RIYADH, 14 November 2006 — On the morning of his visit to Saudi Arabia, Bill Gates met with CEOs from 20 top Saudi firms. The CEOs listened to Gates’ address attentively but then they asked him a few questions of their own. Microsoft technology is pervasive in the market, in part thanks to the company’s strong Arabization efforts. However, enterprises in the Kingdom are increasingly facing difficulties in regards to local technical support and high-end consultants for business mission critical applications. While enterprises welcome Microsoft’s decision to offer its latest platforms and applications to the Saudi market, top executives are seriously concerned that inadequate human resource development could stifle the productive use of these new technologies, especially as more and more companies compete for high end IT staff.
After meeting with the CEOs and then speaking at the First Global Competitiveness Forum, it was the turn of the IT professionals to have an opportunity to interact with the Microsoft chairman at the CIO Summit. In his presentation at the CIO Summit, Gates showed some of the Industry Megatrends that will change how people function in the workplace. Gates discussed how improvements in the hardware and applications available in digital devices, combined with much higher bandwidth and richer content, would help us organize information better and consequently be more productive in our jobs.
Within five years, Gates predicted that improvements in speech recognition technologies would mean that people would use digital devices with speech as the primary input method, rather than a keyboard or touch screen for example. Speech would also be used for functions such as search.
People will work quite differently in the future because they will assume they have rich information available all the time. Marketing staff will be able to immediately and visually see the exact sales of their company. Executives will be able to see instantly how reality is matching budget forecasts. There will be new ways of connecting software together over the web with what are called “Web Services” or service oriented architecture. All these changes will lead to the digital workstyle.
“Software breakthroughs are very important (to the digital work style). Breakthroughs that make it easy to write software with far less lines of code,” said Gates. “Security capabilities built in from the very beginning. Natural Interfaces. Those are the reasons that Microsoft has the world’s biggest research budget of any company because of our optimism about these things.”
Gates’ vision was well received by the audience of IT professionals who saw how information and communications technologies would become essential to every aspect of life. It is certain that if IT comes to play such a vital role, then those economies which best harness software and IT services in innovative ways will empower their people to be knowledge workers thus creating a prime environment to support long-term national growth. Will that happen in the Kingdom? Only time will tell.
After the CIO Summit, Gates spent a few minutes in conversation with Arab News. Although Microsoft is currently on a marketing blitz for its upcoming Windows Vista launch, the company seems to already be on a different path that will take it away from the world’s current focus on the PC and its operating system.
More than a decade ago, at a presentation given at the COMDEX IT trade show in Las Vegas, Gates spoke about the future of the Internet. Even then, he well understood that search and the organization of information would be essential elements of that future. It was always a curious thing how Microsoft hadn’t been able to capitalize on that vision and Google had. Gates discussed what happened.
“Oh sure, I had the vision, but having vision is so easy,” said the Microsoft chairman with a laugh. “There was a paper that (MIT Professor) Vanaver Bush wrote that talked about the ‘memex’ computer. So he was there (on the PC vision) before I was, before I was born. Vision is easy. Google wasn’t even the first. There were tons of people, actually Digital Equipment of all people did an AltaVista search engine that was way ahead of everybody else. Of course nobody remembers that now, and why should they? So Google wasn’t first. Google did the right things and got critical mass. If you’re the first to get critical mass, then all these amazing things happen to you. Just like what happened with DOS or Windows or Office. Now we have to come from behind, which we’ve done before many times.”
He added, “I wish we had done better on it (search). We made some mistakes in the people we picked and in the choices we took. We had a group who thought that doing well on the ‘common queries’ was the key. When in fact the so-called ‘tail piece’ was more important. The difference between us and others on that ‘head piece’ was small enough and the difference between us and others on the ‘tail piece’ was dramatic. Google did very well on the tail and in retrospect that was very smart, so now we have to play catch up. Almost everything we’ve missed, we haven’t missed because of a failure of vision. Typically if we take on five things, I’ll be satisfied with our progress in about three out of five of them. This one turns out to be a doozie. I wish we could have made bad progress in some other area. They’ve (Google) tapped into a revenue stream that just keeps growing and growing and growing. But, we’ve been here before and just telling the employees of Microsoft, ‘Hey, I told you guys (about search), why didn’t you read my speech?’ Doesn’t help them to get the work done.”
Microsoft is now attempting to take on Google in a big way. More than a year ago Microsoft launched “Windows Live.” Most industry analysts see Windows Live as Microsoft’s gambit to overtake Google and other companies that have a focus on web services. According to Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows Live is the most important initiative at Microsoft. Unfortunately, in Saudi Arabia few people, even Microsoft’s partners or software developers, understand what Windows Live is.
The response people commonly give to the question, “What is Window Live?” is that it’s Microsoft’s next operating system. But that is incorrect. Windows Live is actually a group of web services. Some of these are accessible through http://ideas.live.com. Certain services in Live.com were formerly part of MSN.com. The services and user data for Live.com are available anywhere on any device that can connect to the Internet. No application is installed. So why is it that information on Microsoft’s next great thing is being poorly disseminated to users in the Kingdom?
“We’re just at the beginning of Live. I don’t think that anywhere in the world people understand yet fully what we are doing there and they’re going ‘Wow. What an amazing thing,’” said Gates. “Now they know that we’ve put Ray Ozzi (Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect) on it and they know that when Microsoft gets serious about something, something pretty amazing usually happens. So they give us the benefit of the doubt. They’ve seen some pieces. They’ve seen this Live local thing which is the mapping thing and they’ve seen us do a great job there. They’ve seen our search get dramatically better even though Google still has the dramatic market share.”
But why don’t we know more about this initiative in Saudi Arabia?
“If that’s true a year from now I’ll be disappointed,” replied Gates. “We have to do more products; the version of Messenger that’s Live, the version of Mail that’s Live, the ability to back your information up and roam it between your machines that’s Live, all of those things come out in the next 12 months. And so in some ways a lot of things we have in Live today are things that were somewhat under the MSN brand and are re-labeled. We are not that far along on this anywhere in the world. And then of course for many of these products for this market we’ve got to make sure we’re doing the Arabization. In some cases there might be a delay between when we get the product done and we get the Arabized version up. A year from now hopefully people get this ‘Live’ strategy globally.”
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