March 2008
A Republican Would Say: What? More Regulation?... →
“The desktop computer—whether it’s a Mac or PC—is the best model for...”
– Secret
“I always wished to address this Assembly in Greek, but realized that it would...”
– 1957, Xenophon Zolotas (Greek: Ξενοφών Ζολώτας)
WatchKaramanlis cries while saying Macedonia is only one and it is Greek.
“But no. They had everything going for them. They were cute and tasteless and...”
– Jeremy Clarkson about animals used to make leather seats and accessories.
“I say go to Botswana Land and find a native who doesn’t know what...”
– Secret
“In Windows 3.0 I remember I used to wait for the menu to draw the outline, then...”
– Paul Thaurott on Windowsx Weekly Podcast epidose 50.
Bill Gates: SharePoint Conference 2008, Remarks by...
QUESTION: Good morning. My question is, with the SharePoint online services, this opens a big door for competition. In the past few weeks Google announced that they have this thing called Google Team Edition. So obviously, personally I think SharePoint is far more superior. What's Microsoft's plan in being ahead of the competition, and more importantly, gaining better adoption at the end-user level?
BILL GATES: Well, SharePoint is about end users, and being able to get their work done. And one thing you see in any company is, as soon as you have some SharePoint sites, people are going to those and they're thinking, geez, I have a similar task I'd like to do, now can I still provision and can I get at the list of templates that are the starting point for these particular tasks. So to get full value out of the SharePoint, companies really need to take all their common things, whether it's financial analysis, budgeting process, serving employees, setting big metrics, and have sample sites that have been done in various departments and get the word out about those.
Really, successful software always requires both a bottoms-up approach, where users see what they want, why they want it, and it requires a top-down approach, where you understand, okay, who should be able to access this information, what capacity do we need to put into the data center, how do we connect up to departments and things like that. And it's when you get those two working together that something really amazing can happen.
So with e-mail it was Exchange meeting those very stringent top-down requirements, and it was Outlook helping users to be more productive. With SharePoint it's, we do new server features for the top down requirements, and then it's more at the template level, really, and getting the word out, that we allow it to be and the self-provisioning, that we allow people to move into that bottoms-up.
So the population of people who know they use SharePoint, or are comfortable with it, is going up dramatically. Even if you take markets like the education market, schools create portals using SharePoint, we have a lot of special work going on with that, and you can go into the per-student page, the per-class page, see the homework that was assigned to your child, and really view information. SharePoint is perfect for something like that school kind of application, whether it's high school or college. So our commitment to you is we're going to get, as workers come into your workforce, a higher and higher percentage of them will have been exposed to SharePoint by the time they come in, just like you take for granted for Microsoft Office today.
In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don't understand the special needs of business. Today their economic model is based on consumer search, and having done an incredible job there, and obviously we're investing in challenging them in that space, making sure that, even as it grows, gets to be more competitive than it is today. If you've seen the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things, they really don't have the richness, the responsiveness. You can see the relative success they've had there.
Most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day. And then after that ...
TOM RIZZO: Ouch. (Applause.)
BILL GATES: Well, I might be biased.
TOM RIZZO: I agree with you.
BILL GATES: You should check into what's really happened with various of these things. I remember there was one called GTalk, I can barely remember the name, but it was so it was going to change the world. It's healthy that there are many choices that people have here. The breadth of what needs to be done to create something like SharePoint is very, very high. But, then again, we want to meet your test, where your end users are really pushing you even a little bit to say, hey, we're not using it for budgeting, we're not using it for personnel review, we're not using it for sales analysis. Why are we just using SharePoint over here? I want to be empowered to use it across a wider range of capabilities.
TOM RIZZO: All right. We have time there's lots of questions, unfortunately, we have time for one more question. Sir, at number three you've been waiting a while. So please ask your question.
QUESTION: All right. Microsoft made an offer for Yahoo!, and if in the future Yahoo! becomes part of the Microsoft family, how would that affect the SharePoint search experience and roadmap?
BILL GATES: I don't think whether or not we end up doing the Yahoo! merger or not has any real direct impact to SharePoint. Obviously it represents the idea that we're very serious about competing in consumer search. We think that's a very area. We've learned a lot at the company, in terms of how you build up the data center with hundreds of thousands of servers, and you are seeing a benefit, in terms of how we think through automating the data center, both our own, as we host SharePoint and Exchange, but also what are these software management things that we can carry over into customer data centers.
So the fact that we're very serious about competing in that space, and we have some breakthrough ideas that will change consumer search, I think that is relevant. I think that will help SharePoint, because that boundary, as you saw a little bit of the federated search, there are some neat things across that boundary. In fact, if you take desktop search, SharePoint search, and broad Web search, I think you're going to see more and more things, where you're drawing on information in each one of those to improve them, and letting people see results that come out of multiple of those things. And we have an incredible team who works on this consumer search stuff, and will be the ones who deliver the surprises that come through on this.
So search is a very, very important area for us, including for example that when you run servers, you shouldn't have to have people on call 24 hours a day. That is, if a hardware failure takes place, the software should automatically notice that and do the right thing. We have that for a number of our properties today, and that will become a capability for our data center running any of these things as well as how you run them.
So, in general, it shows our bullishness about search and software, whether or not specifically it happens, it's hard to speculate on.
QUESTION: Actually, I have one more question for Bill.
TOM RIZZO: A quick one.
QUESTION: Yes, a quick one. So now you'll be focusing more and more on your Foundation. Which president will you vote for in 2008? (Laughter.)
TOM RIZZO: Well, Bill has to leave right now.
BILL GATES: Both Microsoft and my Foundation are pretty clear that we have causes that we believe in. In the Foundation, global health is the big priority. And we actually work on an organization called One.org, that we helped finance, that went out and got each of the candidates to speak about what they would do relative to global health. So if you go to www.one.org, then you can see videos, and actually you'll see that all the main candidates have made pretty strong commitments, McCain, Clinton, Obama, all of them have talked about continuing some of the great things that have gone on. But if you want to see the nuances on that issue, I would encourage you to go up and look at that site. I'm not making any particular public comment beyond that.
TOM RIZZO: Let's leave it at that. Let's all thanks Bill Gates for his time. Thank you, Bill. (Applause.)
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Macedon
You are a retarded, ignorant, sub-intelligent idiot, with know knowledge of history or logic. Macedonians were never Greek, Alexander the Great was a Macedonian King, how else can Macedonians be called Macedonians, when Alexander’s empire was called Macedon. Its idiots like you that like to re-write history.
To the person who wrote the second (the reply) paragraph. You who call yourself...
February 2008
