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It’s great to be here and have a chance to share some of my excitement with you.
I got involved with computers at 18.And the computer was a very limited teletype that had to be connected through a phone lineup to a mainframe like computer, but my friends and I became fascinated with understanding what the computer can do,what was the future, and how would it be used. When we found out about chip technology,and the miracle of being able to improve the power of the chip exponentially,we realized that computers had a very bright future.We spent a lot of our time writing software because we loved writing software,because we thought that the software being written by a lot of big hardware companies wasn’t as good as what we could do.
I was 19 when I realized that if I wanted to be the first to do a software company for these new cheap computers,I needed to get my friends together and start right away,so Microsoft became the first company doing software for these new machines.Our vision was a computer on every desk and in every home. In the last 20 years,that vision is certainly becoming a reality. If we had to change it today,we would simply add thatnow we also want to have a computer in every pocket,every car - many other places that we had not thought about when we first started doing development.I believe software is the key element that really unlocks the power of all this technology,and the idea of making it easy to find information, easy to create information, easy to communicate with other people.Software is at the center of that, and so software will be the fastest growing industry in the worldand one that will create lots and lots of great jobs.Certainly here in China the opportunity for hundreds of thousands of great jobs should be very exciting because there is aglobal shortage in terms of computer skills.
The personal computer revolution got started in 1975, that’s when I left college and started Microsoft.These last 22 years have really been amazing, every prediction we’ve made about improvements have all come true.As we look ahead, that pace of innovation is not slowing down, in fact if anything it’s speeding up.Very high speed processors like 300MHz Pentiums, or new 64 bit processors that we’re already developing Windows NT for;incredible storage capacity, which will let us store, not just data, but also digital video as well;great screen technology to create a tablet like device that would be good enough for reading and writing;advanced graphics and now the ability to connect computers together at very high speed.
The Internet is the way that all these machines can be connected together. And those standards, and the improvement of those standards, is very very important. Some people like to think about how the computer industry compares to other industries. I’ve shown before what the cost of the typical car was in 1980 in US,and that rose up to be about from 8,000 to 19,000 today, and likewise cereal has increased in price. How does that compare to PCs? If the same model was followed for PCs, can buy a car for 27 cents and cereal forless than one cent, so there’s no other area of the economy that has this rapid improvement, and people just aren’t used to it. You almost have to tell people, “What would you do if Internet computing power was free.” Because that’s what we’ll be able to deliver with all these improvements.
Microsoft’s vision of computing is global computing. We see PCs connected to the Internet making the world a smaller place, and that’s positive in so many ways: to bulid understanding between people, to share research in key science areas, including medicine,to allow world commerce to work very well. And the Internet is driving this already. Microsoft has set up cooperations around the world, and we are very pleased with the success we’re having here in China. We are doing significant software development on products here,and that will continue to increase, and key for us is having very very high quality software people, andwe’ve been lucky to hire a great number of people from this university. Really I’d say that the core of the teams we’ve put together have come from here, and I’ve listed some of those employees here, and we certainly hope that in the future this list will increase dramatically,and the quality of our work continuesto rise.(To be continued)
