Jeff Raikes
Jeff Raikes
Jeffrey Scott "Jeff" Raikeswas the chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Until early 2008, Raikes was the President of the Microsoft Business Division and oversaw the Information Worker, Server & Tools Business and Microsoft Business Solutions Groups. He joined Microsoft in 1981 as a product manager. He retired from Microsoft in September 2008, after a transitional period, to join the Gates Foundation. Raikes is credited with driving much of Microsoft’s early work in business applications. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth29 May 1958
CountryUnited States of America
The $500 million, to be spent over a year to buy ads and expand its sales force, is the largest business-oriented marketing campaign ever for the company.
Lawyers don't run sales forces.
The software business was dominated by hardware companies, and everybody thought they would just come in and wipe us out. People forget that Microsoft took a huge bet to think that an independent operating system and programming language would be successful.
We do think this is a different economy than we saw two to three years ago.
With Microsoft Office Live, we are making online services available for small businesses to create an enterprise-like IT infrastructure for them without the management requirements. Our goal is to make it easy and affordable for small businesses to have a more customizable Internet-based solution.
What we want to do is to make sure that we're working with you and our partners, the community.
IBM legitimized the notion of the PC -- that it would not be just a hobbyist computer.
One way to increase the impact that people can have in an organization is to give them access to the information they need. Until now, BI software has been too complex, costly, and disconnected from the software tools people use every day to do their jobs.
Within a month, Ray was putting his thoughts on software-as-services on paper.
It's about breadth and depth and seamless activity across domains.
There are nearly 300 million PC users out there now, and so that gives us a very, very broad market. So we can put far more, you know, ten times more into R&D of the operating system, yet make it available for one-tenth or less the price.
Until now, business intelligence software has been too complex, costly and disconnected from the software tools people use to do their everyday jobs.
We are on schedule for the launch of Office 2007 by the end of this year for businesses and by early 2007 for consumers. We have scheduled the launch of consumer version in such a way that it is available after the holiday season.
We are making online services available for small businesses to create (big business-like computing) for them without the management requirements.