Bill Gates Conversation Part III

Next up were Julie Lerman, a .NET developer from Vermont, and Kelly Goto of Goto Mobile.

I particularly liked some of the stuff Bill started talking about in answer to Kelly’s question, including some rare glimpses into his personal family life, including dropping off and picking his kids up from school. 🙂

JULIE LERMAN: I think a lot about the Bill Gates Foundation and I’m really happy that you’re able to focus on it. If you ever want to open up an office (off mike) call me.

BILL GATES: Okay. (Laughter.)

JULIE LERMAN: But I do wonder like right now the big focus is on turning the Internet into our personal network. I wonder if you have kind of visions beyond that of things that if you weren’t shifting your focus over to that, you might want to drive?

BILL GATES: Well, computer science had some very ambitious goals over time; to create devices that are hyper-intelligent is sort of the ultimate, because as soon as you do that, then you just ask them what you should do, and they tell you. That’s the Holy Grail of computer science. That’s going to take many decades before it’s achieved. There are different theories about the approach in terms of just modeling how it’s done through evolution versus de novo invention.

So, everything we’ve done is sort of just on the spectrum of, okay, that’s the ultimate out there. In the meantime we’re just kind of a tool that’s helping people get things done. Are we as good as a personal assistant in terms of remembering what a person likes and remembering what they’re interested in? A personal assistant, after they’ve worked for you two or three years, they’re a lot smarter about helping you out. Is a computer as good as that? No, not within — not even close. In fact, it doesn’t even learn all that much. I mean, there’s, yes, it tells you who bought this book or something, but in terms of helping you organize things and know what the thing is you should do next, computers are very limited.

The best asset that Microsoft has by quite a bit is our research group, and that’s why we’ve put so much into that, and I get to spend a huge percentage of my time making sure we’re bringing in the best people, and as we make breakthroughs, that that gets translated into the products.

And they are very open. I mean, the Microsoft Research Web site, you want to know what Microsoft is doing, well, five years from now, go to the Microsoft Research Web site and see what (Lilly ?) is writing about social computing, or see what the 3D graphics guys are saying about how that pipeline will change, or look at how the translation guys, the breakthroughs they’ve made recently in being able to take documents in different languages and translate them in different directions. So, I feel very comfortable that the ambition level that we defined as a company is pretty strong.

We’ve talked a little bit publicly about a process we’re using called “quests” where we write down — we have six communities: developers, IT, information workers, consumers. Anyway, so we have these communities, and then we write down, okay, 10 years from now, what would we like software to do for them? How can you — you know, you walk into a datacenter, you will see no people, you’ll just see a few machines. Well, what would it take? How abstract will the applications have to be to be modeled such that the resources can be applied and the error conditions can be handled and things like that, so that you have that just empty datacenter? And even the datacenter can be fairly small, because if you get a heavy load, you can just delegate it out to some crazy cloud datacenter that Microsoft runs, and we’ll take your overload condition, or if your datacenter blows up, we’ll do the disaster recovery. Of course, you have to pay us a little money, but we’ll be there to do that.

So, you take that vision and you say, okay, where are we today, where is that vision, what’s the work, and so you get these individual quests, each community already has about eight of them, some have actually 10 or 12, and we have quest summits where the people who believe in that stuff sit and talk about it, and see if we’re making progress on it.

So, we have a pretty good way of driving our software agenda. What is the magic of software going to do? What does the home look like, what does the office look like? As we get your desk, there’s a computer in your desk, not on your desk, and you’re just manipulating information and in a meeting room you’re calling up that information, what do we need to do to make sure that comes true?

So, I don’t think my — I think there’s a process here and some pretty great people who will make sure that stays quite ambitious, even next summer when I get to spend full time on the foundation stuff.

KELLY GOTO: I’ve got a two-part question (off mike). That was interesting (off mike). I was wondering — I just had a daughter four months ago, and I’m wondering as a parent with a legacy, I don’t know if you consider yourself Bill 2.0 now, maybe Bill 3.0, but what does the future look like (off mike) what you want to leave behind? What does Bill 2.0 look like?

BILL GATES: Well, I don’t know about these version numbers. (Laughter.) I mean, it’s an arbitrary thing.

PARTICIPANT: Three-point-oh, Bill novo.

BILL GATES: But what is — I never understood, you know, what was Web 2.0, what was that? The AJAX stuff got done in IE 4. (Laughter.) People finally woke up and actually did something to it, and they called that a revolution? I mean, we’d only shipped 100 million copies of IE 4 at the time. But Web 2.0, what was it? It’s kind of random to say, oh, this was the day.

You know, our whole industry is full of these desire to create a headline around this is the day that such and such happened, whereas, hey, every day there’s a little bit more Internet, a little bit more networking, a little bit more personal computing, and there aren’t really that many discontinuities in terms of what goes on. I mean, maybe Intel made a breakthrough where they figured out how they could get the clock — we’re hitting this clock ceiling. It’s one of the first times that the hardware guys aren’t giving us our wishes where we say, okay, we want big screens with high-definition, boom, they give them to us; or we want certain graphics performance, they give it to us. Clock speed they can’t give us, or they don’t know how.

Anyway, in terms of having kids is not — it’s not an easy thing to describe how that affects you. I mean, authors I suppose try and do that, or various creative forums. It’s a very exciting thing.

My daughter happens to go to a Tablet PC school, so she knows more about Tablet PC than I do. I get her homework, her graded homework every day, I see what she got wrong at dinner, I can know whether we have to discuss scientific notation or whatever it is, and she’s just so much more — for her it’s so natural to use the pen and just be reading everything online. They got rid of the textbooks, and it’s a phenomenal thing. And this year it’s all based on OneNote where they use the collaborative synching of OneNote where they’re updating their thing, and the teacher sees it. Anyway, that’s a pretty phenomenal thing.

The thing I asked for Christmas last year, those Teach12.com DVDs, the sad fact is that in their science area I now have all of their lectures. These things are brilliant. If you weren’t here to hear me enthused about that, these are not — they’re kind of pricy, but these are brilliant science lectures. If you want to learn about — if you want to understand how semiconductors work, get the lecture called “Physics in your Everyday Life” and watch it. He will explain to you, better than I’ve ever seen explained, because I’ve always tried to explain to people how semiconductors work. If you want to know about geology, just get the geology course. If you want to know biology, you want to know string theory, you want to know anything, they’ve gone and found the very best lecturers in the world and they’re fantastic.

The problem is I’ve seen them all now. I’m going to go back and re-watch maybe about half of them, because they’re that fun and interesting.

Some of them — my daughter is 11, my son is 8 — some of them, like I got all their high school ones. Some of those are good enough I’ll get to watch with my kids and go through and see if they’re ready for them. So, I might have to think of something new. I’ve told them they should go get more lectures. There are some areas that they don’t cover very well. They don’t cover chemistry as well as they should. There’s actually nothing that’s really good on chemistry out there.

Anyway, I’m 50-some-years old, so I guess there’s a lot of different changes. July 1 will be as much of a demarcation for me as there’s been for a long time, just because I was 17 when I was writing the BASIC full time, so I’ve worked full time for Microsoft since then, and so that will be the first time that I don’t work full time for Microsoft. So, it will be an interesting change. I’ll still work at Microsoft, I’ll come in one day a week, and there will be various projects that I work on. I get to take my kids to school, but after July 1 I’ll get to pick them up, too. I’ve never gotten to do that.