I want to share with you a vision of the personalized, connected office. A big part of making it real will mean taking advantage of the revolution in communications that's taking place right now. Of course, this means the Internet.

The Internet is kind of like a gold rush where there really is gold. It may be buried a little deeper than some people think, but with drops in the price of communication, the fact that PCs everywhere will eventually have very high speed data rates (allowing them to work together) really will have a fundamental impact. In fact, it will mean that our industry will change the way people do business, the way they learn, and even the way they entertain.

So how will it happen? Within local area networks, for example, we're now moving at up to 100-megabit (data transmission) speeds and getting the quality of service that will allow you to pass both audio and video across. But the hard problem comes when you move to a wide area network, and you're trying to reach out to other people. What kind of connectivity do you have?

If we just use today's phone system with modems, that's what we call narrowband. The ultimate speed we'll get out of that is about 28.8K. But an important characterization to it will be digital simultaneous voice data (DSVD) which allows you to carry on a conversation while sending data on the same phone line. It makes data communication far more social and gives the richness of the computer display as part of that conversation. We also need to take narrowband communication and make it easily available on a wireless basis for people who are working in a mobile fashion, but it will be a few more years before the infrastructure is in place.

During that same time period, though, we expect a very rapid move to the next generation, what we call midband. We're very excited about ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network). The ease of setup is improving. The price of the hardware is coming down, the monthly charges are coming down, and because it's about five times faster, ISDN really makes a qualitative difference.

The ultimate is still broadband, and that means providing data rates of several megabits or more. This has been the Holy Grail of the so-called information superhighway. A couple years ago, some communication companies were really talking about how many millions of people they'd connect up in the next few years. Well, a little bit of reality has snuck in here and the revenue opportunity for connecting broadband up to homes is going to take quite some time to develop. The prices have to come down and applications have to be far better than they are today.

So the concrete evolution is moving toward midband as the base point to eventually get to broadband. Broadband will happen, and it will be important, using technologies like the optic fiber, asynchronous transfer mode, and ADSL. We've got that in front of us not asa big bang, but as something that we'll move to step-by-step.

The goal of all of the things we've been talking about is to empower users and to create flexibility so people can work wherever they are and be in touch.

All of that will be enabled by office productivity software - so I hope you can tell I'm very excited about this future vision. We need better hardware for the desktop applications part of the market, better software and communications infrastructure, and, perhaps most important, contributions from the solution providers, the people who have provided the consulting and training, who can take these standardized building blocks and put them together in a way that's meaningful for the incredible variety of users out there.