Bill Gates Conversation Part II

First up were Kip Kniskern, of http://www.liveside.net/ and Rob Howard, a .NET developer out of Dallas.

Kip asked some stuff about Windows Live, which I am not too familiar with, but Bill first mentioned something about “the cloud” here, which he gets more into later.

Rob asked about the openness and transparency of Microsoft. Bill definitely had some interesting answers to that, and gives a glimpse of his early days with Microsoft, “flying all over the world … begging people to write software for MS-DOS” and gets a dig in on Apple’s obsession with secrecy and trying to “surprise people with the big event”. 🙂

KIP KNISKERN: Yeah, I read about Windows Live, and if you could just kind of assess where you think Windows Live is right now, and what do you think the perception of Windows Live versus some of your competitors is now. It seems like that Microsoft — maybe the tools are there, but maybe the perception of it being the cool thing to use, at least U.S.-centric, isn’t as good as (off mike).

BILL GATES: Well, it’s hard to say. I mean, Messenger has a certain strength, Hotmail has a certain strength. We’re doing a broad set of things under that Windows Live banner.

The first time we actually delivered on Live as something that’s kind of unified and integrated together is the Windows Live 2 download that we just did, what’s that, like a month ago, and the numbers on that are super good, and we’re just in the planning for what we call wave three, and the kind of things we’re going to build into that. So, we feel pretty good about it.

All those consumer services are basically big, big volume. They’re tiny businesses in a sense, but they’re very important for the population of users that you connect up to and the opportunities you get out of that.

Some of the things like state in the sky, obviously we want to do a lot more innovation so that everybody just understands that they should use that. Today, no matter whose thing it is, .Mac or the various eDrive cloud store type things, they actually are all pretty small share, they’re kind of messy to use. We think that by the way that we’ll connect up to Windows in a rich way we’ll be able to do something pretty dramatic there, but that awaits the next big wave that comes along.

So, those are all businesses that are going quite well. Messenger is the lead product in most countries in the world. I think Hotmail is still the lead in most countries or number two in most countries, so they’re fairly strong.

There are people doing other things, and nobody really has kind of the breadth I’d say that we have. Maybe Yahoo! comes the closest to it, but you’ll just have to see how that unfolds in terms of the usage and the numbers.

ROB HOWARD: I guess it’s my turn. So, I guess one of my questions would be is when you look at the business, and you look at how Microsoft as a business started and grew since ’98 into 2000, you look at technologies like (social software ?) and how that enabled businesses to become more transparent, I’m just kind of curious what your thoughts are on do you think it was a case of the technology enabling that, or was that just — were we simply at a point in time where businesses wanted to be more transparent and were looking for means for how to better communicate with the customer? I used to work at Microsoft, and I loved how we went through this transformation of there used to be a point in time where Microsoft was a very closed off shell, you didn’t really get to talk to people, and then in the late ’90s and early 2000 Microsoft really opened up, became a much more transparent organization. Do you think that was because of the software or just because business was just changing and evolving?

BILL GATES: I’m not sure. The breakthrough business idea of Microsoft, which is really 1974, is the idea of creating a critical mass of software developers on a platform, and that there was no software industry, there were five companies doing mainframe software, and we wanted there to be a software industry. So, a certain openness about our developer tools, our APIs, flying all over the world convincing ISVs to do something, that was my 1970s and 1980s, begging people to write software for MS-DOS. No, I didn’t have the megaphone of the Internet or of the sort of hyper success that Microsoft would achieve by the mid ’90s that meant that business writers or people were going to write about whenever we were doing something.

So, we certainly weren’t closed. We were out there just begging people to write software. Remember, people didn’t really believe in personal computing, then they didn’t believe in graphics user interface. They thought, oh, this is too slow, it’s too hard to write the software. It took a lot of evangelization, going out convincing people to do things.

The Internet has been a huge benefit to the entire world in terms of transparency, transparency of you’re a buyer for products, you can find things; you’re somebody who’s curious about learning information, you know, I want to know about black body radiation, I just go onto the Web, I do image search, I find five PowerPoint presentations, I watch three of them, I see who they mention, and I think, okay, maybe that guy is a little better. It’s mind-blowing today how much you can learn.

Now, certain structured things are still hard to learn, like go to the Web and try and understand foreign aid. Because that’s kind of a numeric thing, the classification of (inaudible) is hard, the Web does not do that well today. Now, some software breakthroughs in terms of letting you visualize data in rich ways and normalizing it as it comes from different sources, over the next three of four years that will happen. In fact, most of my day today was in a visualization group where we’re talking about what breakthroughs are needed so that if you want to study a question like that, take economic flows, you want to understand this sub prime thing, you want to see the numbers, okay, what percentage of people bought what type of mortgage over what period of time, when does the interest rate go up, what does this mean, what portion of their income is it. If you really want to understand it more than just trivial text-type articles, there’s nothing out there today that lets you do that. Anyway, that’s not directly related to your question.

So, I think every business and organization benefits by communicating to its customers, to its partners, the more you do the better you are. Our success is not based on any type of secrecy about what we’re doing. Apple likes secrecy, but good luck to them. It’s not a period of time where it’s that easy to keep secrets. There are various regimes around the world that are finding that, and various companies that want to surprise people with the big event. We want to make sure that we’re not creating expectations we can’t fulfill. So, we like to know when we’re going to try and get something done before we promise it. But just talking about our general direction, we’ve always wanted to be totally open. And it’s sort of natural if you’re a platform company who’s working with multiple hardware innovators, and those people have to plan ahead. I mean, we’ve got to get Intel to plan their chips three years ahead, we’ve got to get system design plans years ahead.

So, what happened in the ’90s in terms of openness, I’d give technology all the credit, not motivation. The motivation is there.

Now, there are people who deserve credit, like coming up with Channel 9, which in retrospect is an obvious thing of, okay, you have somebody with a random camera go around, film the person, put it up on the Web, and that’s a neat thing that got a certain critical mass and a certain kind of cache to allow us to connect our developers down in the trenches with people who care about their work, and cut out all the stuff in the middle that tends to be so headline oriented and so narrowing the message about how this person is making tradeoffs of how they want to improve the product, you know, not get that feedback, not share, hey, you think we blew it, well, we’re sorry, here’s why we made that mistake, here’s how we’re going to make it better, really see the human at the other side of that interaction. But I think the desire, at least relative to our business model, has always been there.