Business at the speed of thought. Bill Gates

FOREWORD FROM TRANSLATORS
When Cyril and Methodius translated the Bible from Greek, they had to invent a special alphabet. And the matter was not limited to this: for many concepts, Greek words had to be borrowed. I do not equate our team with the team of Bible translators (as well as Bill Gates with its author), but the tasks turned out to be similar. For many concepts appearing in Gates' book, there are no established terms in Russian yet, and we were forced to take upon ourselves the selection of certain options. The inevitable trade-offs involved are sure to elicit mixed reactions from readers.
Difficulties began already with the cover. By translating the name "Business @ The Speed ​​of Thought" as "Business at the speed of thought", we have lost one of its essential components. After all, the @ sign, which corresponds to the preposition "at" in English, is an indispensable attribute of email addresses. In the translation of the title, we had to do without it (we did not dare to supplement the Russian alphabet), and as a result, the author’s obvious allusion to e-mail disappeared.

With the fact that the Internet is written in Russian letters and inclined, everyone seems to have agreed, but there is no consensus on the Web yet. We decided that since the English language has been reduced from the lush World Wide Web to the simple Web, why not abandon the pretentious World Wide Web in favor of the Net? But at the same time (where to go?) Web sites and web technologies had to be preserved.

One of the most difficult problems was the expression "knowledge worker". A search on the Internet and a survey of specialists showed that in English this concept is interpreted ambiguously: some call it all employees of the IT industry, while others - without distinguishing between industries - all those who have broad knowledge in their field and are engaged in creative processing of information. Choosing between precision and brevity, we decided to focus on "knowledge workers" ("knowledge workers").

With pain in my heart, I had to admit monsters like “reengineering of business processes” into the text. However, you will agree that “reorganization of business processes” sounds a little better, and the meaning is more vague.
Separately, I want to say about transactions. It so happened that this word came into the Russian language in two forms at once: economists and some other specialists write "transactions", and computer scientists - "transactions". Time will tell who is stronger.

The formation of terminology always lags behind technological progress: first people invent the wheel, and only then they name it. Moreover, the names often change over time. A few years ago, I came across a text describing "cell phones" - now it can only cause a smile: who does not know that these phones are called "cell phones"?

It is impossible to talk about new products without using new words, and unsuccessful names simply will not take root. At the dawn of aviation, a lot of new terms entered our speech: aviator, airplane, etc. However, over time, as you know, many of them were replaced by Russian variants: pilot, airplane.

In a word, in order to express American thoughts in Russian, I had to choose terminology at my own peril and risk. And whether we did it right is up to the “users of the Russian language”. And time.

Natalya Shakhova, head of the EnRus agency (www.enrus.ru)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, I would like to thank my colleague Collins Hemingway for his help in the selection and processing of materials for this book and for the overall direction of the project.

I would like to acknowledge four corporate executives - Paul O'Neill of Alcoa, Ivan Seidenberg of Bell Atlantic, Tony Nicely (Top Nicely) of GEICO Insurance, and Ralph Larsen of Johnson & Johnson, who read one of the final drafts of the manuscript and offered some valuable insights into how the book could be more useful to business leaders.

Specific data on the use of technology in business and government organizations was collected by Collins and Jane Glasser on trips around the world. Barbara Leavitt, Evelyn Vasen, and Ken Linarelli each contributed to one or more chapters. As the manuscript progressed, it was carefully edited by Erin O'Connor. Anne Schott assisted as assistant to the combined studies and as project coordinator.

I want to thank Bob Kruger and Tren Griffin, thoughtfully who commented on many chapters as the book was being written. And also to Steve Ballmer, Bob Herbold, and Jeff Raikes for their constructive ideas about the book's structure and themes. David Vaskevitch, Rich Tong, Gary Voth and Mike Murray provided valuable insights, while Mich Mathews and John Pinette provided valuable comments.

I also thank Larry Kirshbaum, Chairman and CEO of Time Warner Trade Publishing, and Rick Horgan, Vice President and Executive Editor at Warner Books, for their fruitful feedback. Thanks to Kelli Jerome for the professionally flawless marketing of both of my books worldwide and to Lee Anne Staller for helping with sales.

I am also grateful for the assistance provided at Warner by Warner Vice President and Editor-in-Chief Harvey-Jane Kowal and Senior Production Editor Bob Castillo and Proofreader Sona Vogel.).

As advanced as modern search technologies are, Microsoft Library researchers Laura Bain, Kathy Brost, Jill Burger, Lynne Busby, Peggy Crowley Crowley, Erin Fields, April Hill, Susan Hoxie, Jock McDonald, Tammy Pearson, K. S. Rich, Deborah Robinson, Christine Shannon, Mary Taylor, Dawn Zeh and Brenda Zurbi. Thanks to Christine Turner and Gordon Lingley for their help.

A huge contribution was made by employees of Microsoft and other companies working closely with it. That's a lot of people - I can't list them all here. Thank you so much for your help and support.

Finally, Business @ theSpeedofThought was only able to see the light of day thanks to the time and energy devoted to it by many of Microsoft's customers and partners. We were all amazed and inspired by the willingness with which clients came to us meeting, frankly talking about their successes and plans, about their business and technical problems. These clients are listed in a dedicated section at the end of the book.

INTRODUCTION

In the next ten years, business will change more than in the previous fifty.

As I prepared to speak at the first conference of executives and top managers of companies in the spring of 1997, I thought about how the computer age would change the business world. At first I wanted to devote my speech to the marvels of modern technical thought, but instead I decided to turn to those questions that constantly occupy the minds of business leaders. How to use the achievements of technological progress in business? What will they lead to? And how will they help you stay “on horseback” in five years, and in ten?

If in the 80s everything was decided by quality, and in the 90s it was business reengineering, then the key concept of this decade is “speed”. Here and the speed of change in the nature of business; here are the issues of efficiency of business process management; here and the dynamics of changes in the lifestyle of consumers and their requests under the influence of the increasing availability of information. The rate of growth in product quality and the rate of improvement in business processes will be much higher, and with a sufficiently large value of these indicators, the nature of the business itself will change. If a company producing or distributing products is able to respond to the market situation not in a few weeks, but in a few hours, then in fact it already becomes a company engaged in services for the offer of these products.

The basis of all these changes is strikingly simple: it is the flow of digital information. We have been living in the information age for thirty years now, but buyers are still looking for sellers the old fashioned way, since the bulk of the information exchange between companies is still done on paper. Yes, many use the power of information technology - but only to control basic operations: managing production systems, compiling accounts, maintaining accounting records and calculating taxes. All this is nothing more than the automation of old processes.

And only a very few use these technologies for their intended purpose, that is, to organize new, radically improved business processes that enable employees to reach their full potential and enable them to respond to any changing conditions at the speed necessary to compete successfully in the new world of high-speed business. What most companies don't realize is that today the means to implement such change is already available to everyone. And while so many business problems are inherently informational, almost no one handles information the way it deserves.

It seems that a lot of upper echelon leaders still believe that the lack of timely information is a given. Well, when people live for years without information “at their fingertips”, they cannot know what they are missing. One of the objectives of my speech to the CEOs of companies was to raise the level of their requests. I wanted these people to understand what ridiculously small amounts of useful and meaningful information they are used to receiving in exchange for their investments in information technology - and to clutch their heads. I wanted them to feel the need to create a flow of information to quickly get accurate information about what is really going on with their customers.

Even companies that do not spare money on information technology do not get everything they could from their investments. Interestingly, this discrepancy is not eliminated by increased investment