When Bill Gates Speaks, People Listen

Bill Gates is a great speaker. He may not be the most dynamic, but what he says has a lot of interesting insight into what is happening globally in technology. He recently spoke at the Ninth Annual Microsoft CEO Summit, Redmond, Washington  This is well worth a listen, as there is a new buzz phrase coming out of it “New World of Work.”

Few Highlights:

• Email usage not going down, trendline indicates its going up.Email increased 10x since 1997. e-communication will increase by six by 2008.
• Areas of Information underload: customer insight, budgeting, rapid design, project planning. In otherwords, the tools are available to improve problem solving in this area but more investment by companies are needed.
• Prioritization: how do we know we are working on the right thing. A lot of people get an email and treat it as the priority, though who is to say other things in the inbox have more priority.

Additional this page has some video clips of Gates talking about Office. One of the key messages is better intergration into existing Office applications, not new applications.

As a side note, this happens to be a listing of all the webcasts Bill Gates has done. One that is especially worth listening too is his Keynote presentation from the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference. This also is worth listening to as it has a great QA session at the end

You can find both webcasts here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx