Bill Gates on technology @ Microsoft CEO Summit - May 20 2004...

This year Bill Gates started the 8th Microsoft CEO Summit 2004, presenting some thoughts on how technology advances can impact business strategy in the years to come:

-In the software industry big things take around 5 years to make market impact.

-Processing power with chips now running at 64bit is opening the road for huge memory address space that means more to run apps and new software.

-Increasing use of wireless networks with something called Personal Area Networks using Ultra Wideband instead of more restricted technologies like Bluetooth.

-Using wireless technologies over long distances like the WiMax standard (802.16) with allow massive adoption of broadband Internet access on the consumer side.

-Storage will continue to provide cheaper disk space and is not a limitation.

-Photography will be entirely digital within the next five years.

-Increasing adoption of WI-FI technologies is already a fact. The challenge for households is to have bandwidth for video.

-High definition displays getting cheaper. RFID technologies to improve business abilities to track goods or assests.

-Mobiles phones + better screens resolutions + digital camera + speech recognition + small keyboards + PDA capabilities + GPS sensors will be the standard. Here is what J. Dvorak thinks of convergence.

-Internet advertising increasingly will continue to be boosted by technology and not by M&A activity.

-Digital reading coming with things like: one magazine comes, shows only those articles that the reader likes, and allows to make annotations and to share thoughts with other readers.

-On the business side, enabling employees to organize their works in ways appropriate
to execute their functions instead of being locked in the uniformity of the IT platform.

-Blogging as a new phenomenon where a social network can interact and increase
productivity by simplifying publishing and subscription tasks over an easy to
maintain personal web site. Here are some quite opposite thoughts about what will
happen to blogging: John Dvorak and Dave Pollard.

-Building communities around web sites and products as a way to increase interactions and productivity.