At The Gates

  ProjectsAtWork  

Microsoft's chief visionary Bill Gates shares some views on project management.

PLC 2002 ended with a big bang in the person of Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates. Speaking to an audience of 600 people, Gates outlined his vision of how emerging technologies will impact businesses and    personal lives in the coming decade. Gates and general manager Chris Capossela also demonstrated some new enterprise features in Microsoft Project 2002, scheduled for release in June. Gates then fielded a few questions from the audience.

On Microsoft's impact on the project management landscape: 

"If you looked at the size of the so-called project management business in the early '90s, we're about seven times the size of the entire business. [Today] it's a different business. It's about a broad set of people having a broad set of information; it's not about that Gantt chart that one guy has control over.

"We don't define ourselves in terms of market share. If all we did was get the current business that our competitors have in these high-end spaces, we would be very disappointed. Any company that is doing complex projects -and that's most companies-should want to use these tools. We will work with customers to get widespread adoption. We've never been about high-price, low-volume; we've always been about broad empowerment, so we …

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