Simon Moss doesn't know how to live without software. He and his classmates began doing their school work on personal laptop computers since seventh grade. The 21-year-old Australian student now runs a personal business and manages volunteers for a non-profit foundation almost entirely online and via his mobile phone.

Peter Njeru is still discovering the possibilities of software, but he's a determined explorer. A top student at his secondary school in Nairobi, Kenya, he scraped together the money to get computer lessons. Now 21 and studying architecture, he spends hours each day at a community computer lab doing online research and sending e-mails.

Moss and Njeru are among the 15 college students from around the world who are serving on the inaugural Microsoft Office Information Worker Board of the Future, an advisory panel the company formed to help determine how to better serve their generation -- the so-called Internet Generation. The biggest and most technologically literate group of information workers ever, these "NetGeners" are graduating from college and entering the workforce.

"This program is designed to get us to open up our minds," says Dan Rasmus, director for Information Work Vision in the Information Worker New Markets group at Microsoft. "We really want to get out and broaden our perceptions, look at people who process information differently and are not as influenced by the way products are typically designed at Microsoft."