Remarks by Bob Muglia
Forum 2000
June 22, 2000
BOB MUGLIA: Thank you and good morning.It was about 15 years ago that Microsoft first introduced the Windows platform.And Windows changed the way people worked with computers.And in the process it transformed the computer industry. .NET has the potential to change the way people work in business and thus change business itself.Now this morning what I want to do is focus on the user experience of .NET and the impact this will have on business.
Now the key to .NET is really that its all about delivering software as a service, and the opportunity that services have to transform the user experience.
Now from a business perspective Im going to take this in two parts.The first will be small business and the impact .NET can have on smaller customers, and the second on the enterprise.
Now, thinking about the small business, small businesses dont have an IT staff.They dont have the experience with technology that larger businesses have.So their users dont have the level of support that exist within enterprises, and they dont really have the capabilities to bring themselves to the Internet perhaps the way theyd like.So Microsoft has an opportunity here through the .NET platform to work with small businesses and provide a complete set of turnkey solutions, delivered as a service that helps small businesses get on the Internet.
Now, the enterprise is different.Enterprises have a lot of resources and they have a tremendous amount of technology experience.And many of them, maybe perhaps most of them have already taken steps to move onto the Internet.But they can do so much more effectively and the .NET platform can enable that.
Now later this morning Paul Maritz will talk about how the .NET platform can enable enterprises to deliver solutions in the .NET world.
What I went to do for enterprise is focus on the user experience, the experience of business users and the transition that happens when we move from delivering software in a package form that has to be installed and deployed and move that to delivering it as software as a service.
Now one key facet that weve learned over the years about installing software on users PCs is that enterprises need to have control over how they deploy that software.They want to manage the information that comes to users and have control of what comes on the desktop.So even though .NET changes the paradigm, moving from software that is permanently installed on a PC to software thats delivered as a service, that element of keeping IT in a position where they can manage the users desktop is still important.So thats a key to some of the things that were doing with the .NET platform.
Let me start by talking about small business.And theres an incredible opportunity for Microsoft, for our partners and really for the whole industry to help small business customers adopt technology and get themselves on the Internet.We think this is a very important thing.In fact, its such an important thing that about a year ago we formed a brand-new small business division thats completely focused at providing software services for small business.
With that, what Id like to do is introduced Kathleen Hebert, whos the vice president of our Small Business Division. Kathleen, good morning.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: Thanks, Bob.
With 85 million small business entities worldwide, and over $15 billion spent on software in the U.S. alone, small businesses represent a huge wave of technology adoption.But small businesses dont take advantage of technology to the same depth as their larger counterparts.
Small businesses dont have the time or resources to manage complex or expensive solutions.Their processes are often divided among different areas.If they have their business documents on their PC, you can almost bet that their schedule is going to be on paper and there e-mail contacts and customers are via voice mail and fax.Its really hard to pull all this information together to run a business.
And perhaps even more so than large businesses, small businesses are outward focused.They need to interact with business customers, partners and suppliers for everyday business transactions.
Now, despite these complexities, small businesses are interested in actually adopting technologies that are going to help them rather businesses better.In fact, 63 percent of small businesses today already have an Internet connection.About 15 percent of those are broadband.Thats why were investing aggressively in Microsoft bCentral. Microsoft bCentral is Microsofts small business services solutions.And it may surprise you to know we already have over one million registered users.And actually, Media Metrix ranks us as the number one business portal.
But, in addition to that, were going to be working to engineer a next generation .NET experience for small businesses and evolve our technology to include broader business services and integrate with partners and then also expand internationally.
Now, in order to show the potential of the .NET platform weve created a video.
BOB MUGLIA: One of the things were going to do this morning is use videos as a part of the next set of presentations to really give you a glimpse of the vision that we have for the .NET platform.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: Now the attributes of the .NET platform align so well with small businesses its really going to change the way they use technology.So in the video you see Alex, a proprietor of a small business, a growing mountain bike manufacturer with a hot new product, the Solo 2010.Now she is going to use Microsoft bCentral and Web services to promote her new product and to reach new customers.Lets take a look.
(Video segment.)
KATHLEEN HEBERT: So what are the innovations for small business that the .NET platform enables?Well, in the video you saw Alex use a much broader range of small business services.Right now bCentral is a small business portal with Web site hosting and marketing services, but we are committed to expanding to a complete comprehensive set of small business services that will enable small businesses to run their complete business online.Now, that will include in the future customer management, richer commerce services, messaging, productivity services and more.
BOB MUGLIA: And one of the important things that the .NET platform delivers is really the ability to get this technology to customers, and thats important for small businesses, which dont have a level of expertise.So with the .NET platform we can expand what bCentral delivers to really take care of a much broader set of the needs of small business.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: And what really changes are products like customer management used to be exclusively used by large corporations, because of the cost and expense and complexity, but now small businesses can take advantage of them as well.
The second innovation is that were going to be integrating productivity with business services.This will let small businesses get at and reuse their data much more easily and with a lot less work.You saw in the video Alex took a document off of Web storage and moved it over to a catalog page, and the data copied directly into the fields that were required for her catalog page, so she was up and running quickly.
BOB MUGLIA: So here the key to this is some of the new innovations that the .NET platform delivers, focusing and beginning with XML and putting structure to data, whether that data is business data or whether its productivity data, like a document.By having a standardized schema for that, it breaks down the barriers that exist between todays productivity applications and business applications.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: The third innovation is that we are going to be integrating bCentral with a the whole host of third-party products and services.The .NET platform enables very tight integration without expensive one-off development.Let me show you an example.
What youre looking at here is a customer order and tracking system.I can get a quick glance of all orders that are in my system right now and their status.One of the capabilities of the system is that when an order is complete I can actually arrange shipping.In this case the shipping service is UPS.And to a user it looks like its running directly within bCentral, but the .NET platform enables a much tighter integration. .NET enables authentication, so right now UPS can actually verify my identity, so they know who to bill, and then once that is enabled we can actually exchange a lot more information.So in addition to this billing information we can exchange shipping times, schedule time for delivery.Now, when Im back in my main schedule you can see that Im accepting a schedule for an appointment for a pickup and it actually goes directly into my schedule and it also creates an invoice.
Now I still need to go into the backroom and package up the product to ship, but .NET enables much tighter integration, without all the development thats required in the past by both companies.
BOB MUGLIA: This is a good example of how .NETs hosted services can really helping a small business work with their trading partners.By having a common mechanism, Passport, to create identity between those companies, they can have a secure transaction.And with things like the BizTalk services, being able to provide business to business orchestration is enabled.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: bCentral will be integrating with a whole host of third-party products.Arriba is working to actually integrate their B2B network with Microsoft BCentral.Were working with ADP for payroll and tax filing.Were working with Vertical Net to reach Vertical markets and a whole bunch of other people.
BOB MUGLIA: One key to .NET is really the opportunity that it brings to partners.Microsoft has always focused on working closely with partners, but .NET brings that to a new level.Its built on open programming interfaces and it has the underlying mechanisms that allow partners to engage and work effectively.In this case, think of small business and all of the many partners that the work together..NET can provide the glue to make that happen.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: Well, were investing now to make these innovations that Ive been showing you a reality.And to show you some of the progress, Id like to give you a demo of real-life code of a lead management system similar to what you saw Alex use in the video.In this case were integrating two BCentral services: BCentral site manager and the new BCentral customer manager, which allows you to track every interaction with customers so you can convert customer leads into sales.
Bob, you look like a mountain biker.So Id like you to be a potential candidate to buy a Solo 2010.
BOB MUGLIA: I love mountain bikes.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: What youre looking at is a Web page hosted on BCentral.Its a catalog page by a small business.And this is a special catalog page, because its not just a static Web page, its actually integrated with the customer lead tracking system.So when Bob actually request some further information —
BOB MUGLIA: And maybe I went to know a little bit more about this bike or when its going to ship before I actually go ahead and order it.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: While hes doing this, this information is automatically going to be put into my customer tracking system.This is a great advantage, because instead of people just visiting my Web site, anytime they actually submit a query, I can track it immediately.I can take it to the next step, and then I can convert that interest into a sale.
So as Bob submits a request, Im going to play Alex.And as a small-business owner Im often on the road actually talking with customers.While Im on the road, I interact with my office via a cell phone.Now this is a standard HTML Web phone, but since I use BCentral so frequently I have BCentral listed as actually one of my favorites in this.
So Im just going to drill down into BCentral so I can take a quick look at whats happened in my office while Ive been on the road.And as I sign into BCentral, as Alex in this case Im going to login, its going to give me all the highlights of everything that has occurred.Now, Ive got some tasks Im supposed to be following up.Ive got email.But I also see I have one new lead, so let me take a look at that new lead.
And probably no surprise to everybody in the audience, the new lead is from Bob Muglia.So Im going to check out what Bob wants.And as a potential customer he wants to know when product is going to be available.Now, this is a new product for me.I want to get momentum as quickly as possible with it, so Im going to respond directly from this Web phone with a pre-created template.Templates are very easy to create.But we have the product in stock, and thats available for shipping immediately.
Now, when Im back in the office, I can take a look at a central dashboard that tells me all the task lists of the things I need to be doing.I have phone calls I need to return, but when I refresh this actually youre going to see that weve added Bob Muglia as a new lead.Now, this actually has all the information about this lead, so I can follow up and taken it to the next step.You see that weve captured not only Bobs initial contact, which is via our Web page, but after that actually that I responded via my cell phone to tell him that it was in stock.So now my chances of closing the sale are increased.And that just shows you some simple power between integrating two services, Web site hosting and customer lead management.
You can see that weve made some great progress and we are going to continue to work on shipping more and more richer services for BCentral.
Now, so whats next?Right now BCentral is a portal and a Web site hosting for small businesses and marketing services.But over the course of the next couple months were going to releasing some new services, including lead management services like you saw, richer commerce services, a digital dashboard and were also going to be integrating to offer Outlook messaging.
BOB MUGLIA: One of the things weve done with BCentral is weve taken Exchange 2000 and hosted it as a service thats a part of BCentral, thus providing a very rich set of messaging services for small-business customers.In this case what were doing is delivering Outlook Web access so that people can access these rich services across the Web.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: Well, thats just the beginning.As you can imagine, were going to be architecting BCentral to take full advantage of the .NET platform.Well be offering rich partner integration.Well be rewriting it to embrace the natural user interface.And well support any time, any device like you saw in the demo.Were going to integrate with Office as they move to the .NET platform and well continue to offer more and more small-business services.
BOB MUGLIA: Small business in BCentral is a perfect example of the kinds of things that can be built using the new .NET platform, delivering services to the small-business customers.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: Now, with the .NET platform small businesses will be able to do a lot more.
BOB MUGLIA: Great.Thank you very much, Kathleen.
KATHLEEN HEBERT: Thanks, Bob.
BOB MUGLIA: What Id like to do now is since we talked about small business, Id like to switch now and talk about business users within an enterprise and think about some of their needs.Now, our focus here at Microsoft is really to improve the user experience within business, to help people to be successful, balancing all their demands at work as well as their demand across work and their personal life.We want to empower them to connect with and work with partners and customers in much more effective ways.And we went to enable all of this in an environment that is increasingly becoming mobile.At home, in the car, at the airport, it doesnt make any difference. What this implies is that we need to take .NET and broaden it out to work across multiple devices, the PC, but also cell phones and a wide variety of devices.
Now, to give you an idea of what the experience of a business user can be in a .NET world, what weve done is weve captured a glimpse of some of that in a video.This is a continuation of the video that you first saw, but now it moves to work with Sandra, whos a knowledge worker inside a retail enterprise, an enterprise retailer, and what shes going to do is shes going to work collaboratively with other people, some of them part of a company, some at different companies, Seven Cycles in this case, and watch how seamless this is and the way the .NET platform can transform the business user experience.
Lets run the video.
(Video segment.)
BOB MUGLIA: So what are some of the innovations that were going to focus on for the business user?Well, first and foremost, as Bill talked about, is the natural user interface, an interface that adapts to the way people work, not the other way around.And also one that really works with new forms of input like the pen and the tablet PC or speech.
A second thing thats very critical in the .NET platform is it is not about fat servers and dumb clients; its about a smart service and smart clients.And this is a very critical point, because taking advantage of the rich power and processing power that exists for all of us on the many hundreds of millions of computing devices that we have provides tremendous opportunity.
Last year Intel shipped 2 trillion MIPS, and all of the power is available to the desktops.
Now, when people talk about taking advantage of that kind of processing power, sometimes you think about things like photo editing or editing videos.But Ill assert that theres a lot more opportunity there that can impact peoples lives every day, even things like when youre writing e-mail, having background spell checking.That requires the power of local execution, and thats one of the key things that the .NET platform delivers.
Now, from a collaboration perspective the .NET platform really opens things up and lets people work between companies.If you remember the video, when Sandra was working with Alex at Seven Cycles, she was collaborating with a pretty rich set of services that allowed for instant messaging and chat and allowed her to incorporate things like the video and work together.
Now today when you work between companies there are really walls, barriers that exist between them.And the only thing that really breaks through it is e-mail.Well, we envision a much richer set of services that enable a business user to be much more productive with dot-net, so thats a key focus.
A final thing thats very important with the .NET platform for business users is working on improving the freedom and control that users have, putting users back in control.Now, this starts with authentication and a common authentication mechanism that allows people to work with their information in a safe way, but also a private way so that they know that the things that theyre doing cant be monitored on the Internet.
But this idea of user in control goes much beyond that.It really focuses on helping people to be as productive as they can and to control their environment.And you can imagine how important this is with mobility.
Now, with cell phones today a good example is that when youre talking with somebody in a meeting and just having a conversation with somebody, how often does it happen to you that the persons cell phone rang, and it seems like as often as not the interaction that they had is less important than the conversation you are having.Thats an example how when we take on and bring out new devices, that they can be in some ways more disruptive than productive.
So the key to this is to enable people to control their interruptions and really control the way theyre communicated.
You saw an example of that in the video when Sandra was driving in the car and she said to her husband,
“This is the only interruption that I allow.”
So she knew that she was not going to be interrupted except by the most important business thing.
And here again this is the way that .NET can balance peoples lives between their personal work and their business work.
What Id like to do now is talk about some new technology that well be delivering as part of the .NET platform.Im going to give you a sneak preview of something that hasnt been demoed before, that a small group of Microsoft veterans have been working on for some time.And the result of what they built is very important.Theyve created technology that embodies the .NET user experience.This is real code that demonstrates this.
Now, its clear to us that this is a very important thing, and its critical to the .NET platform.So in the last few months weve doubled the number of people who are working on its.And the technology that Im going to show is something that will apply very broadly across Microsoft products in the future: windows.net, office.net, as well as the consumer subscription service.
So with that, what Id like to do is introduced Jonathan Perera, and have him show you a demonstration of this new technology thats critical to .NET.Jonathan.
JONATHAN PERERA: Good morning.So what Id like to do is show you a demonstration of the progress that weve made in this group, again some of the big initiatives that Bob was talking about earlier, things like smart clients/smart service, the natural user interface, and then finally from a client perspective how were developing software that really embraces XML as a technology.
So Im going to start at the very beginning and show you something I call dynamic delivery.Now, up here on the screen what you see here is essentially a basic Windows 2000 professional system.And for the purposes of this demonstration Im going to play the role of a summer intern at a corporation.Ive just got a new laptop and I havent installed any software on it yet.Now, today the process of installing your software can be really complex.I have to put a CD-ROM into the system.I have to enter in a lot of information as part of the setup program.But the dynamic delivery of software, which is part of smart clients/smart service completely changes that.
So what youre seeing here is that Ive just logged onto an Internet site.Its authenticated me with a Passport.And as I choose to start actually downloading that software, some interesting things are going to take place.Its going to reach out to the Internet and its going to grab the code that Im going to need to run, you know, my set of services and just dynamically install them onto my system.And Ill go ahead and maximize this.
And there are some important points there, right, at no point in that interaction did I as an end-user have to input any information, so it completely makes it easier for me as a knowledge worker, this business user to get up and running easily.So my digital dashboard is here.All of my data has followed me.
If I go over here and choose mail, what youll notice are some interesting things taking place.Now, youll see e-mail being folded in.Now, whats actually taking place there is were actually going out to one of these hosted Exchange servers.Were getting my e-mail and were bringing it down to this client system.And were doing it in a way where we have full replication of my client system.
So what does that mean?I get the richness of sort of a Web type experience with the richness of a client system where I have an offline experience.So even if Im not connected to the Internet I still have all of my e-mail available to me.
BOB MUGLIA: And this is example of how the .NET platform is about smart clients.It gives you things like the ability to work offline on an airplane.And at the same time it lets users get rid of the hassles that exist with installing client software today.
In fact, one of the key things about the .NET platform is that administrators can control exactly when the information is delivered down to the client.And this can happen on a very dynamic basis, so that if there is, for example, a new virus signature that needs to be sent, they can be deployed in an automatic basis across the desktops within an enterprise.
JONATHAN PERERA: Absolutely.So let me show you a quick example here.The experience that people have on the Internet today is with things like Yahoo or MSN e-mail, I get my e-mail no matter where I am.But theres always a trade-off.I dont get the richness of the offline experience sometimes and I also dont have the richness of things like formatting and spell checking.And what were doing here is very different.So this is a full-blown rich client that allows me to do things like great formatting and also have things like background spell checking that just work for me.So the spell checker, the formatting are really just great examples of how weve delivered software as a service with the richness of a traditional client application.
So Ive sort of shown a little bit about dynamic delivery of software in a very rich way.
The second area I wanted to show you was a little bit about the advancements weve made in terms of what we call the natural user interface.And as an example of this Ill be showing you something I call the universal canvas.And this is a technology that both Bill Gates and Bob have spoken about earlier, and this will really be the first time that we show it to you.
And theres two demonstrations of this really.The first thing that you heard Bill and Bob talk about was the ability to seamlessly integrate the experience between my desktop productivity applications and the Internet.So in this case Im looking at my contacts and what youll notice here is that for Shannon Talbot, her address over here is actually a hyperlink.Now, as a click on that hyperlink, its actually a piece of data thats gone out to the Internet, it shows me Expedia maps and its returned it to me within a single window interface that you see here.
In other words, to go browse the Web I didnt have to launch a separate application.The experience for me is absolutely seamless as I move from the Internet to my desktop application and I can use a forward and back paradigm.And this is one of the first key elements of the universal canvas.
Now the second key elements about the universal canvas is that the team has done a loss of thinking about, you know, how do users work with software.And what we wanted to do — and youve heard us talk about this a lot this morning — is really make software adapt more to the end-user.And as an example of this Im going to show you how weve taken features and functionality, and made them available across sort of a universal authoring canvas and expose them in a way they just makes sense to me as an end-user.
So what am I looking at here?This is a proposal for Shannon Talbot.This is essentially just a rich, you know, word processing type of document.Now what Im going to do here is actually just do some editing of this docket.Im going to just add a new row here, and Ill just type in the word
“total”
.
And what weve done is expose features and functionality no matter where I am, no matter what kind of document type it is.So in this case Im taking sort of a sum formula, Ive put that into the table, it dynamically updates for me and it was transparent to me as the end-user.Now that was a spreadsheet or a word processing type of document?Features are exposed to me in this universal editing service no matter where I am.
So one example might be a word processing document.Another example might be an e-mail message.So Im going to go ahead and open an e-mail message here and show you an example of that.Maybe what Ill do here is just forward this off to my client, and just sort of type in here and Ill clean this up a little bit.
“So the following are my preliminary estimates of the worked we discussed.”
Lets just say as an example she wanted to know what the average price was for all of this.
Now, you saw me enter a spreadsheet type formula into a table earlier.And that was kind of cool.But with this new universal canvas I can actually have spreadsheet formulas available to me right in the flow of the text.So let me show you an example of that.
So what Ill just do is sort of say that this is equal to the average of all of the information in these cells here, and it just calculated dynamically for me, which is pretty cool.And if I come in here just to show you an example of that, Ill just make it something really large, youll see how its calculated dynamically for me.
So a couple of really interesting things.Weve put the spreadsheet formulas into the flow of text, making the software work around me, and all of a sudden it becomes pretty interesting.What did I show?It was an e-mail messaging client, a Web browser, a word processing type of document, a spreadsheet.Weve brought all of these things together with one universal canvas.And for me as a business user its just going to help me get work done work intuitively.
BOB MUGLIA: So Jonathan showed some key elements of the natural user interface and highlighted the universal canvas.
I want to tell you a little bit about how the .NET technologies are used to build this.What were doing here is we actually send XML down to the client as a part of the service.And what you see on the screen, everything on the screen is all HTML.And what we be do is we take the XML and we apply XML style sheet to transform it into something that a user can understand.And by using that kind of advanced technology we can break down these barriers, break the barriers that exist between productivity applications like word processors and spreadsheets, but also between applications and the Web.And this is all an example of how the natural user interface allows users to work the way they want.
JONATHAN PERERA: Absolutely.So Ive shown two things here so far.First of all, a little bit about dynamic delivery of a smart client working as a smart server.Secondly, with universal canvas and advancements on the natural user interface.And weve been talking a lot today about XML.Well, so too with the client technology Im showing you here, XML is the very fabric underlying all of this.
So while Bob was talking I just actually downloaded my calendar information and downloaded that from an Internet server down to my system here.
Now, whats interesting here is that all of this calendar information is stored as XML data, and thats got a couple of advantages for me.As I rotate through different views here, Im not making a round-trip to the server and back down to my client.That information is XML.Its sort of data type of information Im manipulating right here on my laptop.And thats sort of interesting.
But the power of XML goes way beyond what I can do with my own system.Its going to help me as a business user long-term organize my time more effectively.And Ill just show you a quick example of that.
So today, you know, organizing my business schedule is really tough.And one of the key frustrations is that I cant manage my business schedule and my personal schedule at the same time.And XML I think is really going to help us solve this issue.
So what were looking at here is a series of events that I might want to schedule against my time, and youll notice here that theres a sports link for the Mariners home page.Now the Mariners today advertise their schedule as HTML.You know, its just basic text.I cant do anything with it.I cant overlay it on top of my calendar.Well, this XML client changes all of that.So as I click on that link what youll notice is that we actually went out, we retrieved the Mariners schedule, we looked at it against my schedule, we brought those two together and what youll see is that the areas in blue are those times at which I as a client can now manage these two pieces of information.
Now, thats just, you know, the Mariners.You can easily imagine your dentist, a real estate agent, doctors advertising information as XML and being able to bring these pieces of data together.
BOB MUGLIA: This is a good example of why XML is so important, because by having data stored in a standardized format like that, information can be integrated together on the client, taking advantage of the smart client.
Now, a key to this is the fact that it goes beyond this example that we just showed here.In the video Sandra showed going out to the Web and taking some demographic data and pulling it into a document, a market analysis she was doing.Again, thats an example of how having data in standardized formats what XML allow business users to have a wide variety of productivity scenarios.
JONATHAN PERERA: So, one more example.If on the one hand, having XML as underlying technology for all this, I can do some really interesting things in terms of polling data together for me, we can also publish data out from my system in a smarter way where smart services on the Internet can take advantage of it.
And just for the purposes of an example, Im going to open a sample resume.I mentioned that I was an intern at a corporation.Ive done some work and its time for me to think about what Im going to be doing in the fall.And what youll notice here is this is a rich looking document, and I can come in here and choose edit, and I can make some changes to this.For example, I might have just gotten my latest final scores back and by GPA moved up from 3.8 to 3.9.You know, Ive got a lot different information here.
And what I didnt show you is that, you know, it looks like just a nice word processing type of document.All of this data is actually XML.I just edited raw XML from a client perspective.My GPA has a sense of a tag about it, where its been tagged as a piece of data.My skills, my experience that you see here, those are all tagged as pieces of information, which means that moving forward in an arena of smart services, a whole new set of, you know, opportunities are available to me.
So Monster.com, in the event that they move towards an XML based world, I could just choose to post this to Monster.And some interesting things took place here.Rather than having to retype my information into HTML, what my skills were, what my experience was, because that information was tagged, Monster was automatically able to return back to me the jobs that best met my criteria and my skills and my experience, and I didnt have to retype in any information whatsoever.
BOB MUGLIA: Now, a couple minutes ago we should how XML can be used to bring data together and provide great, rich views for end-users.But heres an example whereby taking structure to documents, and again using this XML standard, users as they write documents, just normal word processing document and e-mail can actually do things that are part of a business process.That data can pass on to other steps of the business process and its a real opportunity for partners to participate like this Monster.com demo that Jonathan showed.
JONATHAN PERERA: Absolutely.Just, you know, sort of in closure, this exciting technology we think is really going to fundamentally reshape what we can do for the business user with things like dynamic delivery, getting software, getting updates, getting new features.Its wildly different.Its much easier, much more intuitive.Things like universal canvas, the technology works around me in the way that I work, not the other around.
And with XML Im just going to have a much easier time to organize my personal and business time and share and manage data in exciting new ways.
So, thank you very much.
BOB MUGLIA: Great, thanks, Jonathan.
So what Id like to do is now give you a roadmap for how this will play out for the business user.First of all, in the short run weve been working on the next version of Office, and you can expect to see a traditional version of Office with Word and Excel, PowerPoint all as a part of it.And, in fact, we expect to continue to work on traditional versions of Office for quite some time, because our customers will want us to do that.
But as move forward with Office we will be incorporating .NET technology into it and at the same time well be working on a totally new version.You can think of it as Office .NET or Office thats delivered as a software service.And with that version we can take advantage of the full capabilities of the .NET platform, things like the natural user interface, smart clients and smart services, the universal collaboration and the full set of mobility and freedom and control scenarios.
Now, with Exchange were in the last stages of shipping Exchange 2000 and were at the same time taking the steps to host Exchange 2000 on the Internet as a part of the BCentral service.
At the same time weve put a tremendous amount of energy into working with carriers to take Exchange data and make that available to mobile users.And youll be hearing more about that in the coming months.
But whats the next step for Exchange?Well, as we move to software as a service, corporations are still going to want to have control of their data.Theyre going to want to determine how thats hosted.Sometimes theyll do it in-house, sometimes theyll use ASPs to do it.But regardless of that, what we want to do is make it so that corporations can run their servers, but then also work with Internet services like Passport.Our focus is to give corporations the choice of where they run their data, but still take advantage of the advanced capabilities of the .NET platform.
Well, let me close now.Youve seen a lot of important things this morning.And I want to say that Ive been here for over 12 and half years and .NET represents the most exciting opportunity that Ive ever witnessed.With .NET we can transform the user experience like never before.My team is going to deliver on that vision and that will change the way people work within business.To me thats what Microsoft is all about.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)