The ubiquity of software, devices, and connectivity is providing rich, complex social communities that help satisfy the universal desire for human interaction. The popularity of online services such as Xbox Live, Windows Live Spaces, Facebook, and MySpace show the appeal of technology that enables connections and community.

This transformation will pick up speed as the way we interact with technology evolves to resemble the way people interact witheach other. Cheaper, more powerful computing has enabled researchers to solve difficult problems such as voice and handwriting recognition and we’re beginning to see the emergence of interfaces that incorporate speech, handwriting, vision, touch, and gestures.

We’ll also see rapid progress in display technology. Screens will become cheaper, lighter and more portable. We’ll link our portable devices to nearby displays or project information onto nearby surfaces. New input and output mechanisms will have a revolutionary impact, not only on how we interact with technology, but how we interact witheach other.

To enable people to take advantage of all of these new capabilities, interoperability has become critical. This refers to how easily different software systems work together. As more information is created in digital form and stored in millions of different systems – corporate databases, healthcare systems, government repositories – the imperative to ensure that information in one system can be accessed from another grows.

In February, Microsoft announced sweeping changes to its technology and business practices to help IT professionals build systems that inter-operate more easily. At the heart of these changes are plans to publish documentation to help software developers understand and use the connection points and communications protocols in our most popular products.

This is a significant shift. These communications protocols are the result of big investments in research and development, and in the past, we have shared this information on a more limited basis. Our goal is to provide software developers with the technical foundation that will help them build systems that streamline the flow of information from system to system and person to person.

Europe will continue to play a critical role in developing Microsoft’s technology innovations and bringing them to market. We have 12 research and development facilities in Europe, and more than 2,000 researchers and engineers working on projects ranging from machine learning to the development of new programming languages. At Microsoft Research in Cambridge, our Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group is focused on developing new computational tools and methods for predicting and mitigating changes to the natural environment.

When Paul Allen and I founded Microsoft more than 30 years ago, our dream was to put a computer on every desk and in every home. Today, about 1 billion people have a PC. That’s a lot – but it’s just a fraction of the world’s 6.6 billion people. As we make technology more affordable and simple, we will extend the social and economic opportunities that come with better access to education, healthcare, and global marketplaces. As more of the world participates in the knowledge economy, the result will be innovations that make everyone’s lives richer, more connected, more productive, and more fulfilling.

This will be the biggest change during the next decade – the expansion of the digital revolution to people not yet able to participate in the knowledge economy. For all the progress we’ve made, in many ways we’ve only just begun to see digital technology’s great potential.