MICROSOFT PRODUCER FOR POWERPOINT 2002 AVAILABLE NOW.

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates has announced the availability of Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 2002 in his keynote address at COMDEX Fall 2001. Microsoft Producer, an add-on for PowerPoint 2002 in Office XP, makes it easy for everyday business users and media professionals to create engaging rich-media presentations by synchronizing audio, video, slides and images. These rich-media presentations can be viewed on demand in a browser across the Internet or an intranet. Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 2002 is available for download today at http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoint/producer/.

"Businesses around the world are looking for new, more effective ways to communicate both internally and externally," said Jeff Raikes, group vice president of the Business Productivity Group at Microsoft. "Microsoft Producer will do the same thing for digital media that FrontPage did for Web authoring: -- Make it easier and more ubiquitous in companywide communication."

Companies and institutions ranging from Harley-Davidson Motor Co., Marathon Oil Co., Mellon Financial Corp., PPG Industries Inc., RadioShack Canada Ltd. and Unisys Corp. to the Cornell Theory Center and the Kern High School District in Bakersfield, Calif., have evaluated and are adopting Microsoft Producer as a valuable new tool to cost-effectively communicate with, educate and train employees and customers.

For more than a year RadioShack Canada has been building and delivering rich-media training content to employees at its 550 corporate stores on a fully bilingual intranet. The company will soon extend this to 350 dealer locations across Canada. Until now the process for creating rich-media content was tedious, and required multiple tools and complex HTML scripts. Microsoft Producer makes the process easier and more efficient.

"Microsoft Producer is going to change and expand the way we train and share information throughout the organization," said Francois Rivard of the Learning Group at RadioShack Canada. "We are going to be able to generate more training content -- using more types of media, at a better quality -- and cut down the production time by close to 25 percent. It will be a significant help to us as we expand the use of streaming media throughout our organization."

Marathon Oil is a global company with more than 12,000 employees worldwide in places as diverse as Gabon and equatorial Guinea in Africa, offshore Netherlands and Russian Siberia.

"For us, global communication is critical to our success as a business, and yet is one of our most daunting challenges," said Robert Calmus, senior media producer at Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC. "Microsoft Producer and rich-media communication help us answer this challenge by enabling us to do in hours what it once took days and weeks to develop and deliver to our key constituents around the world."

Organizations are embracing the use of digital media because it combines the immediacy, ease of use and efficiency of the Internet with a dynamic and compelling new way to communicate information and training to employees and customers. The use of streaming media in large organizations has doubled since 1999, with one in four companies now using it for corporate communication, training, and sales and marketing. Lawrence Orans, senior analyst at Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn., has predicted that by 2006, 85 percent of enterprises using video-over-IP for corporate training will realize a positive return on investment in less than one year.

The Microsoft Producer Software Development Kit, which is also available today and included with Microsoft Producer, enables network administrators, independent software vendors and hosting providers to develop their own publishing services and integrate them into the Publish Wizard of Microsoft Producer. This makes it easy for business users to publish and share their rich-media presentations on a company intranet or on the Internet. Companies are also using this new SDK to develop custom solutions or services including systems integrators such as Approach Inc. and Quilogy Inc.; developers such as CyberLink Corp., Eloquent Inc., InfoLibria Inc. and Inktomi Corp.; and Windows Media Service Providers such as e-media, Full Screen Multimedia LTD, Loral CyberStar, MicroVideo Learning Systems, Streaming Eye Media, Streaming Media Corp., StreamOS, Unified Web Media and UVision Inc.

Microsoft Producer helps media and marketing professionals, training specialists and business users of all kinds to create engaging external and internal digital media marketing communication, online training, on-demand executive broadcasts, and published archives of live presentations. These can be quickly published with the click of a button to intranet sites, the Internet or onto CD.

The final release of Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 2002 is an add-on tool for users of Office XP. It is available for download today at no additional charge for users of Office XP at http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoint/producer/. Microsoft Producer is available in English today, and is scheduled to be available in December in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

Windows Media is the leading digital media platform, providing unmatched audio and video quality to consumers, content providers, solution providers and software developers as well as business, education and government users. Windows Media offers the industry's only integrated rights-management solution and the most scalable and reliable streaming technology tested by independent labs. Windows Media Technologies includes Windows Media Player for consumers, Windows Media Services for servers, Windows Media Tools for content creation, and the Windows Media Software Development Kit for software developers. Windows Media Player, available in 26 languages, is the fastest-growing media player.