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It was about 30 years ago that I first got involved working with partners in Japan on helping to create the personal computer market. Kazuhiko Nishi came over and showed me a kit computer called the TK-80, and asked me if there was some way we could work together on the software and find some partners and, in fact, that led to some of the most important partnerships that Microsoft has anywhere in the world. In fact, the market here has always been a great leading edge market with some amazing things taking place. And it was one of the first countries that we established our subsidiary in.

One of the great challenges, of course, was establishing graphical user interface, and that was a challenge that we took on together. And, of course, today everybody accepts that as a very standard thing. In the photo here we have the occasion, it was 1986, where we went to a full subsidiary, and people like Mr. Furukawa, Mr. Hosogi were involved on our side, and many of you were already working with us very closely, and very supportive of that. That's when we really started the pitch for graphics interface, a lot of special work that we needed to do, the machines weren't quite powerful enough, but that was an incredible success and something that we can build on.

Another milestone that I think is a very important one is that it was 10 years ago when the Internet first really exploded. And so we've seen a lot of new ways that the personal computer is being used around the Internet. In fact, it's fair to say the Internet hasn't just had a big impact on the personal computer business, it's changed the way we do business in every industry. But I think the opportunity for taking that Internet, together with the great hardware and software that we all do, and using it in new ways is more exciting today than it's ever been. We have a lot of strengths that we build on. The Windows PC standard is definitely one of those. If we look at the size of the install base, it's grown quite dramatically, now well over a billion machines. The original statement of Microsoft was, we wanted to have a personal computer on every desk and in every home. And so we're not quite there, that would be more than six billion, but certainly in lots of countries, like Japan and the United States, we're not too far away from that. And as we work together to make it more relevant, better performance, I think that original dream absolutely is still the vision that guides Microsoft and should guide the work that we do together.

Now, when we think about the Internet, of course, we're thinking mostly about broadband connections. The dial-up connections were an important tactic to get things going, but the way that we really want to use not only images, but video and audio, and those things, requires the broadband connection. And amazing investments have been made in that. And so today we have over a quarter-billion households connected worldwide, and still a very sharp increase in this. Of course, we want to see that connection not just to every home, to schools, to libraries, pervasive in business, and then, of course, with the new data services, we want this kind of connection taking place wherever people go, and so you never have to give up the connection to the business data, electronic mail, the information that's out there on the Internet.

In some ways, we've just scratched the surface of what's possible with the Internet. There are some activities, like buying and selling stocks, or books, or travel, that have changed a bit, but some very fundamental things have not yet changed. The way e-government is done, still very much at the beginning. The way we think about education, you know, our textbooks are still very much on paper, and they're not interactive, they're not as up to date, or customizable as they should be. One role I see for the Windows PC in the future is that we want every student to have one, and so instead of carrying textbooks around, they can get that information through their Internet connection. In some ways that's far superior, not just in terms of them knowing it as a tool, but the kind of learning they can have. Already if we think about the if we compare a print encyclopedia to an online encyclopedia, it's a very different thing in terms of the richness that's there even though the online encyclopedia is so widely available. And so that will change, I think, in many areas.