How do you explain Real Simple Syndication (RSS) to 100 CEOs, some of whom are barely comfortable checking their own e-mail?

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates found a way, as part of his keynote that kicked off the company's eighth annual CEO summit taking place in Redmond over the next two days. The summit was closed to the press, but the Gates keynote was Web cast for members of the media.

The productivity benefits accrued by companies that aren't afraid to back "bottoms-up empowerment" was a key theme for Gates during his hour-long address, attended by CEOs from Barnes & Noble, Berkshire-Hathaway, Dell, Delta, Fanny Mae, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot and other Fortune 1000 firms from around the world.

Gates detailed a handful of scenarios that exemplify the "seamless-computing" world view that he has been espousing for the past couple of years.

Gates mentioned briefly how seamless computing will impact the entertainment and digital lifestyle realms. But, given the business interests of the CEO Summit audience, he focused primarily on "business productivity" and "rewiring the economy" scenarios that will harness the power of seamless computing.

Gates talked about the tension between centralization vs. individual user empowerment. "Over the last few years, it (the emphasis) has been swinging toward centralization," he said. "But now the focus is on bottoms-up empowerment."

He cited as an example of the good that can come from empowering individual users the crash-analysis reporting software (code-named "Watson") that Microsoft has been using to gather data on bugs in Microsoft Office. Watson allows users to submit reports of crashes directly to Microsoft over the Web in real time.

"This has been a fantastic thing," Gates told the CEOs. Because of Watson, "our software is more agile, more transparent and more up-to-date."

He noted that Microsoft is expanding on the Watson technologies so that they can be used by individual IT departments to gather crash/bug reports on software deployed within their own companies.

Gates also extolled the productivity benefits that can be derived from user-empowering technologies such as blogging, RSS, collaboration software and online communities that are integrated into Web sites.

Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a "very interesting phenomenon." He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can "get the information you want when you want it."

Gates didn't mention the fact that Microsoft currently has hundreds of employees blogging across all of its product groups. Microsoft blogging poster child Robert Scoble – an evangelist on the Windows team – recently advocated in an article posted to the Microsoft Business Solutions Web site that businesses use blogs to get customers excited about their products.

Gates highlighted other examples of user empowerment during his speech. He showed how Microsoft's InfoPath e-forms tool can be used to give information workers more visibility into sales and marketing data that is typically trapped in an Excel spreadsheet. He also mentioned that Microsoft is working to add camera software to future versions of its Office Live Meeting conferencing software that will provide users with new ways to take advantage of traditional whiteboards during meetings.

At the tail end of his speech, Gates turned to the notion of how seamless computing can help rewire the economy. He called out Web services, business-process templates, self-service portals and speech interfaces as examples of technologies that have the potential to make companies more productive and benefit business at large.