Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and CEO, yesterday closed Compaq's Innovate Forum '99 with a keynote in which he reiterated many of the Internet and electronic commerce issues discussed by speakers and users throughout the two-day event.
The Web is changing the way people live and work, Gates said, as he went over his by now well-known concept of the Digital Nervous System, which calls for companies to make their IT systems the core of their business operations.
But that vision of a company that, among other things, turns all its paper-based data into digital form and gives users tools and applications that let them share and analyze that data effectively, is far from being a reality.
"No company is even close to getting 100% of the benefit" that a Digital Nervous System can provide, Gates said. "We're still at the very early stages."
Some of those benefits are improved operations, lower costs, a better understanding of clients and of markets, improved collaboration among employees, and an enhanced ability to adapt and change business strategies quickly, he said.
To start taking advantage of IT's benefits, companies don't need to throw out their existing systems, but rather bring in tools that let them share information more easily, namely Internet-related tools for creating Web sites, Web-enabling their supply chain operations and implementing e-mail systems, he said.
About 153 million people are online today worldwide, a small percentage of the total population, he said. In the U.S. 29% of the population is online, a figure that drops to around 5% in Europe and to less than 1% in the rest of the world, Gates said.
The awareness of IT-related issues is also low, he said, and he proceeded to show a video in which NBC Tonight Show host Jay Leno asked people on the street computer-related questions like what is the Y2K problem and where is the Internet.
The answers were, to put it mildly, very off the mark. The video also showed a fake video of Gates doing traditional Irish dances a la Riverdance and cruising around town in a car with the volume cranked up, prompting laughter from the audience.
Gates also said that hardware and software must become simpler to use and that vendors must strive for higher interoperability among their products. Microsoft is committed to providing robust products for enterprise customers, he added.
Gates and Doug Groncki, a product manager, gave a demonstration of Windows 2000, the next version of Windows NT. The demo was focused on the product's Active Directory and highlighted Windows 2000's ability to automatically synchronize the user information in its directory with the information in Microsoft's Exchange and on Novell's NetWare Directory Service (NDS). Microsoft is working to create this type of synchronization between Windows 2000's directory and other third-party products like enterprise resource planning suites from SAP R/3 and Baan, he said.
Gates and Groncki also showed how Windows 2000 lets IS managers configure users' desktops to prevent them from using certain applications. It also lets IS managers distribute software automatically to users' desktops.
In addition, Gates highlighted the scalability of the company's SQL Server 7.0 database, saying that the new version can handle more than twice the number of simultaneous R/3 users than the previous version could.
