金寨县人民医院怎么样:比尔盖茨1995年一篇微软战略内部报告，对未来趋势作出精准预测！【英文全文】

To: Executive Staff and direct Reports
From: Bill Gates
Date: May 26, 1995

The Internet Tidal Wave

Our vision for the last 20 years can be summarized in a succinct way.We saw that exponential improvements in computer capabilities wouldmake great software quite valuable. Our response was to build anorganization to deliver the best software products. In the next 20 yearsthe improvement in computer power will be outpaced by the exponentialimprovements in communications networks. The combination of theseelements will have a fundamental impact on work, learning and play.Great software products will be crucial to delivering the benefits ofthese advances. Both the variety and volume of the software willincrease.

Most users of communications have not yet seen the price ofcommunications come down significantly. Cable and phone networks arestill depreciating networks built with old technology. Universal servicemonopolies and other government involvement around the world have keptcommunications costs high. Private networks and the Internet which arebuilt using state of the art equipment have been the primarybeneficiaries of the improved communications technology. The PC is justnow starting to create additional demand that will drive a new wave ofinvestment. A combination of expanded access to the Internet, ISDN, newbroadband networks justified by video based applications andinterconnections between each of these will bring low cost communicationto most businesses and homes within the next decade.

The Internet is at the forefront of all of this and developments onthe Internet over the next several years will set the course of ourindustry for a long time to come. Perhaps you have already seen memosfrom me or others here about the importance of the Internet. I have gonethrough several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now Iassign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I wantto make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every partof our business. The Internet is the most important single developmentto come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is even moreimportant than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI). The PCanalogy is apt for many reasons. The PC wasn’t perfect. Aspects of thePC were arbitrary or even poor. However a phenomena grew up around theIBM PC that made it a key element of everything that would happen forthe next 15 years. Companies that tried to fight the PC standard oftenhad good reasons for doing so but they failed because the phenomenaovercame any weaknesses that resisters identified.

The Internet Today

The Internet’s unique position arises from a number of elements.TCP/IP protocols that define its transport level support distributedcomputing and scale incredibly well. The Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) has defined an evolutionary path that will avoid running intofuture problems even as eventually everyone on the planet connects up.The HTTP protocols that define HTML Web browsing are extremely simpleand have allowed servers to handle incredible traffic reasonably well.All of the predictions about hypertext – made decades ago by pioneerslike Ted Nelson – are coming true on the Web. Although other protocolson the Internet will continue to be used (FTP, Gopher, IRC, Telnet,SMTP, NNTP). HTML with extensions will be the standard that defines howinformation will be presented. Various extensions to HTML, includingcontent enhancements like tables, and functionality enhancements likesecure transactions, will be widely adopted in the near future. Therewill also be enhanced 3D presentations providing for virtual realitytype shopping and socialization.

Another unique aspect of the Internet is that because it buyscommunications lines on a commodity bid basis and because it is growingso fast, it is the only “public” network whose economics reflect thelatest advances in communications technology. The price paid forcorporations to connect to the Internet is determined by the size ofyour “on-ramp” to the Internet and not by how much you actually use yourconnection. Usage isn’t even metered. It doesn’t matter if you connectnearby or half way around the globe. This makes the marginal cost ofextra usage essentially zero encouraging heavy usage.

Most important is that the Internet has bootstrapped itself as aplace to publish content. It has enough users that it is benefiting fromthe positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more contentit gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets. Iencourage everyone on the executive staff and their direct reports touse the Internet. I’ve attached an appendix, which Brian Flemming helpedme pull together that shows some hot sites to try out. You can do thisby either using the .HTM enclosure with any Internet browser or, if youhave Word set up properly, you can navigate right from within thisdocument. Of particular interest are the sites such as “YAHOO” whichprovide subject catalogs and searching. Also of interest are the waysour competitors are using their Websites to present their products. Ithink SUN, Netscape and Lotus do some things very well.

Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Web than it is tofind information on the Microsoft Corporate Network. This inversionwhere a public network solves a problem better than a private network isquite stunning. This inversion points out an opportunity for us in thecorporate market. An important goal for the Office and Systems productsis to focus on how our customers can create and publish information ontheir LANs. All work we do here can be leveraged into the HTTP/Webworld. The strength of the Office and Windows businesses today gives us achance to superset the Web. One critical issue is runtime/browser sizeand performance. Only when our Office – Windows solution has comparableperformance to the Web will our extensions be worthwhile. I view this asthe most important element of Office 96 and the next major release ofWindows.

One technical challenge facing the Internet is how to handle“real-time” content – specifically audio and video. The underlyingtechnology of the Internet is a packet network which does not guaranteethat data will move from one point to another at a guaranteed rate. Thecongestion on the network determines how quickly packets are sent. Audiocan be delivered on the Internet today using several approaches. Theclassic approach is to simply transmit the audio file in its entiretybefore it is played. A second approach is to send enough of it to befairly sure that you can keeping playing without having to pause. Thisis the approach Progressive Networks Real Audio (Rob Glaser’s newcompany) uses. Three companies (Internet Voice Chat, Vocaltec, andNetphone) allow phone conversations across the Internet but the qualityis worse than a normal phone call. For video, a protocol called CU-SeeMefrom Cornell allows for video conferencing. It simply delivers as manyframes per second as it sees the current network congestion can handle,so even at low resolution it is quite jerky. All of these “hacks” toprovide video and audio will improve because the Internet will getfaster and also because the software will improve. At some point in thenext three years, protocol enhancements taking advantage of the ATMbackbone being used for most of the Internet will provide “quality ofservice guarantees”. This is a guarantee by every switch between you andyour destination that enough bandwidth had been reserved to make sureyou get your data as fast as you need it. Extensions to IP have alreadybeen proposed. This might be an opportunity for us to take the leadworking with UUNET and others. Only with this improvement and anincredible amount of additional bandwidth and local connections will theInternet infrastructure deliver all of the promises of the full blownInformation Highway. However, it is in the process of happening and allwe can do is get involved and take advantage.

I think that virtually every PC will be used to connect to theInternet and that the Internet will help keep PC purchasing very healthyfor many years to come. PCs will connect to the Internet a variety ofways. A normal phone call using a 14.4k or 28.8k baud modem will be themost popular in the near future. An ISDN connection at 128kb will bevery attractive as the connection costs from the RBOCs and the modemcosts come down. I expect an explosion in ISDN usage for both Internetconnection and point-to-point connections. Point-to-point allows for lowlatency which is very helpful for interactive games. ISDNpoint-to-point allows for simultaneous voice data which is a veryattractive feature for sharing information. Example scenarios includeplanning a trip, discussing a contract, discussing a financialtransaction like a bill or a purchase or taxes or getting supportquestions about your PC answered. Eventually you will be able to findthe name of someone or a service you want to connect to on the Internetand rerouting your call to temporarily be a point-to-point connectionwill happen automatically. For example when you are browsing travelpossibilities if you want to talk to someone with expertise on the areayou are considering, you simply click on a button and the request willbe sent to a server that keeps a list of available agents who can beworking anywhere they like as long as they have a PC with ISDN. You willbe reconnected and the agent will get all of the context of what youare looking at and your previous history of travel if the agency has adatabase. The reconnection approach will not be necessary once thenetwork has quality of service guarantees.

Another way to connect a PC will be to use a cable-modem that usesthe coaxial cable normally used for analog TV transmission. Early cablesystems will essentially turn the coax into an Ethernet so that everyonein the same neighborhood will share a LAN. The most difficult problemfor cable systems is sending data from the PC back up the cable system(the “back channel”). Some cable companies will promote an approachwhere the cable is used to send data to the PC (the “forward channel”)and a phone connection is used for the back channel. The data rate ofthe forward channel on a cable system should be better than ISDN.Eventually the cable operators will have to do a full upgrade to anATM-based system using either all fiber or a combination of fiber andCoax – however, when the cable or phone companies will make this hugeinvestment is completely unclear at this point. If these buildoutshappen soon, then there will be a loose relationship between theInternet and these broadband systems. If they don’t happen for sometime, then these broadband systems could be an extension of the Internetwith very few new standards to be set. I think the second scenario isvery likely.

Three of the biggest developments in the last five years have beenthe growth in CD titles, the growth in On-line usage, and the growth inthe Internet. Each of these had to establish critical mass on their own.Now we see that these three are strongly related to each other and asthey come together they will accelerate in popularity. The On-lineservices business and the Internet have merged. What I mean by this isthat every On-line service has to simply be a place on the Internet withextra value added. MSN is not competing with the Internet although wewill have to explain to content publishers and users why they should useMSN instead of just setting up their own Web server. We don’t have aclear enough answer to this question today. For users who connect to theInternet some way other than paying us for the connection we will haveto make MSN very, very inexpensive – perhaps free. The amount of freeinformation available today on the Internet is quite amazing. Althoughthere is room to use brand names and quality to differentiate from freecontent, this will not be easy and it puts a lot of pressure to figureout how to get advertiser funding. Even the CD-ROM business will bedramatically affected by the Internet. Encyclopedia Brittanica isoffering their content on a subscription basis. Cinemania typeinformation for all the latest movies is available for free on the Webincluding theater information and Quicktime movie trailers.

Competition

Our traditional competitors are just getting involved with theInternet. Novell is surprisingly absent given the importance ofnetworking to their position however Frankenberg recognizes itsimportance and is driving them in that direction. Novell has recognizedthat a key missing element of the Internet is a good directory service.They are working with AT&T and other phone companies to use theNetware Directory Service to fill this role. This represents a majorthreat to us. Lotus is already shipping the Internotes Web Publisherwhich replicates Notes databases into HTML. Notes V4 includes secureInternet browsing in its server and client. IBM includes Internetconnection through its network in OS/2 and promotes that as a keyfeature.

Some competitors have a much deeper involvement in the Internet thanMicrosoft. All UNIX vendors are benefiting from the Internet since thedefault server is still a UNIX box and not Windows NT, particularly forhigh end demands, SUN has exploited this quite effectively. Many Websites, including Paul Allen’s ESPNET, put a SUN logo and link at thebottom of their home page in return for low cost hardware. Severaluniversities have “Sunsites” named because they use donated SUNhardware. SUN’s Java project involves turning an Internet client into aprogrammable framework. SUN is very involved in evolving the Internet tostay away from Microsoft. On the SUN Homepage you can find an interviewof Scott McNealy by John Gage where Scott explains that if customersdecide to give one product a high market share (Windows) that is notcapitalism. SUN is promoting Sun Screen and HotJava with aggressivebusiness ads promising that they will help companies make money.

SGI has also been advertising their leadership on the Internetincluding servers and authoring tools. Their ads are very businessfocused. They are backing the 3D image standard, VRML, which will allowthe Internet to support virtual reality type shopping, gaming, andsocializing.

Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats. After 10hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows.EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format. Idid see a great number of Quicktime files. All of the movie studios usethem to offer film trailers. Apple benefited by having TCP supportbefore we did and is working hard to build a browser built from OpenDoccomponents. Apple will push for OpenDoc protocols to be used on theInternet, and is already offering good server configurations. Apple’sstrength in education gives them a much stronger presence on theInternet than their general market share would suggest.

Another popular file format on the Internet is PDF, the short namefor Adobe Acrobat files. Even the IRS offers tax forms in PDF format.The limitations of HTML make it impossible to create forms or otherdocuments with rich layout and PDF has become the standard alternative.For now, Acrobat files are really only useful if you print them out, butAdobe is investing heavily in this technology and we may see thischange soon.
Acrobat and Quicktime are popular on the network because they are crossplatform and the readers are free. Once a format gets established it isextremely difficult for another format to come along and even becomeequally popular.

A new competitor “born” on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser isdominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine whichnetwork extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platformstrategy where they move the key API into the client to commoditize theunderlying operating system. They have attracted a number of publicnetwork operators to use their platform to offer information anddirectory services. We have to match and beat their offerings includingworking with MCI, newspapers, and other who are considering theirproducts.

One scary possibility being discussed by Internet fans is whetherthey should get together and create something far less expensive than aPC which is powerful enough for Web browsing. This new platform wouldoptimize for the datatypes on the Web. Gordon Bell and others approachedIntel on this and decided Intel didn’t care about a low cost device sothey started suggesting that General Magic or another operating systemwith a non-Intel chip is the best solution.

Next Steps

In highlighting the importance of the Internet to our future I don’twant to suggest that I am alone in seeing this. There is excellent workgoing on in many product groups. Over the last year, a number of peoplehave championed embracing TCP/IP, hyperlinking, HTML, and buildingclient, tools and servers that compete on the Internet. However, westill have a lot to do. I want every product plan to try and gooverboard on Internet features. One element that will be crucial iscoordinating our various activities. The challenge/opportunity of theInternet is a key reason behind the recent organization. Paul Maritzwill lead the Platform group to define an integrated strategy that makesit clear that Windows machines are the best choice for the Internet.This will protect and grow our Windows asset. Nathan and Pete will leadthe Applications and Content group to figure out how to make moneyproviding applications and content for the Internet. This will protectour Office asset and grow our Office, Consumer, and MSN businesses. Thework that was done in the Advanced Technology group will be extremelyimportant as it is integrated in with our products.

We must also invest in the Microsoft home page, so it will be clearhow to find out about our various products. Today it’s quite random whatis on the home page and the quality of information is very low. If youlook up speeches by me all you find are a few speeches over a year old. Ibelieve the Internet will become our most important promotional vehicleand paying people to include links to our home pages will be aworthwhile way to spend advertising dollars. First we need to make surethat great information is available. One example is the demonstrationfiles (Screencam format) that Lotus includes on all of their productsorganized by feature. I think a measurable part of our ad budget shouldfocus on the Internet. Any information we create – white papers, datasheets, etc., should all be done on our Internet server.

ITG needs to take a hard look at whether we should drop our leasingarrangements for data lines to some countries and simply rely on theInternet.

The actions required for the Windows platform are quite broad. PualMaritz is having an Internet retreat in June which will focus oncoordinating these activities. Some critical steps are the following:

1. Server. BSD is working on offering the best Internet server as anintegrated package. We need to understand how to make NT boxes thehighest performance HTTP servers. Perhaps we should have a project withCompaq or someone else to focus on this. Our initial server will havegood performance because it uses kernel level code to blast out a file.We need a clear story on whether a high volume Web site can use NT ornot becaues SUN is viewed as the primary choice. Our plans for securityneed to be strengthened. Other Backoffice pieces like SMS and SQL serveralso need to stay out in front in working with the Internet. We need tofigure out how OFS can help perhaps by allowing pages to be stored asobjects and having properties added. Perhaps OFS can help with thechallenge of maintaining Web structures. We need to establishdistributed OLE as the protocol for Internet programming. Our serverofferings need to beat what Netscape is doing including billing andsecurity support. There will be substantial demand for high performancetransaction servers. We need to make the media server work across theInternet as soon as we can as new protocols are established. A majoropportunity/challenge is directory. If the features required forInternet directory are not in Cairo or easily addable without a majorrelease we will miss the window to become the world standard indirectory with serious consequences. Lotus, Novell, and AT&T will beworking together to try and establish the Internet directory. Actuallygetting the content for our directory and popularizing it could be donein the MSN group.

2. Client. First we need to offer a decent client (O’Hare) thatexploits Windows 95 shortcuts. However this alone won’t get people toswitch away from Netscape. We need to figure out how to integrateBlackbird, and help browsing into our Internet client. We have made thedecision to provide Blackbird capabilities openly rather than tie themto MSN. However, the process of getting the size, speed, and integrationgood enough for the market needs works and coordination. We need tofigure out additional features that will allows us to get ahead withWindows customers. We need to move all of our Internet value added fromthe Plus pack into Windows 95 itself as soon as we possible can with amajor goal to get OEMs shipping our browser preinstalled. This followsdirectly from the plan to integrate the MSN and Internet clients.Another place for integration is to eliminate today’s Help and replaceit with the format our browser accepts including exploiting our uniqueextensions so there is another reason to use our browser. We need todetermine how many browsers we promote. Today we have O’Hare, Blackbird,SPAM MediaView, Word, PowerPoint, Symettry, Help and many others.Without unification we will lose to Netscape/HotJava.

Over time the shell and the browser will converge and supporthierarchical/list/query viewing as well as document with links viewing.The former is the structured approach and the later allows for richerpresentation. We need to establish OLE protocols as the way richdocuments are shared on the Internet. I am sure the OpenDoc consortiumwill try and block this.

3. File sharing/Window sharing/Multi-user. We need to give awayclient code that encourages Windows specific protocols to be used acrossthe Internet. It should be very easy to set up a server for filesharing across the Internet. Our PictureTel screen sharing clientallowing Window sharing should work easily across the Internet. Weshould also consider whether to do something with the Citrix code thatallows you to become a Windows NT user across the Network. It isdifferent from the PictureTel approach because it isn’t peer to peer.Instead it allows you to be a remote user on a shared NT system. Bygiving away the client code to support all of these scenarios, we canstart to show that a Windows machine on the Internet is more valuablethan an artitrary machine on the net. We have immense leverage becauseour Client and Server API story is very strong. Using VB or VC to writeInternet applications which have their UI remoted is a very powerfuladvantage for NT servers.

4. Forms/Languages. We need to make it very easy to design a formthat presents itself as an HTML page. Today the Common Gateway Interface(CGI) is used on Web servers to give forms ‘behavior’ but its quitedifficult to work with. BSD is defining a somewhat better approach theycall BGI. However we need to integrate all of this with our Forms3strategy and our languages. If we make it easy to associate controlswith fields then we get leverage out of all of the work we are doing ondata binding controls. Efforts like Frontier software’s work and SUN’sJava are a major challenge to us. We need to figure out when it makessense to download control code to the client including a securityapproach to avoid this being a virus hole.

5. Search engines. This is related to the client/server strategies.Verity has done good work with Notes, Netscape, AT&T and many othersto get them to adopt their scalable technology that can deal with largetext databases with very large numbers of queries against them. We needto come up with a strategy to bring together Office, Mediaview, Help,Cairo, and MSN. Access and Fox do not support text indexing as part oftheir queries today which is a major hole. Only when we have anintegrated strategy will we be able to determine if our in-house effortsare adequate or to what degree we need to work with outside companieslike Verity.

6. Formats. We need to make sure we output information from all ofour products in both vanilla HTML form and in the extended forms that wepromote. For example, any database reports should be navigable ashypertext documents. We need to decide how we are going to compete withAcrobat and Quicktime since right now we aren’t challenging them. It maybe worth investing in optimizing our file formats for these scenarios.What is our competitor to Acrobat? It was supposed to be a coordinationof extended metafiles and Word but these plans are inadequate. Theformat issue spans the Platform and Applications groups.

7. Tools. Our disparate tools efforts need to be brought together.Everything needs to focus on a single integrated development environmentthat is extensible in a object oriented fashion. Tools should bearchitected as extensions to this framework. This means one commonapproach to repository/projects/source control. It means one approach toforms design. The environment has to support sophisticated viewingoptions like timelines and the advanced features SoftImage requires. Ourwork has been separated by independent focus on on-line versus CD-ROMand structured display versus animated displays. There are difficulttechnical issues to resolve. If we start by looking at the runtime piece(browser) I think this will guide us towards the right solution withthe tools.

The actions required for the Applications and Content group are also quite broad. Some critical steps are the following:

1. Office. Allowing for collaboration across the Internet andallowing people to publish in our file formats for both Mac and Windowswith free readers is very important. This won’t happen without specificevangelization. DAD has written some good documents about Internetfeatures. Word could lose out to focused Internet tools if it doesn’tbecome faster and more WYSIWYG for HTML. There is a critical strategyissue of whether Word as a container is strict superset of our DataDoccontainers allowing our Forms strategy to embrace Word fully.

2. MSN. The merger of the On-line business and Internet businesscreates a major challenge for MSN. It can’t just be the place to findMicrosoft information on the Internet. It has to have scale andreputation that it is the best way to take advantage of the Internetbecause of the value added. A lot of the content we have been attractingto MSN will be available in equal or better form on the Internet so weneed to consider focusing on areas where we can provide something thatwill go beyond what the Internet will offer over the next few years. Ourplan to promote Blackbird broadly takes away one element that wouldhave been unique to MSN. We need to strengthen the relationship betweenMSN and Exchange/Cairo for mail, security and directory. We need todetermine a set of services that MSN leads in – money transfer,directory, and search engines. Our high-end server offerings may requirea specific relationship with MSN.

3. Consumer. Consumer has done a lot of thinking about the use ofon-line for its various titles. On-line is great for annuity revenue andeliminating the problems of limited shelf-space. However, it alsolowers the barriers to entry and allows for an immense amount of freeinformation. Unfortunately today an MSN user has to download a hugebrowser for every CD title making it more of a demo capability thansomething a lot of people will adopt. The Internet will assure a largeaudience for a broad range of titles. However the challenge of becoming aleader in any subject area in terms of quality, depth, and price willbe far more brutal than today’s CD market. For each category we are inwe will have to decide if we can be #1 or #2 in that category or getout. A number of competitors will have natural advantages because oftheir non-electronic activities.

4. Broadband media applications. With the significant time beforewidescale iTV deployment we need to look hard at which applications canbe delivered in an ISDN/Internet environment or in a Satellite PCenvironment. We need a strategy for big areas like directory, news, andshopping. We need to decide how to persue local information. TheCityscape project has a lot of promise but only with the right partners.

5. Electronic commerce. Key elements of electronic commerce includingsecurity and billing need to be integrated into our platform strategy.On-line allows us to take a new approach that should allow us to competewith Intuit and others. We need to think creatively about how to usethe Internet/on-line world to enhance Money. Perhaps our Automaticteller machine project should be revived. Perhaps it makes sense to do atax business that only operates on on-line. Perhaps we can establishthe lowest cost way for people to do electronic bill paying. Perhaps wecan team up with Quickbook competitors to provide integrated on-lineofferings. Intuit has made a lot of progress in overseas markets duringthe last six months. All the financial institutions will find it veryeasy to buy the best Internet technology tools from us and others andget into this world without much technical expertise.

The Future

We enter this new era with some considerable strengths. Among themare our people and the broad acceptance of Windows and Office. I believethe work that has been done in Consumer, Cairo, Advanced Technology,MSN, and Research position us very well to lead. Our opportunity to takeadvantage of these investments is coming faster than I would havepredicted. The electronic world requires all of the directory, security,linguistic and other technologies we have worked on. It requires us todo even more in these ares than we planning to. There will be a lot ofuncertainty as we first embrace the Internet and then extend it. Sincethe Internet is changing so rapidly we will have to revise ourstrategies from time to time and have better inter-group communicationthan ever before.

Our products will not be the only things changing. The way wedistribute information and software as well as the way we communicatewith and support customers will be changing. We have an opportunity todo a lot more with our resources. Information will be disseminatedefficiently between us and our customers with less chance that the pressmiscommunicates our plans. Customers will come to our “home page” inunbelievable numbers and find out everything we want them to know.

The next few years are going to be very exciting as we tackle thesechallenges are opportunities. The Internet is a tidal wave. It changesthe rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incrediblechallenge I am looking forward to your input on how we can improve ourstrategy to continue our track record of incredible success.