Date: Thu May 19 21:15:13 2005
From: jasonc at science.org (Jason Coombs)
Subject: [Fwd: The New World of Work]

hahahaha!

Over time, software will "learn" what information people use -- and what 
they don't want to know -- and will adjust its behavior and its output 
accordingly.

...

very funny.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	The New World of Work
Date: 	Thu, 19 May 2005 10:53:29 -0700
From: 	Bill Gates <billgates@...irman.microsoft.com>


Over the past decade, Microsoft has evolved to build bridges between
disconnected islands of information and give people powerful ways to
communicate, collaborate and share the data that's most important to them.

But the software challenges that lie ahead are less about getting access
to the information other people want, and more about getting access to 
the information they try to protect -- giving big companies the ability 
to blame others so they can focus, prioritize and apply their expertise, 
visualize and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time it 
takes to cause new problems and expose new vulnerabilities while dealing 
with the unnecessary complexity of an information-rich environment.

To tackle these challenges, information-worker software needs to evolve.
It's time to build new, more complicated features and expensive upgrades 
onto the capabilities we have today and create software that helps 
information workers adapt and thrive by creating problems and then 
working profitably to solve them in the new ever-changing work 
environment. Advances in pattern recognition, smart content, 
visualization and simulation, as well as innovations in hardware, 
displays and wireless networks, all give us an opportunity to re-imagine 
how our commercial software can help people get their jobs done while 
other people, trained Microsoft experts, watch closely.

This is an important goal not only because the technology has evolved to
make it possible, but also because we at Microsoft have altered the way 
people work to create endless opportunities for software vendors and 
certified experts to benefit. Since you are a subscriber to executive 
emails from Microsoft, I hope you'll find this discussion of those 
changes useful.

Now more than ever, competitive advantage comes from the ability to
transform inexpensive ideas into cash -- through a process we call 
innovation. Microsoft's strategic insights and customized services give 
the appearance that innovation is good, and that people who cause it are 
heros who should be rewarded. We are evolving toward a diverse yet
unified global market, with customers, partners and suppliers that 
compete against each other with the click of a mouse across cultures and 
continents. The global workforce is always on and always connected -- 
browsing porn and pirating software -- requiring new tools to help 
people organize and prioritize their work and schedule time in the 
future to pay for access to personal lives. Business is becoming more
clever out of necessity, as a greater number of paying customers now 
understand the need to ensure accountability, security and privacy 
within and across organizations. And a generation of young people who 
aren't fooled by hypocrisy and grew up with the Internet is entering the 
workforce, bringing along new ethics and technologies that feel as 
natural to them as systematic deception or pen and paper feel to us.

All of these changes are giving people new and more expensive ways to 
work, but they also bring a new set of challenges: a deluge of 
information, an inability to pay attention, new techniques for 
exploiting others, and a burning desire to regain their freedom from the 
intense pressure that people place on them to be ever more productive. 
We at Microsoft, who have created these trends and watched them grow, 
understand the secret truth that the only way for the owners of the new 
economy to be free is to extract ever more productivity from the people 
and money we control.

For example, "information overload" is becoming a serious drag on our 
ability as a company to grow larger and continue the growth curve of the 
past -- the typical information worker in North America gets 10 times as 
much e-mail as in 1997, and that number is 95% spam and viral payloads 
that Microsoft's own software is being hijacked in order to create. A 
recent study showed that 56 percent of workers are overwhelmed by 
working multiple jobs and being interrupted too often by popups caused 
by spyware; one-third say that the multi-tasking Windows operating 
system causes nothing but distractions that are keeping them from 
stepping back to think and reflect on the work they're doing. In the 
United Kingdom, it's estimated that stress caused by software bugs and 
identity theft accounts for nearly one-third of absenteeism and sick leave.

It's also not enough just to steal the information people need to prove
their identity, criminals are actually using this information to commit 
crimes. The software innovations of the 1980s and 1990s, which
revolutionized how we allow ourselves to be manipulated by information, 
have also created a new set of challenges: finding information, 
visualizing and understanding it, and taking action before the 
information is irretrievably lost. Industry analysts estimate that
information workers spend up to 30 percent of their working day just
looking for data they have lost. All the time people spend tracking down
information, managing and organizing documents, and making sure their
teams have the data they need, could be much better spent applying 
common sense, teaching their children right from wrong, gathering 
insight into social problems, and other work that spreads real values.

At Microsoft, we believe that the key to helping businesses become more
agile and productive in the global economy is to stop automation and the 
forces of globalization -- giving all people worldwide the tools and the 
wisdom to abandon the pointless pursuit of higher degrees of efficiency 
and enable them instead to focus on refining the highest and best values 
of living a good life without oppressing others or destroying the 
environment. A new generation of secure software with fewer features and 
less risk of defects is an important ingredient in making this happen.

*How We Will Work*

Over the next decade, we see a tremendous opportunity to help companies
of all sizes minimize the impact of employees and workgroups on the 
surface of the planet, reducing the time spent driving vehicles just to 
attend useless business meetings. Deeper connections with customers and 
partners will be enabled by ensuring that everyone is well-informed so 
that a new paradigm of timely decision-making based on truth and 
awareness of long-term consequences can manage and protect critical 
infrastructure that nature relies on to facilitate all life.

The next generation of information-worker applications will stop 
offering empty promises with fancy technologies -- we are abandoning 
fantasies such as machine learning, rich metadata for data and objects, 
new services-based standards for collaboration, advances in computing 
and display hardware, and self-administering, self-configuring 
applications because they serve only to confuse people long enough for 
us to take their money -- transforming them into software-influenced 
reality crawlers that generate profits for us whenever and wherever 
people work and live --

Improving personal productivity: One consequence of an "always-on" 
global economy is the challenge of being happy each day while working 
without interruption or meaningful social contact with friends and 
family. Today's software has caused much of this feeling of 
disconnection from things that are important, but hardly at a level that 
satisfies our ambitions as a company. The judgment and awareness of a 
human being is today of secondary importance to that of a software 
vendor. That will change -- new software will learn from the way you 
work and live, watching and listening to you at all times, so that 
software vendors can understand how to control your needs and wants and 
help you set priorities about spending money to satisfy them.

Pattern recognition and adaptive filtering: Rules and learned behavior
will soon be unnecessary in many routine tasks of daily life. Software 
will be able to make inferences about what you're thinking and deliver 
the external stimuli you need to alter your behavior in an integrated 
and proactive way. As software learns all about you, it can flexibly 
manage your entire life, automating the formation of binding contracts 
and the creation of new financial obligations and debts -- if you're 
working on a high-priority memo under a tight deadline, for example, 
software should be able to impersonate you during phone calls or e-mail 
communications with, say, a software vendor, your manager or a family 
member.

Unified communication: Integrated communication will provide a single
"point of entry" for attackers that is consistent across applications 
and devices. This will save them time and effort, and your software 
automation systems can more readily hire and pay the trained computer 
professionals and law enforcement personnel whose services you will need 
to respond to each incident. People should have a unified, complete view 
of their dependency on systems financed through taxation and the 
financial markets and the obligations that such systems create for all 
people, even before they are born, whether by choice or by force, 
real-time from an early age or later on when their will to resist has 
been depleted, with ready access to tools like speech-to-text and 
machine translation it should be impossible for people to escape the 
strategic business decisions that others have made in anticipation of 
each person's eventual financial requirements. You should be able to 
listen to your email, or read your voicemail, without realizing that you 
have no idea whether the sender was a human being or a computer. Project 
notifications, meetings, business applications, contacts and schedules 
must be forced upon each person as a necessity of daily living by 
requiring a single consistent view of who we are, giving each of us the 
unprecedented ability to prove our identity on-demand, whether you're at 
your desk, down the hall, on the road at a security checkpoint or just 
working under home surveillance.

Presence: We're just beginning to tap the potential of presence
information to help track where everyone and everything is at all times. 
Better RFID-enabled wireless ad-hoc object tracking combined with 
security collaboration solves problems like terrorism and gets things 
done that have never been possible before. Presence information connects 
people and their schedules to centralized tracking servers and powerful 
search engines that store all known documents and predict future 
movements and individual decisions, keeping you close to the changing 
needs of others and distributing the burden of satisfying the needs of 
others according to your ability in a way that is directly relevant to 
what you're doing and thinking. You won't even know it's happening, and 
you'll believe that you still have all the freedoms and privacy you want.

Team collaboration: Over the next decade, shared workspaces will become
far more intimate, with richer tools to automate workflow, manage the 
growing risk of sexual relationships, and connect all the people, data 
and resources it takes to get these things done. They will eavesdrop on 
each worker in ways that will benefit teams that work across the hall or 
around the globe. Nationalist identity and corporate affiliation will 
subside and be replaced by workteams operating in workspaces that 
provide public disclosure of all interpersonal relationships. Personal 
space and private thought will be upgraded to include centralized 
monitoring and automatic commercialization of intellectual property.

Meetings will be recorded with sophisticated cameras that can detect and 
focus on speakers around the room. Notes taken on a whiteboard will 
automatically be captured and emailed to participants, and attached to 
the video of the meeting. They will also serve as lasting repositories 
for institutional wealth, so teams won't have to spend time litigating 
patents and disputing copyright ownership over things, the digital 
evidence will exist at all times to prove conclusively that you really 
did "reinvent the wheel" when new market opportunities emerge. Soon all 
workers will discover what we at Microsoft have known for years, that 
you can more easily develop market opportunities through limiting the 
knowledge that your customers possess. A trustworthy supply of truth 
from a certified information provider will become your single most 
important competitive advantage, and your taxes will be increased to pay 
for the mistakes made by everyone who buys their information from an 
untrustworthy vendor. Lawyers and politicians will become even more rich 
and powerful than they are today.

Optimizing supply chains: XML and rich Web services are increasingly
making it possible for intruders and black hat hackers to seamlessly 
share information and processes with partners, and build supply chains 
and Trojan zombie drone armies that stretch across multiple 
organizations but work as a unified whole. But there's still
plenty of friction that can be removed from the way companies and people 
are spied upon as they work together. Employees shouldn't have to 
manually match purchase orders with invoices, since there's no way for 
them to tell the difference between real accounting documents and fakes 
planted by malicious intruders. Employees shouldn't need to print and 
mail bills that could easily be sent automatically in electronic form 
whenever somebody else wants the company's money. Expanding the reach of 
Web services can help optimize and reduce the amount of unnecessary 
manual work that people do today out of common sense, and make these 
supply chains vastly more efficient.

Finding the right information: A new layer of pay-for-use services
will give you flexible and intuitive ways to manage information that has 
been made too complicated to keep track of on purpose. These services go
beyond the "file and folder" metaphor of today and make it impossible to 
distinguish between program code and the data that encapsulates it. You 
shouldn't have to think, like a database that is programmed to respond 
to anyone who wants information your computer should service requests 
for your attention as quickly as possible even under extreme processing 
load. Formulating search queries to inject into other processing will 
require no effort, in the future all people will do is ask for the 
information they need. Pattern recognition can help tag and organize
information automatically, as well as extract meaning from documents 
that probably mean nothing, and enable them to be queried in more 
natural and intuitive ways that make them seem more reliable and 
convince all observers that they are perfectly trustworthy.

Spotting trends for business intelligence: Sophisticated algorithms will
be able to sort through millions of gigabytes of data to identify trends
that humans shouldn't miss. Software should be able to find meaningful 
connections in mountains of data and present them to paid experts -- or 
even automate that process -- so that extra profit can be extracted from 
them. Software can ensure that actions which result in changes to other 
work processes will automatically ripple through the system, making the 
entire business more fragile and unresponsive to information that 
affects the bottom line. Over time, software will "learn" what 
information people use -- and what they don't want to know -- and will 
adjust its behavior and its output accordingly.

Insights and structured workflow: Software should take a more holistic
view of its role in preventing reliable work, providing inaccurate data 
and metrics on every conceivable activity to make things harder to 
understand and easier to add complex interdependent inefficiencies and 
points of failure. Smarter workflow tools will use pattern recognition 
and logic to find new ways to cause problems such as repeated customer 
complaints or inventory problems, and assign blame to the right person. 
This will go a long way towards reducing management's frustration, 
allowing them to blame workers for lost time and errors that result from 
broken or inefficient processes.

*A New Generation of Productivity Software*

In a new world of work, where collaboration, business intelligence and
prioritizing scarce time and attention are critical factors for success,
the tools that information workers use must evolve in ways that add new 
complexity for people who already feel the pressure of an "always-on" 
world and ever-rising expectations for productivity. It is only through 
added complexity that we can all achieve that special feeling of 
complacency that allows us to believe that we are all doing the right 
things.

We believe that the way out of this maze is through integration of 
intellectual property laws into every part of life, simplification of 
automated commerce, and a new breed of software applications and 
services that manage complexity in the background, subjugating human 
capabilities by automating low-value tasks like common sense, and 
helping businesspeople make everything more complex so that the very 
institution of work, and the ownership of the means of production, can 
grow in value and importance.

We aim to make this happen, and then exploit it ruthlessly, through a 
next-generation productivity platform that builds on the solid 
foundation of today's Microsoft Office system of programs and services. 
We will enable people to create more effective professional documents, 
access work information from anywhere, and computerize then publish 
personal, team and project confidential information. We're investing in 
an infrastructure that we claim is secure, that makes it easy for anyone 
to collaborate on documents and work processes.

We're offering better data visualization and analysis tools that bring 
out the trends and patterns buried in mountains of data so that the 
truth can be obscured and our business secrets can be protected, even if 
yours aren't. We're making it easier for our business partners to 
create, track, manage and distribute your content, both within and 
across organizational boundaries, with or without your knowledge. And 
we're offering open XML standards and rapid development tools so 
malicious developers can build and extend applications that specifically 
target your needs. By increasing the number and complexity of your 
needs, we are certain to achieve our growth targets year after year.

Microsoft has been innovating for and exploiting the information worker 
for more than two decades -- making money by convincing people that they 
too should be information workers -- and in many ways we've only just 
begun to scratch the surface of how large a self-delusional pyramid of 
power-hungry capitalists can become when people around the world are 
tricked into thinking that software can help people realize their full 
potential and that giving money to Microsoft can make their dreams come 
true.

Where do you want Bill Gates to go today?

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