Channel 9 recently interviewed Bill Gates on a wide range of topics.It is inspiring that after 30 years in business the richest man in the world still comes to work every day with passion and a desire to build more great products.
I encourage you to watch the entire 17 minute interview, but here is a summary of what he discussed.
- MIX06 - Bill will keynote the MIX 06 conference in Las Vegas next month. The focus of the conference is the power of new web applications and how Microsoft will help developers with new tools and services.
- Office 12 - The new version of Office has a completely new User Interface that exposes tools and features that are relevant to what you are doing at the time. Collaboration and Sharing are more integrated, especially with Sharepoint and Groove. Extensibility is enhanced with XML everywhere making it much easier to build applications on top of Office and to get data in/out of Office. Diagraming and Visualization are new features in Powerpoint and Excel.
- Backward compatability - Being able to use an application from the '80s on the latest version of Windows is important for users and developers. It is a huge asset. We can't always insure backward compatability but we try hard to do so. Sometimes it slows us down in terms of delivering new releases and features, but it is important.
- IE 7 - Bill admits that we didn't move as fast as we should have. There is a renewed emphasis on Explorer and more features are coming.
- DHTML - Bill is surprised that it has taken so long for DHTML to take off in a big way. There is a lot of power yet to be tapped.
- Bill Gates browsing habits - Bill regularly reads News.com, Engadget, WSJ, NYT, Channel 9, and various video sites. He seems to be particularly interested in video and the future opportunities there. He said Microsoft got into IPTV, MSNBC, and other web video projects very early but thinks the time is right now for the technology to take off.
Bill also talks about how he spends his time. He doesn't watch TV, travels on business a lot, and is always on email 24X7. He has Steve Ballmer review his calendar to make sure he is spending his time in the right places, and Bill reviews Steve's calendar for the same reasons. Even at this stage in life Bill Gates cares about optimizing his time and making good things happen...every day.
Bill Gates was also interviewed at the RSA Security Conference by The Financial Times.
FT: Should the US government establish guidelines to regulate how internet companies deal with censorship in countries like China?
BG: I think something like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been a resounding success in terms of very clearly outlining what companies can’t do and other rich countries largely went along with that. That’s a great thing. I think – [it] may be that idea [will] come along. I hope the people who make those things are sophisticated and not over-simplistic.
You could make a rule – let’s say, should I be allowed to do business in Germany? Germany bans Nazi hate speech – the US clearly constitutionally protects that. Should I do business in Germany? Or child pornography, the US view is very different than others. I don’t think that a [rule] that said you shouldn’t do business in some place whose standards aren’t identical to the US would work. Clearly people like ourselves are glad to go along with whatever reasonable things gets laid down. That’s why its part of the dialogue.
The internet overwhelmingly makes information available. It is not possible to block information, it is just not. You can make it so that the average person who just clicks on popular websites, with no extra effort, certain things don’t show up there. But in terms of actually blocking information… it’s bad news if you like to block libelous websites, or child pornography, or various things, copyright stealing. It’s very hard to do blocking. You can only take the very direct paths. And particularly if you put something up that says, we took this thing down, think of the time period between when you put it up and when it comes down and how people can cache that. It’s hard to block information. It’s so night and day versus when newspaper publishers and TV owners were small chokepoints that controlled the distribution of information.
So, I think people have to [understand] what a open tool the internet is, despite any firewall stuff or any takedown orders that get given. People need to really understand what a tool for openness it is.
DHTML? Or AJAX? I think the XML bit of the package means that its a bit more enticing for developers and users.
Posted by: Farhan Lalji | February 16, 2006 at 05:08 AM