Bill Gates Keynote Speech at Microsoft Mobile & Embedded Devices Developer Conference 2005

Bill Gates Keynote Speech at Microsoft Mobile & Embedded Devices Developer Conference 2005

Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Mobile & Embedded Devices Developer Conference 2005
"Opportunity Through Innovation"
Las Vegas, Nevada
May 10, 2005

BILL GATES: Good morning and welcome to our mobile and embedded conference. We're here to talk about the opportunity to do great software. We're here to talk about a big advance in the mobile platform and our embedded operating system that, combined with new tools, will let you build applications that weren't possible before.
The whole mobile space is incredibly hot. We're moving well beyond just doing voice calls and SMS messages to a whole range of applications that will take media, location, productivity information and present it in new and rich ways.

Work Is Changing

And it fits in really to the whole trend that the way we think about information availability, the way we think about communicating and the way we think about how we get our work done is all changing. For Microsoft, of course, we think about this in terms of the magic of software, the empowerment that started with the personal computer, got expanded with the Internet and graphical interface, and now is being taken to new levels with these wireless networks and the ever-smaller powerful devices that are connected to them.

We've gone from having this boundary between work that you just sit at your desk and do or when you're at home you're sitting there with a desktop computer to now where wherever you are, whether you're taking a portable computer or a mobile phone, you can be in touch, you can get the information that you care about.

And so it's a very radical shift that's taking place, a lot of expectation about what people can get into this device. And it's because of that vision of software working on all these devices, putting the user at the center, taking all the things you're interested and only having to express those things once and it shows up on the different PCs you use, shows up on the different phones you use, because of that software-centric vision that we decided we needed to be part of this mobile space.

So we took Windows CE and built around that. Now, we provide Windows CE and Embedded Windows XP to an unbelievable range of applications from kiosks, medical devices to use in set-top boxes to increasing use in the car and that's another area of special interest to us because we see explosive improvements in what can be done with the user interface there. So embedded Windows in both forms, CE and XP, is used very, very broadly.

The scenario of greatest focus for us, of course, has been this mobile scenario, building a whole stack of built-in applications and tools and getting mobile developers to take that and build a credible set of applications.

Market Opportunity

Of course, not only the operating systems and the tools but the applications will be exploding in sales. There are many categories here, taking traditional applications on the desktop and having versions that run on the mobile phone, taking games and thinking through what the mobile opportunity is there, there's a lot going on there. And then helping the operators by having the richness of this software increase the amount of connection time and create a financial opportunity for them as they participate in promoting and licensing this software onto these phones.

So software is driving the future of these devices and that for us is a great, great opportunity.

Windows Mobile 5.0

If we look at the industry there is a lot going on. The mobile space in particular has more competition, a desire to move up and get this data side to carry its weight and not just rely totally on the voice side there and that means software comes in in a bigger way.

We do get the incredible benefits that the chips are more powerful. If we didn't have that, many of these applications wouldn't be possible. As we look forward we'll be doing even more with this processing power. Windows Mobile 5.0 brings in some speech recognition capabilities and we see that for small command sets as being really ready today, something that is very powerful.