Collaboration, security, and workflow were among the themes of Microsoft's eighth annual CEO Summit in May 2004. Chief Software Architect Bill Gates delivered a keynote speech about Microsoft's long-term vision for driving IT innovation, with an emphasis on Microsoft products and technologies that are already available or coming out in the next few years. Gates's annual speech can be useful for partners to help them determine which technologies are particularly important to Microsoft.

The two-day CEO Summit includes speeches, panel discussions, and social events and gives Microsoft an opportunity to pitch products to its largest customers and establish or reinforce partnerships away from press scrutiny. About 100 CEOs participated in this year's event, including Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Barry Diller (USA Networks), Carly Fiorina (Hewlett-Packard), Michael Marks (Flextronics, the manufacturer of Microsoft's Xbox console), and Paul Vivek (Wipro, which specializes in IT outsourcing).

Gates's keynote speech, the only part of the summit available to the public, was organized around four areas in which Microsoft hopes to drive major changes by 2010:

• "Redefining business productivity," including new types of collaboration and better security and reliability
• "Rewiring the economy" by changing the way companies exchange information internally, with other businesses, and with customers
• "Redefining entertainment" in the home
• Promoting the "digital lifestyle" by encouraging consumers to use digital technology to perform everyday tasks.

Redefining Business Productivity

The majority of Gates's speech covered productivity issues that Microsoft believes companies are struggling with today and identified how Microsoft technologies and products address these issues.

To improve collaboration among workers, Gates said workers should be encouraged to create "bottom-up" Web sites where they can easily share information, as enabled by Microsoft's SharePoint family of products. He also noted the importance of RDF/Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (RSS), an XML-based technology that lets users subscribe to Web logs ("blogs"), pick specific topics of interest, then receive updates when new relevant information is posted. This is the most prominent mention of RSS by a Microsoft executive to date, suggesting that the technology may find its way into future versions of SharePoint or other Microsoft products. Gates also described how Microsoft is allowing its developers to communicate directly with customers through blogs and other methods, and he suggested that this strategy can help companies understand customer needs and dissatisfactions that are not always picked up by broad-based market research.

Gates also acknowledged that security and reliability remain critical business concerns, and he suggested several areas of focus for Microsoft:

• Helping customers better secure systems by building in isolation technologies, such as the firewall that is on by default in Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)
• Moving beyond password-based authentication and access control with technologies such as smart cards and biometrics
• Improving the delivery of security-related patches to Microsoft customers—for example, by better defining what constitutes a "critical" update and by combining the current Windows Update and Office Update sites
• Allowing corporations to take advantage of error reporting to enhance the reliability of in-house applications.

Rewiring the Economy

Gates also described how he believes IT will continue to make major changes in how companies do business, highlighting three technologies in particular:

Workflow. Although Gates didn't use the term workflow specifically, he spent considerable time talking about automating highly complex, variable business processes. In particular, he noted a forthcoming add-on to Visual Studio that would allow developers to define a business process by drawing it on a Tablet PC. Presumably, this will be delivered as part of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), a set of application modeling and life-cycle tools code-named Whitehorse and planned for Visual Studio 2005. (For more details on VSTS, see "Visual Studio Targets Application Life Cycle" in the July 2004 issue of Update.) Gates also discussed how software had to be capable of understanding complex human variables in business processes—a likely allusion to BizTalk Server 2004's Human Workflow Services (HWS) feature, which could find its way into other products.

Web services. According to Gates, one-third of the companies at the summit already have significant Web services applications, although most are probably used for internal application integration rather than exchanging information between companies. But this could change soon: Gates mentioned the significant work being done on Web services standards by Microsoft, IBM, and others and described how these standards (known as WS-*) will help companies with different computer systems easily exchange information about customers and transactions.

Speech recognition. Gates suggested that Microsoft's many years of investment in speech recognition technology is finally paying off in the form of Windows Speech Server, a server product for creating applications that can respond to people's voices—for example, for taking phone orders for e-commerce Web sites.

Consumer-Focused Initiatives

Because the CEO Summit is a business-oriented event, Gates spent much less time on the other two pillars, which are consumer-oriented:

Redefining entertainment. Gates contended that by 2010, big advances will change how consumers receive entertainment in the home. In particular, he discussed the rising popularity of digital video recording (DVR), and the possibility of inserting personalized advertisements into recorded TV streams to account for the fact that users are watching programs at different times. Gates also mentioned the emergence of high-definition video games, alluding to the company's recently announced XNA game development platform, which is designed to make it easier for PC and Xbox developers to keep up with the latest hardware advances.

Digital lifestyle. Gates used this term to describe how consumers are performing traditional tasks using new digital technology—for example, few people stored photos and videos in digital format five years ago, but the practice is common today. One big challenge with the digital lifestyle, according to Gates, is storing and organizing this data so that consumers can easily retrieve it. Microsoft is doing a lot of work in this area: in Apr. 2003, Microsoft Research demonstrated an application called "Stuff I've Seen," which indexes files on a hard drive for later retrieval; MSN has a major initiative under way to improve both Internet-based and local searches; and WinFS, a new file system slated for inclusion in a future version of Windows, could make it easier to conduct searches on multiple types of files.

Resources

SharePoint technologies are detailed in the Sept. 2003 Research Report, "Collaboration and Portal Strategy Built on SharePoint."

Background on blogging and RSS can be found in the Apr. 2004 edition of Microsoft's MSDN Magazine at msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/04/XMLFiles.

Security improvements in Windows XP SP2 and planned advances in Microsoft's security patch delivery systems are described in "XP Service Pack Needs Significant Testing" on page 3 of the May 2004 Update.

Smart cards and authentication are covered in "Smart Cards Provide Stronger Log-On Security" on page 12 of the Dec. 2001 Update.

Error-reporting technologies are described in "Windows Error Reporting Tracks Down Bugs" on page 3 of the July 2003 Update.

Human Workflow Services is covered in "Human Workflow in BizTalk Server 2004" on page 16 of the June 2004 Update.

The WS-* standards and how Microsoft plans to implement them are described in "Indigo to Aid Web Services Development" on page 22 of the June 2004 Update.

Windows Speech Server is described in "Server to Aid Voice Response Applications" on page 12 of the Jan. 2004 Update.

XNA, Microsoft's emerging game development platform, is covered in "Game Development Platform Planned" on page 25 of the May 2004 Update.