BILL GATES: Well, good morning. I get a chance to kick things off and give you probably the longest-term view you'll get about the different things we're up to.

The simple summary is that we believe that we're just at the beginning of what we can do with software. If we take any of the different audiences we address—the IT audience, the developer audience, the knowledge worker audience, the way business processes are done, the way people deal with information at home—in every one of those cases we've really just scratched the surface in terms of the scenarios that software can enable.

We talk about that as software empowerment. Really, since the foundation of the company, that's been the value that's driven us forward. We're exhibiting our belief in that in a very dramatic way in this environment.

I'll talk about the increase in R&D that we're taking, going from this year to next year—a pretty substantial increase, over 8 percent—because of the opportunities we see. The model we're applying is our high-value, low-price model. We are very focused on the business market but also a number of our investments relate to the future in the consumer market.

The kind of software value-add that we see ourselves as uniquely providing has to do with platform and application advances that require very substantial investments, things that could not be done by a software company with only hundreds of developers. And so we take those things on and make those the centerpiece of our activities, providing that work as a platform for other people to build on.

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