out on stage and do a final concluding demonstration for you. Deanna?
MS. SANFORD:Well, Steve, by now most of us have probably seen how Office 2000 can help us do things like create reports, analyze data, and manage our busy schedules.Today I’d like to show you how Office 2000 can also help with a fun project, like planning a trip.
So some friends at work and I decided that we need a little weekend getaway.And since the sun hasn’t really been out yet in Seattle, we decided Hawaii would be the perfect place.And I’ve been designated as the person to plan this trip, and to pull together some of my ideas and fun activities in Hawaii.I just started throwing this together in a PowerPoint presentation.
MR. BALLMER:This is for after the launch?
MS. SANFORD:Right.Yes, next week.So in PowerPoint 2000, the tri-pane view allows me to work on my outline, on my slides, and my notes, all at the same time.So I no longer have to switch back and forth between the views.Now, there’s one more thing I want to add to this slide.
MR. BALLMER:For anybody who makes a lot of PowerPoint presentations, that’s killer.My job is “professional presenter of PowerPoint slides,” and it is a real headache moving back and forth.That’s great.
There’s one more thing I want to add to this slide, but I’m running out of room here.But, watch closely as PowerPoint automatically adjusts the size of the font to make sure it fits on the slide.Feel free to clap if you see anything you like.Now, it’s also noticed that I was using a number of lists, and it’s extended that for me.So these are things that I used to have to do manually in PowerPoint, but now the built-in intelligence takes care of those things automatically for me.Well, I noticed that I received an email from one of my friends providing me with a Web site to help me plan the activities for the trip.And because I’ll be visiting the site pretty frequently, I’ll just drag that over to my Outlook bar and create a shortcut.And because of the rich support for HTML, I can view this page right from within Outlook.I can even navigate and get to the information I need very quickly.
MR. BALLMER:So you’re saying Outlook just has the Web browsing capabilities built into it, so you don’t have to move around.
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.So places that I go frequently, like in my daily job at work I go to our team Web site, I go to MSNBC, so I can drag shortcuts right into my Outlook bar and get to those places very quickly.Now, I also received another email, and this one is from Expedia Travel.Now, it looks like they’re confirming our hotel and our flight reservations.They’ve also included some contact information for the hotel in a v-card, or basically an electronic business card that can be sent over the Internet.And because Outlook supports the v-card standard, I can drag that right into my contacts.It will open it up so I can view the information, and I can easily save that as a new contact in Outlook.
I also have some information in this email now that I want to copy and paste into an itinerary document I’m putting together for the team.And with the new collect and paste, I can copy up to 12 items, and collect them on the Office clipboard and paste them into a document when I’m ready.
MR. BALLMER:Now, you didn’t just blow that stuff away when you put that stuff in?
MS. SANFORD:No.Here’s the first item I copied, and here’s the second.Pretty convenient, isn’t it?
MR. BALLMER:I’ve used that feature before.
MS. SANFORD:They’ve also provided me a hotel rate for a trip, and I want to update that in my budget.That I’ve already started creating in Excel.And Excel 2000 will intelligently apply the formatting and the calculations when I add new data to a table.Again, this is something I used to have to do manually before.
MR. BALLMER:So, you don’t have to repaint and all that screwball stuff every time you add an entry now.
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.Excel takes care of that for me now.
Well, I need to copy this as well, and to make sure I get the right data, the new see-through selection uses a light gray instead of a black.So, it’s much easier to make sure I get all the right data.Now, there’s one more thing I want to copy, and that’s from a Web page.And this is possible because the Office clipboard also supports HTML.
Now, in this case, I’m just copying an image, but I could also be copying an HTML table, or any other information from the web, copy it right into, or paste it right into an Office file without having to reformat.
Now, Steve, you can imagine how this collect and paste feature is really time saving, because now I can collect all the items and paste them all at one time into one location.This is especially handy when I’m working on a project like a month-end report, where I’ve got to pull together lots of information from different people.
Now, there are a few more things I want to do in this itinerary document, and the first is make the background of this image transparent so it matches with the background, and that looks better.I also want to add a title here, and it’s easy for me to type anywhere in the document with the new click and type.
MR. BALLMER:No, no, no.You just put your cursor there, you didn’t have to put space, space, space, all that kind of stuff?
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.I just double click and I type.
MR. BALLMER:Very nice.
MS. SANFORD:Now, I want to jazz up this title a little bit, and I’ll use the WYSIWYG font menu to help me find a good font.And that’s easy because I get a preview before I have to select the font.
Now, I’m not sure “vacation” is the right word I’m looking for here, and I’d like to use the thesaurus to help me find a synonym.Now, when I go to the tools menu, I see a new shortened menu, and the language tool isn’t listed until I expand it out, and then it’s exactly where I’d expect it to be, and I can use the thesaurus.
MR. BALLMER:But you’re saying for the people who don’t look at the thesaurus, don’t use the thesaurus, for all those people, they don’t have to have to have it cluttering up the menu anymore.And if you’re just getting started with Word, you get a little shorter view of what its capabilities are.
MS. SANFORD:Exactly.It’s personalized to the way that I use it.So, the next time I go back to tools, language is now included on the short menu.
MR. BALLMER:You’re saying not only are the menus shorter, but, in fact, if you use something, it’s going to pop it right up for you.You don’t have to do that customization.
MS. SANFORD:Right.The menus and toolbars are now intelligent, so they’re constantly adapting to the way that I use them, so I always have quick access to the tools that I use most right on the shortened menu.
I found this great image of a tropical sunset, and I thought it would be fun to add my friends right into the picture.So, I’m going to take this into PhotoDraw, and I’m going to do a little editing.
MR. BALLMER:Now, PhotoDraw is the newest member of the Office family?
MS. SANFORD:Right.It’s our business graphics design tool.
So, I’ve got a picture of my friends here.
MR. BALLMER:It’s pretty funny to be calling it our business graphics design tool if we drag people into a beautiful Hawaiian sunset, but I’ll roll with you on this one.
MS. SANFORD:Just go with me here for a second.
Okay, so I’m dragging a photo of my friends right onto the sunset here, and this is just one thing I can do in Photo Draw.I can also create custom Web graphics, I can change clipart.I can use 3D elements to touch-up images, touch-up photos, a lot of things that business users really do need.
So, speaking of 3D elements, I’m going to use a photo brush here, and select some flowers, and I’m going to add a Hawaiian lei right into this image I’m working with.I’ll make that a little bigger, so everyone can see.There we go.
And there’s one more thing I want to add here, and that’s a caption.The one Hawaiian word that I know, and I can drag this image and position it just right on the picture, and I can also use an eyedropper tool that allows me to copy one of the great colors of the sunset, so the text stands out.
So, what do you think?
MR. BALLMER:I think it looks great to me.
MS. SANFORD:And that was really easy for me to do using the tools in Photo Draw.
MR. BALLMER:You didn’t add me to the picture, though.
MS. SANFORD:Do you want to go to Hawaii?
MR. BALLMER:I would, but not before the demonstration ends.
MS. SANFORD:Okay.
So, when I close that photo in PhotoDraw, it automatically updated it back here in my Word
document, and now my itinerary is ready to send out to my friends.And I’m going to use Office email to do that.And this is a new tool in Office 2000 that allows me to send a copy of the current file I’m working on in HTML format, so I don’t have to switch to my email client, find the document, and then include it as an attachment, I can just send it right from within the application I’m working.
And what that means is anyone using an email client that supports HTML will be able to view that rich document.So, let’s go to my email client, and take a look and see how that came through in HTML.Well, it looks great, I think.The formatting came through, the Excel table looks great, and the group photo in Hawaii looks great.
So, after seeing this, I think my friends will be pretty excited about the trip.
MR. BALLMER:Agree absolutely.It looks super.Thanks very much Deanna.
MS. SANFORD:Thanks, Steve.
(Applause.)
MR. BALLMER:We talked about a new world of knowledge worker productivity.We talked about a variety of new capabilities which I think we can make available.We talked about Office 2000, and showed some of its capabilities, which I think positions it well to be, if you will, the ongoing tool of choice for knowledge workers.We just had a chance to show you some of the things in Office 2000 that respond to the kinds of things people are trying to do every day today, as well as get us ready for tomorrow.
The core technology enhancement is the merger, or the integration of the best of Web technology and the best of Microsoft Office technology.I hope the way in which you see the product has evolved.I hope you have a fairly good sense for at least a little bit, a little bit, of what’s in Office 2000.It’s a very rich, very exciting product.Starting Thursday of this week, we encourage you to all hop on now, get a copy, play around with it, and I hope you enjoy the product as much as we do.
To all of you on our broadcast audience, I want to say thanks very much for joining us, and that’s the end of our formal presentation.Thank you.
(Applause.)
