STEVE BALLMER: It is my honor, privilege, excitement, to be here with you today.
What's special about this group? What gets me particularly pumped up? What is particularly exciting? Our partners are a unique blend, you are, of two elements. Number one, you've made a bet on us. You believe in us, you want us to win, you need us to win.
We make 97, 98 percent of our revenue with partners, through partners -- So every year that's a good year for us in a sense means it's been a good year for you, and you've driven it to be a good year for us. So I do say thanks so much. You do have choices. Every day you can come to work and you make precious investments of your time and your people's time and energy in our technologies and in our product line, and with our people and in our partner program. And the value of that to us is immeasurable
We respect our partnerships. We value our partnerships. We need our partnerships.
The world will change more in the next 10 years, I predict, than even the last 10 years. Ten years ago was kind of a momentous for us. Ten years ago was Windows 95. Ten years ago was Internet Explorer Version 1.0. Ten years ago, most people in the world did not have a PC. Ten years ago, most people in the world did not have a mobile phone. Ten years ago, most people didn't know what the Internet was, let alone whether they needed to connect narrow band or broadband -- and what the heck was a virus anyway? That was the world 10 years ago. And yet I predict 10 years from now the world will be more different than it is today versus 10 years ago. The advance of technology, the innovations that are coming to market, will really blow our minds. We've barely as an industry begun to exploit the power and potential on the Internet. We still have user interfaces that work like computers -- they don't work like us. I still can't talk to my computer, have it recognize my voice, my meaning, my intent. All of that will happen in the next 10 years. Moore's Law continues. It's not being translated into additional processing power in quite as straightforward a way it was for the last 10 years, but Moore's Law continues -- communication, storage -- everything continues to get less expensive.
And so the fundamental underpinnings of the hardware industry are ripe, and all it takes is the right software and the right services, and these next 10 years will be phenomenal. It is a phenomenal place to be, industry to be in, and we are phenomenally lucky and fortunate to be the leader of this industry. And we are investing in the technologies we think will enable us to continue to lead this industry five years, 10 years, 15 years from now. Sometimes we're way ahead of competition. Sometimes, unfortunately, we get a bit behind competition. But we are a company that will relentlessly pursue the opportunities to innovate, to change the rules, and to break through.
Number one, we're going to have to continue to face change, and face it together. If we talk about the world being substantially different in 10 years, and we agree on that, we also have to agree that things will evolve. The role of the Internet, the hosted services, will evolve. Our product line and the spaces in which we offer solutions like security and BI is going to continue to evolve. We need to evolve together. We are 100 percent absolutely, totally positively committed to our partnerships. But neither you nor we should be 100 percent committed to doing things exactly the way we do them today for the next 10 years. If you run your business exactly the way you do today 10 years from now, you'll probably have a problem. If we don't embrace the important things that are going to happen and be enabled by technology and drive our business, we will have a problem.
So what we need to commit to do is to continue to evolve, but evolve together, always having the dialogue, always making sure that we respect each other's mutual skills and talents, and the mutual opportunities that are in front of us.
Enhance your skills at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005, September 13-16th, in Los Angeles. PDC05 was created by developers for developers. Learn more!