The Road Ahead by Bill Gates

Author:Bill Gates [Gates, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670859139
Amazon: 1405879327
Publisher: Viking Pr
Published: 1995-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

The greatest improvement in productivity, and the greatest change in work habits, will be brought about because of networking. The original use for the PC was to make it easier to create documents that were printed on paper and shared by passing around the printed output. The first PC networks allowed people to share printers and store files on central servers. Most of these early networks connected fewer than twenty computers together. As networks get larger, they are being connected to one another and to the Internet so that every user is able to communicate with everyone else. Today, communications are mostly short text files, but eventually they will include the full richness of the documents discussed in chapter 6. Increasingly, companies that want to provide the benefits of document-sharing to every employee have installed extensive networks, often at substantial cost. For example, Microsoft's subsidiary in Greece pays more for its connection to our worldwide network than it pays in salaries.

Now electronic mail is becoming the primary tool for exchanging messages. Print conventions have also evolved. If you want a sentence to end with a chuckle to show that its meaning is intended to be humorous, you might add a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis. This composite symbol, :-), if viewed sideways, makes a smiling face. For instance, you might write, "I'm not sure that's a great idea :-)"—the smiley face showing that your words are good-natured. Using the opposite parenthesis turns the smiling face into a frowning face, :-(, an expression of disappointment. These "emoticons," which are half cousins of the exclamation point, probably won't survive the transition of e-mail into a medium that permits audio and video.

Conventionally, businesses share information internally by exchanging paperwork, placing telephone calls, and/or gathering around a conference table or white board. Plenty of time and plenty of expensive face-to-face meetings and presentations are required to reach good decisions this way. The potential for inefficiency is enormous. Companies that continue to rely on these methods exclusively risk losing out to competitors who reach decisions faster while devoting fewer resources, and probably fewer layers of management, to the process.

At Microsoft, because we're in the technology business, we began using electronic communication early. We installed our first e-mail system in the early 1980s. Even when we had only a dozen employees, it made a difference. It quickly became the principal method of internal communication. E-mail was used in place of paper memos, technology discussions, trip reports, and phone messages. It contributed a lot to the efficiency of our little company. Today, with thousands of employees, it is essential.

E-mail is easy to use. To write and send an electronic message, I click on a large button labeled "Compose." This brings to the screen a simple form. First, I type the name of the person or people to whom I am addressing the message or choose the name from an electronic address book. I can even indicate that I want the message sent to a group of recipients.

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