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Business @ The Speed of Thought
- by Bill Gates

INTRODUCTION
Business is going to change more in the next ten years than it has in the last fifty.
As I was preparing my speech for our first CEO summit in the spring of 1997, I was pondering how the digital age will fundamentally alter business. I wanted to go beyond a speech on dazzling technology advances and address questions that business leaders wrestle with all the time. How can technology help you run your business better? How will technology transform business? How can technology help make you a winner five or ten years from now?
If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity. About how quickly the nature of business will change. About how quickly business itself will be transacted. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of consumers and their expectations of business. Quality improvements and business process improvements will occur far faster. When the increase in velocity of business is great enough, the very nature of business changes. A manufacturer or retailer that responds to changes in sales in hours instead of weeks is no longer at heart a product company, but a service company that has a product offering.