比尔.盖茨的向开发者告别演讲

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FROM: http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_8 ... 25745D0044BF9C.html
Gates Bids Adieu to Developers
It's fitting that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates delivered his final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee on Tuesday to a roomful of software developers.
Gates started as a developer 33 years ago when he co-foundedMicrosoft, and the developers of the Windows OS are a primary reasonthe company is an industry powerhouse.
The latter is not lost onGates, who kicked off the TechEd Developers conference Tuesday morning,addressing what is perhaps his company's most loyal audience. Heacknowledged their importance to his company. "The success of Microsoftreally is due to our relationship with developers," he said.
Gates spoke only briefly about his July 1 transition to spending most of his time at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, calling it "a bit abrupt."
"Itwill put me in new territory," he said. "That's the first time I'vereally changed my career since I was 17 years old. I've been completelyimmersed in software."
Aside from that mention of his upcomingcareer change, the speech was textbook Gates, who for more than 30years has been the face of Microsoft and the one responsible for layingout its future vision. On Tuesday he did more of the same, outliningfuture directions for application development and services, the latterbeing a more recent topic of interest for his company.
On theformer, Gates unveiled Microsoft's future direction applicationmodeling, part of Project Oslo, Microsoft's application-developmentplan for making it easier for developers to build SOAs(service-oriented architectures). SOAs allow the underlying softwarerunning a company's network to communicate with software and pieces ofsoftware outside the firewall using standard network and applicationinterfaces to create composite applications.
Microsoft will givedevelopers their first look at Oslo, which will add a commonarchitecture for visually modeling applications in different Microsoftsoftware products, in October at the Professional DevelopersConference, Gates said.
"We're taking the kind of models you'reseeing rising in specific domains like software management in SystemCenter, data design in SQL Server ... and [putting] them into onemodel-driven space," he said. "In some ways, it speaks to the dreamsabout a [central application] repository people have had for decades."
As for services, Gates articulated perhaps more clearly than ever before Microsoft's plans to compete with companies like Google and Amazon.comto provide the industry's largest data centers for hosted services.Microsoft has been late to embrace a hosted-services business model,but has been forced by competition to move more quickly or miss outaltogether on new Web-based business models.
"We're takingeverything we do at the server level and saying we will have a servicethat mirrors that exactly," Gates said. "It's getting us to think aboutdata centers at a scale that we haven't thought of before... [tocreate] a mega-data center that Microsoft and only a few others willhave."
Gates also highlighted Microsoft's flagship Webtechnology, the Internet Explorer (IE) browser, which has been an assetand a curse for the company over the years. While it allowed Microsoftto secure its dominant position in Web-browsing technology, it alsotriggered Microsoft's U.S. antitrust woes, something that haunts thecompany to this day. IE also has taken a hit in the past several yearsas MozillaFirefox, an open-source browser, has gained a loyal following, forcingMicrosoft to step up development and make its own product moreinnovative.
Gates revealed that beta 2 of the next version of IE,IE 8, will be available in August. He also stumped for what has beenhis pet interest during his years at Microsoft natural human-interfacetechnology that allows people to interact with computers in wayssimilar to how they interact with each other. Last week, Microsoftrevealed that the next version of Windows, Windows 7, will includetouchscreen technology, a fact he mentioned in his talked.
Healso reiterated his vision for mini, tablet PCs that allow people to"write" and use other nature interfaces such as speech-recognitiontechnology. Another futuristic technology Gates has promoted atMicrosoft is robotics, and he made this interest part of the finaldiscussion of his comments Tuesday. He welcomed onto the stage a Ph.D.candidate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the "Ballmer-bot," a robot made to imitate and act like Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO and Gates' long-time business partner, who is not attending TechEd.
"Developers,developers, developers, developers," the robot, developed usingMicrosoft Robotics Developer Studio product, repeated over and over, inan homage to Ballmer's famous rant. The robot also raised his arm,showing how he has the ability to "throw eggs," according to the MITstudent controlling his movements.

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周二在"TechEd Developers"大会上，微软董事会主席比尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)面对满屋的开发人员，发表了退隐前的最后一次公开演讲。

    7月1日退出微软日常管理

    33年前创建微软时，盖茨也是一名开发人员，而微软能有今天的行业老大地位，也要归功于Windows操作系统的开发人员。在昨天的开幕演讲上，盖茨并没有忘记这些功臣，"微软的成功在于我们和开发人员的关系。"

    盖茨还简短地谈到自己将于7月1日退出微软日常管理工作，全心投入和妻子创立的比尔及梅琳达·盖茨基金会，他表示感到有些仓促，"(慈善事业)将把我推向一个新领域，这是自我17岁以来第一次真正意义上的换工作。此前，我完全沉溺于软件开发之中。"

    预测技术趋势

    除了谈到自己的职业变化，盖茨的演讲又恢复到了以前的"教科书式"模式，30多年来，盖茨一直是微软的象征，一位为微软勾画未来蓝图的掌舵人。这次会议上，盖茨再次对应用开发和服务的发展方向进行了预测，而后者也是最近微软最关注的话题。

    盖茨首先谈到了微软未来应用模式的发展方向，即"奥斯陆计划(Project Oslo)"。该项目是微软的一个应用开发计划，旨在简化开发人员创建"面向服务架构"(以下简称"SOA")。SOA允许运行公司网络的底层软件通过标准的网络和应用接口，与防火墙以外的软件通信，从而创建综合应用。

    在服务市场，盖茨清晰地阐明了微软与谷歌和亚马逊竞争的计划。在托管服务模式上，微软是迟到者，但迫于竞争对手的压力，微软也迅速做出了反应，否则就可能错过新兴的基于Web的业务模式。

    盖茨说："我们致力于服务器层面上的所有项目，将来也会推出完全对应的服务。我们开始考虑庞大的数据中心，规模之大是我们从未想象过的……打造只有微软和少数几家企业才能够拥有的巨型数据中心。"

    此外，盖茨还谈到了IE浏览器。他透露，IE 8 beta 2版本将于8月推出。IE对微软来说，既是天使又是魔鬼。一方面，IE帮助微软成功垄断了Web浏览器市场，另一方面，又在美国给微软带来了反垄断噩梦，至今未消解。最近几年，由于Firefox浏览器的茁壮成长，IE受到了严峻挑战，迫使微软进行不断创新。

    另外，盖茨又谈到了自然人机界面技术，它将使人与计算机的交互变得越来越像人与人之间的互动。上周，微软公布了下一代操作系统Windows 7的多点触摸技术。该技术就是自然人机界面的一部分。

    机器人恶搞鲍尔默

    最后，盖茨谈到了平板PC和微软研发多年的机器人技术。盖茨邀请一名麻省理工大学的学生来操控一台名为"机器人鲍尔默"的机器人，它可以模仿微软CEO史蒂夫·鲍尔默(Steve Ballmer)的语言和动作。

    只见机器人一遍又一遍地高喊："开发人员，开发人员，开发人员……"，模仿鲍尔默的激情演讲。随后，机器人又举起了胳膊，摆出"扔鸡蛋"的姿势。不久前，鲍尔默在匈牙利发表演讲时遭到了现场听众的"飞蛋"袭击。(李明)