eWeek interviews Bill Gates in an article called: Blazing the Longhorn Trail and, among many other questions, asks:
eWeek: Where should companies spend the dollars freed up from lowering costs? And where should they spend new technology funds?
Bill Gates: Web services is the new architecture for new applications. Web services are being used to connect information that is inside the company in different systems. They're connecting people and systems in new ways and connecting across different companies as well. You think of investments for making your knowledge workers more productive. That is the biggest investment companies in almost any industry make.
There are things that are essentially new ways of doing business, such as creating workflows to connect buyers and sellers together. We are seeing lots of interest in taking BizTalk and connecting it up with our XML forms capability called InfoPath. People still want projects that are about five to six months in duration. They don't want a one-year shot in the dark. And they want projects where, if they really look at all the costs, then for a million dollars or less they can be really far along and start to get the payback.
K-Collector