Friday, 8 November – 13:30-15:00 – Exhibit Hall 4B

Invited Speaker: The Future of Programming in a World of Web Services

William H. Gates
Microsoft Corporation

While the discipline of programming has evolved over more than 50 years of modern computing, the human programmer still bears most of the burden of designing, coding, and testing a system or application under development. Moreover, the programmer is generally tasked with making some assessment or guarantee of a system's quality, security and reliability. With the emergence of Web services and new types of development systems, what will the experience of building applications be in 5 years? 10 years? How do Web services move us closer to a world of systems controlling and even programming other systems? What will the programming interfaces of the future--both the languages and the environments--look like?

In his keynote address, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will address these questions and more. The keynote will also feature demonstrations of innovative concepts, tools and technologies being developed by scientists and engineers from Microsoft Research and Microsoft product development groups.

Speaker

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. Microsoft had revenues of $25.3 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2001, and employs more than 40,000 people in 60 countries.

In his junior year, Gates left Harvard University to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.

Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, reflected in its investment of more than $4 billion on research and development in the current fiscal year.