BIT-101 Blog

Next up were two names familiar to those of you in the Flash community, Jesse Warden and Erik Natzke.

Erik asked about physical computing and more about “the cloud”. Some neat tech stuff in that answer.

Jesse’s question was about Bill’s motivation for starting the Gates Foundation. Some pretty interesting things in there about why Bill is stepping down from Microsoft in 2008, “I said even in my 20s that I didn’t think somebody who was 60-years old should be deciding the technology strategy for a state of the art software company.” This one is a good read.

Erik Natzke: We got a chance to see Surface today, and it was just remarkable to see like physical computing being brought to that level. Do you feel that home automation has sort of fallen short of its promise of like the 1980s and where you felt like you were actually going to have this controlled environment that’s then integrated into your automobile? One of the examples that I threw out there today was like imagine if every time I was searching a map, that that map went to my car. Do you think now that with all this conversation of the cloud, will we get to that point or are we going to go towards Surface where it’s a centralized unit versus like multiple devices that can work as a whole? Because that promise in the cloud seems extremely advantageous when you start to think about now it’s not about power or a laptop or a Palm device; it’s about everything connected together. So, do you feel like home automation is eventually going to get there, or was it just like, ha-ha, that didn’t work, let’s move on?

BILL GATES: Well, I think we can separate things out. Your state, the stuff you care about will be overwhelmingly in the cloud. There may be some really gigantic things in terms of videos or big photo collections that use special case to be on, say, Home Server or something, but even there, there will be an entry in your cloud directory that says this is this thing, but I only have a pointer to it instead of holding the thing, but logically everything will just be up in the cloud.

So, if you’re, say, going to your doctor’s office and they make you wait, there will be a tablet device sitting there. If you authenticate to that thing, phew, your state comes down, your homepage, your documents, your software rights, your music rights, it’s going to be on that device. If you lose your phone, you just say to the cloud, hey, never authorize that unit again, but pick up a naked phone, authorize who you are, and, phew, all your stuff comes down onto the device.

So, it will be a multi-device world, because there will be different screen sizes, the car is clearly different than the TV set, which is different than the desk, which is different than the thing you might want to take on the plane. All these devices will be radically better, and some of them will disappear — if you have cameras and you can talk, then you don’t even see the computer. I mean, so the computer is most powerful when it disappears, and it’s just in this pervasive environment.

The word “home automation” to me sort of calls up things like setting your thermostat or turning the lights on and off or the coffee turning on before your alarm rings or something like that, which, hey, I actually believed in that stuff, and I still do, but it’s kind of an adjunct to media. Media is where you get this intense interest: the family photos, the TV shows that I want to watch.

So, the thing that justifies putting in that big HD screen, that’s TV, Xbox Live, and the fact that, okay, you want to save a little power while you’re on vacation, we turn some things off, we can piggyback that old dream that never happened on its own onto the media infrastructure that will exist in the house, where you’ll have a little thin tablet you carry around, you’ll have those big screens, and in your bedroom, your walls, you can put up whatever group you’re into, you don’t need posters anymore, you just put it up on the walls, and if your parents are coming in, you push a button and change to something else. (Laughter.)

Today, that sounds like a dreamy thing, but the screen guys with these laser generated things and some stuff we’re doing in that area, you know, we’ve made some acquisitions and done some inventions. Screens will be dirt, dirt cheap, and so the magic of taking the camera technology with the right software, like you saw with Surface, that starts out as a fairly expensive device, but eventually every computer, when you touch the screen, it will be able to see what you’re doing, not just see that you touched, but see what it is that’s there, and that’s a lot richer than just touch screen, although there will be some touch screen stuff over the next two or three years.

So, the home, you know, music anywhere you want, your phone is this neat remote control that just when you’re in an environment it knows what things that you might want to change the state of and do the commands, we have this thing of what we call devices combining and recombining, that if your phone is near a big screen, of course your phone should be able to project on the big screen. If you’re near a printer, of course your computer should offer that up as a device.

So, we have this very dynamic environment that today it’s kind of limited. Yes, USB devices come and go, but it’s not like big storage or computation or big screens show up, and the phone magically takes advantage of those things. That will happen. And when you take your phone into the car, it will talk to the car, it will say, hey, what’s in this car, and the car will say, why, I have a big screen here, I have voice recognition here, I have storage here, and so the phone can get at the resource of the car, the car can get at the resources of the phone, and they’re both — it’s devices combining and recombining. And you’re seeing a tiny bit of that in that thing called Sync, this — hopefully you’ve seen the ads for this Ford Sync thing where they took the Microsoft software and put it in. It’s voice recognition. You take your iPod or whatever into your car, just name the song, hopefully it understands what you said and plays the song.

PARTICIPANT: So, Ford already has it?

BILL GATES: Mm-hmm, Ford Sync.
PARTICIPANT: No, I didn’t know that.

BILL GATES: They’re shipping in all their new cars, including the Ford Focus, this thing that you take a phone, a Zune, an iPod in, it just recognizes that it’s there, says, okay, what kind of device is it, and you can talk and do instant messages or it will annunciate the instant messages that are coming in to you.

PARTICIPANT: Are they using Bluetooth?

BILL GATES: Well, right now it uses Bluetooth, but the software is kind of neutral. Most devices in the car are Bluetooth. Wi-Fi is really — 802.11n is sort of the ultimate in wireless, and unfortunately Bluetooth, because it was low power for so long, and Wi-Fi wasn’t low power, that we have this mixed world where you’re going to have to have both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and the chip guys are just going to have to put them both on the chip, and hopefully users won’t understand what’s — have to think about what’s going on. But you need both. Cars have tended to be Bluetooth, cars and phones, whereas the rest of the world has tended to be Wi-Fi.

JESSE WARDEN: So, your (inaudible) has really influenced a lot of software industries and then as soon as you announced the Gates Foundation, the media jumped on it and talk about how you were (inaudible/off mike) philanthropic endeavors. Was there a turning point that made you feel like you wanted to do that sometime or was it a culmination thing? How did you get to the point where you now want to (off mike)?

BILL GATES: Well, I said even in my 20s that I didn’t think somebody who was 60-years old should be deciding the technology strategy for a state of the art software company. So, you know, I’m pretty old now, and it’s good for somebody else to come along. I’m still the guy who thinks, hey, saving a few bytes of memory is a worthwhile thing, let’s spend a few hours and save a few bytes here. Nowadays just saving a megabyte, it’s not worth it, don’t waste your time. So, you get a certain mindset about what makes sense. To me, computing power is still a little scary. Now, compared to the people before me, I was a revolutionary in how I thought about those things.

So, there comes a point where somebody should pick things up. Since the age of 17 I was CEO and sort of chief software architect until seven years ago, and then I got — that was a big change, maybe not as big but it was a big change, because then Steve took over and has run the company since the year 2000, and that was sort of getting ready for the idea of running Microsoft in a different way.

The foundation stuff has turned out to be very exciting, and I’d say there’s one thing in common with the foundation and Microsoft. When we announced a software-centric vision of the world, 1975, there weren’t a lot of people involved in that, and it’s been exciting to see it sort of developed as we dreamed that it would, and many people coming in and contributing to that.

When the foundation got going in global health, there just wasn’t that much — there was nothing going on in terms of Malaria, TB. We have 20 diseases that we do. And we think we’re going to conquer the majority of those in some reasonable period of time.

So, my ability to spend full time on that, go get the pharmaceutical companies more involved, get the best scientists more involved, back some risky approaches there, I may be more unique in terms of facilitating some of that than I am in software.

And sometime in my fifties I was going to make a change, and so about a year and a half ago, we picked the date and told the world, and we’re on track for that to happen.

So, there’s nothing magic about the date, but it seemed like Microsoft was in good shape, Ray Ozzie was the person stepping up to take on a big part of what I’d one uniquely, and so we made the choice.