Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at D5
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At the recent D5: All Things Digital conference, Wall Street Journal technology columnists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. To share the experience, download a free podcast (audio or video) of their historic meeting.
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Legendary technology rivals Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a rare joint appearance Wednesday and wasted no time making nice.
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Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had a non-virtual date this week. What's behind the new romance?
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CARLSBAD, California: Legendary technology rivals Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made a rare joint appearance and wasted no time making nice. "Bill built the first software company in the industry," said Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc.
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The way people interact with PCs will change dramatically in the next five years, Microsoft chief Bill Gates says.
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With the focus of this year's Worldwide Developers Conference on Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X Leopard and the iPhone, could CEO Steve Jobs have something else up his sleeve?
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By Edward C. Baig  CARLSBAD, Calif. -- In a rare public appearance together, rival tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates met on stage Wednesday night at a tech conference here in Southern California.    Their meeting was more love fest than slug fest.
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Just before his farewell CES keynote speech, Microsoft's chairman reflects on Redmond's rivals and the changing face of Windows. Photos: Gates' last call at CES?
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Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates has been giving keynote speeches at Las Vegas conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show and the now-defunct Comdex, for decades. Before his last&#160;CES keynote speech&#160;as a full-time company employee, he talked with IDG News Service Executive News Editor Marc Ferranti about his legacy as an innovator, the background behind some of the deals announced at CES this week, and directions for Microsoft.The following is an edited version of the interview:IDGNS: We&#39;ve been tracking your career for some 30 years. One bone of contention has been when people have said that Bill Gates is a business mastermind, but not really an innovator. Can you point out a couple of innovative things you&#39;re particularly proud of?Gates: In terms of what we&#39;re proud of, I think it&#39;s the personal computer that we&#39;re proud of. It was a crazy idea at the time, that we could take the microprocessor and create a software industry around it. There was no software industry. Computing was about big businesses, and what we did in 1975, with me dropping out of school, was to say that we could build an industry that was about empowering people. We could seek out partners to build the hardware. We&#39;d let anyone write software for the work we did, and everything we&#39;ve done, over these 30 years, has been about that vision of personal computing. We were first ones with that vision.And now we&#39;re tackling the new frontiers. We&#39;re bringing TV, we&#39;re bringing new educational experiences, health experiences, onto this device that empowers people in a new rich way. And so it&#39;s pretty broad, the PC industry and our innovations in it -- I don&#39;t think there&#39;s anything in the last 30 years that has had as much impact.IDGNS: In the consumer space, since we&#39;re at CES, can you point out some recent innovations Microsoft can leverage in the next couple of years.Gates: Well the dollars spent on games and Xbox in the U.S. is greater than Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii combined. Really, that&#39;s because of the innovation in Xbox Live -- connecting people up, letting players find each other, matching them, getting video online. It&#39;s a real breakthrough way of thinking about even the future of TV.We&#39;ve got a million people using our Mediaroom, which is TV delivered over the Internet. Companies like AT&amp;T and 19 other phone companies around the world bet their future on this being the new video platform. And what that means is when you think about news, and you go and use Mediaroom news, you see the things that you care about, the ads are targeted at you.Look at what we&#39;ve done with Surface, directly touching and manipulating things -- that&#39;s gonna be a centerpiece.I can go on and on, there&#39;s so much that has to do with making it natural, bringing these things together and integrating them. We&#39;re the company that&#39;s doing the walk -- a lot of business focus but enough consumer focus that, from the biggest game phenomenon in the world to the biggest instant messaging thing, we have a lot of success that represents the innovation we&#39;re put into it.IDGNS: With increasing competition from abroad, innovation is of increasing importance to American companies. What&#39;s your thinking around the link between innovation and intellectual property?Gates: Well, we&#39;re a company that&#39;s based in the United States, but obviously we&#39;re drawing on engineering talent from all over the world. We&#39;ve got an unbelievable research group in China, we&#39;ve got an unbelievable research group in India, and we&#39;re delivering to consumers all over the world as well. And we file for intellectual property in all of these countries. They&#39;re all in different stages in terms of copyright, or patents, and it tends to be a pretty complicated area.Other countries look at what&#39;s going on in the United States and they say they&#39;d like their engineers to have those same opportunities, those same incentive systems, and so there really is a sense of progress in that. It&#39;s just one of the elements that make sure people are willing to take risks and keep the innovation in this industry the fastest of any industry in the world.IDGNS: You&#39;re going to be talking here about new partnerships for Microsoft&#39;s MSN, Xbox Live and Mediaroom IPTV services that will provide more content to drive Microsoft&#39;s consumer entertainment strategy. Can you talk about what you needed to do -- on the technology side and on the business side -- to make these deals happen?Gates: XBox Live is attracting virtually all the content people because of the volume we&#39;ve got there, and they see this group of very engaged users spending a lot of hours and finding new media in that environment, so that&#39;s made it easy for us. Our announcement with NBC on the Olympics is about our innovations in Silverlight, where you can view interactive content, multiple video streams, so it&#39;s really a perfect match for the Olympics where you have all this different content and yet different people care about different parts of it.IDGNS: As your consumer entertainment strategy comes to fruition, how will your business model change from what it has been in the past? Can you quantify goals for advertising-generated revenue?Gates: We&#39;ve seen good growth in our advertising revenue. That&#39;s an area where Google&#39;s the leader and we need to be very innovative to drive the scale. A huge partnership with Viacom is helping us with that. We&#39;ll be signing up more partners around the world. Taking the advertising platform to scale is very valuable for things like the search property we offer.We participate in a lot of business models. We have consumer software like games that you buy on a one-time basis. We have things that you can pay as a monthly fee, that we run up in our servers, as more of a service type model. We have some software we give away for free. And so, ads are coming in as a big, strong component but I don&#39;t see it replacing the others. We need all modalities to be strong.IDGNS: In your philanthropic work, you&#39;ve focused on fundamental health issues for the developing world. In the tech sector, there have been efforts such as the OLPC, and Microsoft&#39;s efforts to reduce prices in developing countries. But there&#39;s been criticism about these efforts. People have been saying, well, a $200 laptop isn&#39;t going to do a kid much good if he doesn&#39;t live to age five. With this in mind what do you think technology companies -- that need to make profits -- can do to spur development in emerging markets?Gates: Companies make their contribution by both giving some cash to broad areas but also by having their products in their area of expertise be tailored and donated to people who are poor. So in the case of Microsoft, we went and got involved in putting PCs in libraries. We went to Chile to put PCs in the libraries there, so by having a really robust machine connected to the Internet, going through the training, working with the government, getting all the pieces right -- we learned how to do that in the United States -- those projects were incredibly successful.So while I admit for my Foundation the top priority is health, Microsoft is about software. It&#39;s got a product, that&#39;s what the company knows. And that&#39;s where, in its activities around the world, its helping educators, it&#39;s helping kids who have curiosity, and I think that&#39;s fantastic for Microsoft to do that.I&#39;m taking the success that Microsoft had and putting tens of billions of that into the basic needs where breakthroughs can be made -- and there, we&#39;ll be using software. We&#39;ll be using mobile phones, we&#39;ll doing data gathering, so we&#39;ll be using software as a tool to do it. I wish every company was doing as much as Microsoft is to take their expertise and look into that developing world and see what role they can play . We&#39;ve had great impact, great success, and it helps us attract better employees. It makes our employees feel good because we were founded on the idea of empowerment. We&#39;re not just talking about it, we&#39;re out in over a hundred countries delivering it in a significant way.
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When Steve Jobs hits the keynote stage at the 2008 Macworld Conference and Expo on January 15, he will face a ballroom full of bloodshot eyes, a sea of journalists, analysts, and bloggers knocked loopy by the culture shock of going to sleep in Vegas (where the Consumer Electronics Show was just held) and waking up in San Francisco. Talk about your tough crowd.Fortunately, Jobs doesn?t need to kick into charisma overdrive to capture minds, hearts, and wallets. This year?s conference is already a banner event, a coming-out party of sorts for a Mac platform that has seen its biggest evolutionary kick since the demise of the original Mac OS. The combination of OS X Leopard and new Macs based on Intel?s Penryn CPU will help Mac outsiders remember that Apple sells more computers than phones.iPhone, take 2 What will happen this week? Only Steve Jobs knows for sure, but here?s my best guess.Although Leopard and Penryn have pushed the Mac to dizzying heights and should thus gain some stage time, the Macworld Expo keynote will still go heavy on iPhone and iTunes. And this time, the hype will be justified. eBay will be awash in mint-condition, used iPhones the day that Apple ships the new model that links to AT&amp;T?s fast 3G network (in the U.S.). With the speed of the 3G cellular data network, lots of RAM space for cached maps, and a close partnership with Google, iPhone could blast a tunnel through the in-car navigation market. CES was packed with navigation newcomers, but none has the hook of iPhone?s multi-touch interface, much less the capability to make phone calls and purchase music from iTunes.Another indirect but even farther-reaching benefit derived from the faster cellular network is iTunes Tagging. When listeners with compatible receivers are tuned into terrestrial and satellite radio stations that have licensed iTunes Tagging, they can purchase music that catches their ear with a button press. This will see its greatest uptake among users of Mac and PC iTunes, but iPhone owners could have the song downloaded before the radio is done playing it. No more trying to figure out the title of a song from the words in the chorus.iPhone?s support for native applications will see its official debut in February, but third parties are undoubtedly already on board. If Apple doesn?t take up navigation, the likes of Telenav and TomTom surely will. Voice-over-IP would make a great keynote demo, and with native application support, Apple might not have to write it in-house.Do pre-show announcements clear the stage for new notebooks? Apple always gets what it considers to be its lesser product announcements out of the way just before Macworld Expo so that Steve Jobs can focus on the high-percentage pitches in his keynote.The pre-keynote rollouts for 2008 are Apple?s specialty machines: the Mac Pro desktop/workstation and Xserve rack-mounted server. Both have been reworked for Intel?s quad-core Penryn family Xeon CPUs, nicknamed Harpertown. Mac Pro buyers can now get 8-core systems for about $1,200 less than before, and the Harpertown Xserve is the first 8-core server Apple has ever sold. Both systems also support significantly faster front-side bus and memory speed. This sort of performance kick might go unnoticed by most home and mainstream commercial users, but Mac Pro and Xserve buyers are going to love it.With the power user, workstation and server Mac announcements out of the way, Apple has room on the Macworld Conference and Expo keynote stage for new notebooks. The story there isn?t necessarily limited to Penryn. AMD recently announced its ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series GPU (graphics processing unit) for notebooks. Among the new GPU?s attributes are improved power efficiency, PCI Express 2.0, and direct HDMI output. The new ATI GPU has one other feature: on-chip decoding of HD and Blu-Ray DVD content. It may be a long shot for this Macworld Expo, but there is a high-def DVD-equipped MacBook Pro on the near horizon.What to do after the keynote Those Macworld Conference and Expo Attendees who don?t fly home after the keynote will be treated to a packed schedule of sessions targeting audiences from home users to scientists and IT professionals.Macworld Expo?s organizers -- IDG World Expo, which has the same parent company as InfoWorld -- have also managed to pack the exhibit hall. Attendees will find familiar faces such as FileMaker Pro, REALbasic, and the venerable BBEdit programmer?s editor, but they?ll also see Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Xerox, VMware, Parallels, Iomega and, of course, Microsoft.Next to Leopard, Office 2008 for Mac will be the best-selling software for the Mac this year. It?s not only the first native version of Office for Intel Macs, but Microsoft?s first Office designed from scratch for OS X. The Mac faithful may outwardly jeer Microsoft for taking four years to catch a clue, but they?ll be buying Office along with all other commercial Mac users. Office 2008 will be just one of many new products showing at Macworld Expo that don?t need Steve Jobs to sell them. They?ll sell themselves.
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(InfoWorld) - Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference kicked off Monday at San Francisco's Moscone West convention center. The keynote address, by Steve Jobs, began at 10 a.m. Pacific time. [ For the latest from the show, read Tom Yager's Enterprise Mac blog ] The event began with a video featuring John Hodgman, the PC of the Mac and PC ads, dressed as Steve Jobs. "I've got some big news this year, I want the whole world to hear it -- I quit," Hodgman said. "And what's more, I'm shutting down all of Apple. I know this comes as a surprise, but I didn't have a choice -- Vista has sold tens of dozens of copies.... Then I got my iPod killer, the Zune. Look at this baby. Brown!" "I'm sure you'll agree that it's time for Apple to wave the white flag," Hodgman said. Then Justin Long, the actor who plays the Mac in the ads, confronts Hodgman with the news that he's not Steve Jobs. "You're right,"Hodgman says. "I'm Phil Schiller." After the video played, Jobs took the stage to applause. Intel kudos The focus of last year's WWDC was the transition to Intel microprocessors, noted Jobs. "We did that transition successfully, and everyone did an awesome job," Jobs said, including engineers inside of Apple and the developers present at this year's WWDC. Jobs then invited Intel CEO Paul Otellini up on stage. Complimenting Otellini and Intel on a job well done and to recognize their hard work in helping Apple with the Intel transition, Jobs apologized. "Paul, we're not big on awards at Apple, so we don't have anything real standard, so I asked Jonny Ive to make something for you. It says, our sincere thanks," he added. Jobs then presented Otellini with a disc made of polished stainless steel. Gaming news Jobs then presented Bing Gordon, co-founder and chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, the billion-dollar game publisher. "I have two daughters, they live on their MacBook. I have friends in business, they live on OS X. Our CTO at EA lives on Mac, and we're seeing EA technologists move to Mac in droves. And what do they want, in addition to a Cinema Display? They want to go to Apple stores and see EA games. And so that's what we're going to do," Gordon said. Gordon said that EA is going to bring "four of our biggest titles" to the Mac starting next month: Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. What's more, EA will be bringing sports games to the Mac in August, beginning with simultaneous launches of Madden 08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08. Jobs then introduced someone with whom he's shared the keynote stage before -- John Carmack, owner and CTO of id Software, the company behind such games as Quake and Doom. Carmack presented to the audience a demonstration of a heavily textured 3D environment built using id Software's next-generation technology, running on Mac OS X. Carmack told the crowd he'd just gotten it running on the Mac in the past few days and encouraged attendees to look forward to other Mac-related announcements coming at QuakeCon, id Software's annual gamers convention. "Moving on to the Big Cats" -- new Leopard features galore "Now let's move on to our big cats," said Jobs -- a sly reference to Mac OS's code-names, all of which are based on wild cats -- Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard being the focus. "Two-thirds of our users are running Tiger," said Jobs. "That's unprecedented in our industry. Ninety percent of our customers are running the current or current minus one release." The first new feature of Leopard on exhibit during Jobs' keynote is a new desktop. The default blue pattern of old is gone, replaced with something showing grass with dew. But more to the point, a menu bar now adapts to what you put on the backdrop. The desktop is now translucent and the dock is more translucent than before. Stacks are a new feature that let you group icons within the dock -- you click, and a collection of icons pop up from a single folder. The new feature mimics popular third-party add-ons and dock replacement software but with much more visual pizzazz with glass reflective surfaces and vertical arrangements. Jobs also noted that a new folder has been added to the dock called Downloads. By and large, users clutter their desktops by adding downloaded files to them -- this helps clear the average desktop of much of its clutter. Leopard's Finder has also gotten an extensive upgrade. Spotlight, for example, is now capable of being used to search other Macs and servers on the network. A new Sidebar has been cleaned up as well with devices, shared items, places, and such in groups. "If you're a subscriber to .Mac, we have this really cool feature called 'Back to My Mac' that lets you share computers and files even when they're not on the local network," said Jobs. In a nutshell, "Back to My Mac" tells .Mac what your local Mac's IP address is so if you're on the road with a laptop, you can establish a secure, encrypted connection to that home Mac and access files from it. Finder also features Cover Flow, a feature adapted from iTunes that enables you to view Finder windows the same way you view iTunes cover art. Applications show up in Cover Flow as giant icons; you can even play QuickTime movies in place. "Quick Look is great," said Jobs, moving on to another new feature of Leopard. "Quick Look lets you instantly preview files without opening applications." Quick Looks is based on a plug-in architecture, so it can be expanded to work with any file type. As it stands now, the feature provides live file previews for text, images, movies, PDF files, and Microsoft Word and Excel documents, among others. To demo the feature, Jobs found a file -- a QuickTime trailer of the forthcoming Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille. Hitting the space bar on his keyboard caused the movie to start playing, expanded on the screen. Clicking the movie caused it to go full screen. "Number four," said Jobs. "Leopard is 64 bit from top to bottom." This is the first time that 64-bit will be mainstream in the computer world, he said -- not only does this mean Leopard's Unix underpinnings will be 64-bit, but so will Cocoa. "One version of Leopard runs 32-bit and 64-bit apps side by side," explained Jobs. "If you write a 64-bit app, you can guarantee that it will run on every copy of Leopard out there." To demonstrate the capability, Jobs loaded a giant photograph -- 4GB in size -- into a demo application that showed CPU and disk access. One version ran in 32-bit mode, the other in 64-bit mode. Running filters on both systems, the 32-bit version took 81 seconds to complete the tasks, hammering the hard disk in the process. The 64-bit version was able to load everything into memory and finished in 28.48 seconds. "We're seeing a real need for 64 bits, not just in scientific computation, but we're hearing it more and more in the professional arts, whether it's animation or the high-end Photoshop market," said Jobs. "And please remember, almost every computer we ship is 64-bit capable." Jobs also demonstrated Core Animation, which enables developers to perform extensive animation capabilities within their apps simply by calling forth core technology in the operating system, similar to how Tiger's Core Image and Core Audio technology works. "Boot Camp's pretty amazing," said Jobs, moving on to the sixth major feature of Leopard on display at this keynote. "Since we put it out a little over a year ago, we've had over 2.5 million downloads for the beta. With Leopard, Boot Camp is now going to be built in. It lets you run Windows XP and Vista at native speed." Jobs said that with the Leopard implementation of Vista, users will no longer have to burn a CD of Windows drivers or install those drivers separately -- it will be built in to the operating system. Users concerned that Leopard would devalue third-party virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware Fusion need not worry. Jobs called Boot Camp "a great complement" to those products and said, "There are three great ways to run Windows on a Mac." Apple is helping VMware and Parallels "as much as we can," said Jobs. Jobs then revisted Spaces, the virtual desktop technology that he first unveiled at WWDC in 2006. Spaces was well fleshed out as a feature in 2006, and little seems to have changed -- it enables users to organize their work life, said Jobs. Dashboard also gets an upgrade in Leopard. More than 3000 third-party widgets have been created since Tiger introduced the feature, and Apple has added a new widget that lets you look up movie times. And to empower users to create their own Dashboard widgets, Apple will introduce in Leopard WebClips, which enable users to "make a widget about almost anything on the Internet, and it's pretty cool," said Jobs. WebClip enables users to "scissor" a portion of a Web page, then turn that into a standalone Dashboard widget. iChat will also get a big overhaul with Leopard, beginning with better audio quality thanks to the addition of AAC-LD, or AAC Low Delay audio. Tabbed chats have also been added, along with iChat Theater, which enables users who are videoconferenced to display slideshows and other rich media with each other. Backdrops help you add some flair to your background while conferenced as well. Jobs also revealed that anything that works with the new QuickLook feature will also work with iChat Theater. Jobs demoed the capabilities of Leopard's iChat with Apple senior VP of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller, producing Photo Booth effects in live chat, turning Phil upside down, making him look like a Star Wars-style hologram, and dropping his mouth into a picture of George Washington. Jobs even had a bit of fun at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's expense, making a photo of Ballmer appear to say "I love my Macs," then sticking out his tongue. Number 10 on the list of Leopard enhancements is Time Machine, Leopard's automated backup technology. "We are all walking time bombs," said Jobs. "Misplacing information, mistakenly deleting it, or worse. We want to solve these problems in such a simple way that everyone actually uses it." With Time Machine, Jobs explained, you click on it, and it automatically backs up everything, either to a local hard drive or network server, wired or wirelessly -- so you can use a hard drive you have connected to a new AirPort Extreme Base Station, for example. Using Spotlight's search capabiliities, you can "search back in time" for lost files, Jobs explained. You can preview the file with Quick Look to make sure it's what you want, restore it using a single click, or restore your whole Mac. "The goal here is to build this in and make it so simple and automatic that people just use it," said Jobs. All of the new features of Leopard are being given to developers attending this week's WWDC -- they can retrieve their preview copies after the keynote. Taking another opportunity to fire some sarcasm at Microsoft, Jobs said, "We've got a basic version, which is going to cost $129. We've got a Premium version, which is gonna cost $129. We've got a business version, $129. We've got an enterprise version, $129. And we've got the ultimate version, we're throwing everything into it, it's $129. We think most people will buy the ultimate version." One more thing -- Safari? "One of the things we haven't talked about today is Safari," said Jobs. "There are now more than 18 million Safari users. And if you look at Safari's market share, it has climbed from 0 to 5 percent across the entire internet." Showing the relative market share for other Browsers, Safari is solidly in third place, behind Microsoft Internet Explorer (with 78 percent) and Mozilla Firefox (with 15 percent). Other browsers are estimated at 2 percent. Apple hopes to grow Safari's market share dramatically, said Jobs. "The Mac's market share is great, but we want to grow, and in order to do that, we have to create a version of Safari for Windows. And that's exactly what we have done," said Jobs. Safari 3 works on Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista, said Jobs. He showed some benchmarks that demonstrate Safari for Windows running twice as fast as Internet Explorer when loading Web pages and faster still with JavaScript. "So what we've got is the most innovative browser in the world, but we've also got the fastest browser on Windows," said Jobs. It's twice as fast as IE, 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2, and features built-in Google and Yahoo search. Apple is releasing a new public beta of Safari 3 for both Mac OS X and Windows today, said Jobs. The iPhone and developers The iPhone ships later this month -- June 29, specifically. "I believe it's 6 p.m. in the evening when they'll go on sale," said Jobs. "We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure. And we've come up with a very sweet solution," said Jobs. This capability is being exposed through the full version of Safari that will run on the iPhone, said Jobs, using Web 2.0-style technologies such as AJAX that will enable developers to create content that "looks and behaves exactly like apps," integrated with the iPhone and iPhone services. "They can make a call, they can send an e-mail, they can look up a location on Google Maps," Jobs added for emphasis. What's more, distribution is simple because developers can put them up on their own servers, update the code themselves, and incorporate the built-in security that Web 2.0 applications provide. "They run securely on the iPhone, so they don't compromise its reliability or security. And guess what? There's no [software development kit]. You've got everything you need if you know how to write apps using existing Web standards," Jobs said. Apple VP Scott Forstall demonstrated how this can work by showing an Apple directory application that runs in less than 600 lines of code. The application returned a search query from Safari into an address book-style card, where the identified user could be called or e-mailed using the built-in services on the iPhone. Jobs concluded the keynote by welcoming developers to the 300 sessions planned for this week, 94 hands-on labs, and 1,200 Apple engineers on site to help them with questions.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is once again delivering the opening keynote at CES. Wired News is bringing you up-to-the-minute coverage and photos as the speech unfolds.
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Bill Gates' CES keynote featured a funny retirement video that included cameos by Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Brian Williams
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Microsoft preached its "new world of work" mantra at the company?s Global High Tech Summit 2007 conference in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday.Noting synergy between the disciplines of business and IT, the event is intended for professionals from both realms, said Tyler Bryson, Microsoft's newly announced general manager of the U.S. Manufacturing Industry portion of the company?s Industry Solutions Organization."At Microsoft, we believe that alignment [of business and IT] is critical to innovation," Bryson said. Also featured at the event were speakers from chipmakers Intel and Freescale Semiconductor, who talked about modernizations to their systems and processes.Trends are accelerating, such as globalization and market growth that are creating a new world of work, Bryson said. Other relevant trends include the pressure to improve operation performance, quality-driven regulatory compliance, and rapid cycles of product innovation.Globalization and technology create entirely new ways that people think about work, and everyone must adjust and respond, said Bryson. "The world is transforming what it means to be at work," he said.The morning's presentations had a bent toward high-tech manufacturing. Bryson said the National Association of Manufacturers expects a 40 percent turnover in the manufacturing work base; companies must cope with transferring knowledge to employees."Most manufacturers are reporting a shortage of skilled workers," he said. A culture of innovation must be created that can attract the best talent, said Bryson.New tenets of work, according to Bryson, include creating a culture of innovation, empowering the workforce, driving operational excellence, running a customer-centric business, using compliance as a tool of transparency, and operating in a global environment.At Freescale, the company is undertaking several upgrades, including moving to a single global instance of SAP for supply chain operations. Freescale is what Janelle Monney, senior vice president of business operations at the company, described as "a 50-year-old startup" that was part of Motorola until 2004.The company also has initiatives in manufacturing and business intelligence, she noted. Freescale's business intelligence platform is intended to bring multiple data streams altogether into a single data warehouse."One of the key objectives of IT is to turn data into information for decision-making," said Monney.Also, employees can access e-mail on cell phones equipped with Windows OSes, she said.With Intel, the company is extending itself to accommodate three market opportunities: mobile Internet devices, consumer electronics, and development of low-cost PCs, said Stuart Pann, an Intel vice president and co-general manager of customer fulfillment, planning and logistics."One of our goals is how do we configure the supply chain to take advantage of these new opportunities," Pann said.Intel is running a new manufacturing process on Intel systems and Microsoft operating systems at its high-volume plant in Arizona, Pann said. "That is virtually run on Intel architecture and on Microsoft operating systems, so we've made the transition over the years, and we've found that the combination of these two products is more than robust enough to run $3.5 billion factories," said Pann.Among other improvements, the company is developing a new workspace that is a fundamental change to the company's cubicle culture, he said. Phone booths will be created, more privacy options will be offered, and the company will get rid of underutilized office space, said Pann.Also, author and consultant Geoffrey Moore, managing director of TCG Advisors, lectured on the challenges of finding a competitive advantage and innovation in a marketplace that faces frequent commoditization."You must innovate in order to continue to sustain advantage," Moore said.Differentiation also is important, he said. Apple with its iPod has customers acknowledging it is different, he said. But past differentiation can erode so that a company?s core competency is no longer core, he said."Our friends at Dell are dealing with that right now," with the industry catching up and Dell having to reinvent itself, said Moore.Microsoft officials briefly noted the company's new unified communications platform, which features Office Communications Server and provides such capabilities as IM, voice, and videoconferencing.
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Execs from the biggest studios talk business and technology at CES.
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By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  May 30--When Bill Gates talked about a new kind of computer in a speech a couple of years ago, I thought it was pure fantasy.
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By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Jun. 12--Steve Jobs showed in his keynote speech Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference that the Cupertino company can maintain its technical lead over Microsoft in the quality of its operating system software.