Bill Gates on Windows Mobile 5.0 and Self-Service Kiosk Application
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.