Gates' Last Microsoft CEO Summit

[Editor's Note: This was a living document, blogged live from the start to the finish of the keynote. Time stamp reflects first posting. Keynote ended about 55 minutes after time stamp.]

Bill Gates is scheduled to end all day-to-day activities from June 30, as he goes from monopolist to philanthropist. This will be one of many "last" appearances. Sadly, his last speech to CEOs was a sales pitch for SharePoint Server 2007. No disrespect, but Bill isn't much of a salesman; he's got plenty of strengths, but sales isn't one of them. Still, he gave the coolest demo of the year: The Microsoft Touch Wall.

Bill started by talking broadly about innovation. "We're only at the beginning of really empowering the workers," he said. But "we fall very short of the ideal," with respect to giving employees the tools they need to make competent decisions.

Bill gave one reason for the economic boom of the 1990s. "The improved us of IT." He spoke about falling costs for storage and other hardware. "Things that were impractical are incredibly impractical," he asserted.

I noticed that he didn't note how the cost of Microsoft software hadn't fallen, but increased.

Bill said that existing tools, like e-mail collaboration, are very ineffective to meeting current needs. He said that the solution—information boom, with various names like business intelligence—exploded about eight years ago. But there was fragmentation, particularly with user interfaces. He likened the situation to disparate file formats of the past. (Can you see where this line of thinking is going?)

The same thing needed to happen to these Websites, he asserted. Bill's solution: SharePoint. He moved into a sales pitch for SharePoint Server 2007 as answer for the disparate corporate Web portals.

Bill Gates demos the Microsoft "Touch Wall"

Bill next gave examples of how he works and how SharePoint Server improved his work life. He spoke about "the review process at Microsoft," that was "incredibly paper intensive." In the old way, people would fill out Excel spreadsheets and mail them around. "You would spend a lot of time on the mechanics," he said. Today it's a "paperless process."

Because of SharePoint human resource processes: "It's our best way about getting the pulse of the business." Bill then went on to look at financial analysis using similar tools.

"That is a building block," Bill said about making Websites common, like Office did with file formats. I think he overstated Microsoft's enterprise impact, with respect to creating "common" Websites.

Bill put up a slide titled "The Next Wave of Business Productivity" with four topic areas of coming IT improvement: Unified communication, social computing, enterprise and business intelligence. Not surprisingly, Microsoft is advancing in these same technology areas.

Bill explained that businesses share common investments like networking and internetworking architecture. The differentiator: "The software processes that you put on top of it."

Microsoft's CEO left the stage while SharePoint was demonstrated. Interesting note from the demonstration: Microsoft has already incorporated Fast Search & Transfer technology into SharePoint Server. Microsoft announced the Fast Search & Transfer acquisition in January.

Microsoft has about 15,0000 SharePoint extranet portals on the Internet for collaboration.

"Information empowerment is getting stronger and stronger," Bill said after the demonstration.

Microsoft's CEO moved on to the "natural user interface," and how it changes the way people interact with devices. Some natural user interfaces he identified: speech, touch.

"Typically when we think of information, it's linear," Bill said, while showing a touch screen interface. He then demonstrated the Microsoft "Touch Wall." The documents laid out like pages on a table. The interface was totally multi-touch and acted like the iPhone on steroids, the way Bill manipulated contents using one or both hands.

"That's in our R&D labs right now," Bill said about the Touch Wall technology. The Office group is looking how to bring the technology into Office, he said. Near as I can tell, the project comes from the new Office Labs. That said, the Windows client group is "building [it] down to an operating system level," Bill said.

He moved to a slide titled "Shared Vision: Quests." Was that intentional? Vision quests? The phone annoyingly rang, and I missed what he first said about the slide. He next spoke about "verbatims" and collecting feedback from customers. Error messages are crucial, and from them Microsoft can go back to an enterprise and tell IT managers how they can better manage their Exchange infrastructure.

Bill moved onto the importance of Microsoft Research and the company's different research facilities. He also emphasized the importance of working with universities: "The manpower out there is greater than any company."

"This is a very strong leg of bringing in new ideas," Bill said about research. Another: "We get new blood and new ideas through acquisitions." Interesting, Bill indicated that Microsoft is constantly looking for new acquisitions. He said that if a product group hasn't made any acquisitions for awhile that CEO Steve Ballmer will ask if they're being open-minded enough about their approach, about looking at bringing in new ideas, new technologies through acquisition.

Bill spoke about the importance of Microsoft "Think Week," which used to be his going off by himself for a week to review employee feedback and suggestions. Now the company uses SharePoint as way of collaborating with Microsoft's top thinkers. "We've institutionalized it as a grass roots process," he asserted. "It's now an institution that has a twice-a-year rhythm."

He shifted gears to broadly and not very deeply saying how TV and reading would change—and also datacenters. While changes don't seem like much, there's a progression that leads to big changes over time, he asserted.

Bill's formal speech wrapped about around 12:25 p.m. ET. Bill took questions, but they weren't streamed. I blogged the event from the stream. The CEO summit isn't open to the press.

What Bill didn't discuss is surprising: Live Mesh. He made no mention of this important synchronization service, which could have huge impact on enterprises. My guess: Mesh will get lots of private discussions—the stuff the press can't see—throughout the day. That's if the CEOs can be pried away from the Touch Wall.