IP: The software revolution has only just begun, Gates says

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/may1/gates2002-a.html

The software revolution has only just begun, Gates says

BY DAWN LEVY 

The software revolution has only just begun, Microsoft chairman, chief
software architect and co-founder Bill Gates told a packed Kresge Auditorium
audience April 25. While the personal computer (PC) has brought power to the
people, software advancements seem more evolutionary than revolutionary to
users impatient for more natural computer interfaces and Internet
connectivity anytime, anywhere. But dramatic improvements are on the
horizon, Gates said.

His comments were part of "Bill Gates in Conversation with John Hennessy,"
an event sponsored by the Office of the President and Provost. It included
an address by Gates, an interview conducted by President John Hennessy and a
roving-mike question-and-answer session with the audience. The event was
videotaped for future broadcast on San Jose public television station KTEH.

"PCs essentially have become the most important tool of empowerment and
[have] driven a whole wave of productivity and additional communication and
research and sharing," said Gates, noting that 50 percent of homes now have
PCs. "That's really fantastic. If the only thing the technology is used for
is the advances in medicine that it enables to take place, that alone would
justify everything that has been done. But of course it's far more than
that. The key point I want to make is we're really just at the beginning."

What might the future bring? Gates envisioned PCs that prioritize e-mail so
users are rarely bothered with low-priority items such as junk mail. On the
other hand, a device that's part cell phone, part personal digital assistant
could alert a mobile user if a high-priority message -- "You've left water
running in the bathtub" -- were sent. Users could e-mail handwritten notes
or listen to music from the Internet while driving in their cars. Technology
will be a seamless means of personalizing your environment, wherever you may
be, he said.

In the home, Gates anticipated a ubiquitous connectivity where technology
would allow family members to point at screens to get the family schedule or
select music to listen to. "Underneath that there's a lot of technology," he
said. "There's a lot of networking, network management going on, security to
make sure that your information isn't shared with the house next door or
anybody that it shouldn't be. And yet you're going to want to be able to do
that without being an expert in that underlying technology."

In the workplace, business-to-business e-commerce is the prototypical
application, but in any meaningful sense it has not happened, Gates said.

He showed the audience a prototype of a product coming out later this year
-- a laptop computer that turns into a writing tablet by flipping the
display around. Users can take notes with a pen-like device instead of a
keyboard. A wave of similar products emerged five or so years ago, but they
were flawed, Gates said, with clunky hardware, short battery life and
inferior handwriting recognition software. The product also could be used to
do all your reading on one device, he said.

Many tough technical problems remain to be solved, and that takes research.
In an era of shrinking commercial budgets for research and development,
Microsoft's has grown. It's about $5 billion a year, Gates said, and the
portion supporting work at leading universities, including Stanford, has
increased. 

Other obstacles include privacy concerns, which he implied may hinder
software fixes. "It's only recently that we've put into our Windows product
this self-monitoring capability so that if something goes wrong, if the
application stops working, we see across the network what went wrong." Given
an opportunity to e-mail a report back to Microsoft, about 70 percent of
users do so. The report allows Microsoft to trace what happened and pinpoint
the problem. But it also has users wondering if other information is being
collected about them.

If the industry doesn't make big advances in security, Gates said, it will
hold back the dream of connectivity. Passwords are a terrible way of
identifying users, he said. "People take passwords that are easy to guess.
They use the same password on very insecure systems they use on secure
systems." He suggested a smart card plus a password.

Sniffing software, the last mile and more

During the interview, Hennessy, also a computer scientist and successful
entrepreneur, asked Gates his thoughts on the battle between content
providers wanting to protect their intellectual property and companies
wanting to distribute that content to a wider audience.

Gates said legislation has been proposed to require "sniffing" software that
looks for a rights emblem and reports content users who don't have it. While
Gates is not opposed to a mechanism in the operating system to honor the
rights emblem, he said he didn't think it appropriate for PC manufacturers
to be forced to have sniffing software.

"My PC has gotten faster and faster and faster, and when I now use the
Internet all the time, it's great when I'm here in the office," Hennessy
eased into the next question. "But then I go home and I have this tiny
little pipe, and now so much of what I do is on the Internet, and [the
speed] stinks! It's terrible! A lot of the things you do here, you can't do
at home. It doesn't seem that that situation is improving very quickly. Do
you see any hope in solving that so-called 'last mile' problem?"

"You'll have to move on campus," Gates quipped.

"I did!" Hennessy replied, amidst laughter.

Gates said the economics of the last mile are particularly difficult. One
country -- Korea -- has broadband costs down to about $20 a month. More than
half of Korean households have broadband, enabling streaming video and
online games. At $50 a month elsewhere, however, at most 15 percent of
households will subscribe to broadband access, he said.

While wireless technologies may provide a way to get around last-mile
economics in the next decade, Gates said his company "has a little spare
cash" for anyone with a solution. (Microsoft posted revenues of $25.3
billion for the fiscal year ending June 2001.)

Hennessy next asked if Gates saw a technology on the horizon that would
dramatically change the face of computing, as microprocessors did roughly 30
years ago, personal computers did 20 years ago and the Internet did 10 years
ago. 

Speech and handwriting recognition advances might bring dramatic change,
Gates said. As hardware evolves in form into more natural interfaces, that
might bring change too, he said.

Inquiring minds wanted to know ...

Gates had spent three days prior to the Stanford event in Washington
testifying at the Microsoft antitrust trial, where nine states seek to have
Microsoft share its internal software code with competitors, which may allow
competitors to create Windows clones. The plaintiffs also want a modular
version of Windows that would allow Microsoft's Internet Explorer to be
replaced with competing browsers, such as Netscape's.

Only one member of the Stanford audience was brave enough to bring up the
lawsuit. "While I recognize that you cannot comment on any pending
litigation, I'm curious as a former judge, what effect has all this
litigation had on you personally?" asked Vice Provost for Campus Relations
LaDoris Cordell. Gates said that he was proud that the company has stayed
focused. It did not allow the distraction of the four-years-and-counting
lawsuit, which made hiring and protecting investments more difficult, to
slow it down. 

His reply to a question about Microsoft's new video game system, Xbox,
promised gamers a jolly holiday season. Last year, Gates said, Microsoft was
hardware-constrained. "We sold every box we could make. This Christmas, both
ourselves and Sony, our primary competitor, will be able to make as many as
people want." 

A student asked about the role of technology in freeing people. "There's
almost a perfect correlation between the use of personal computer technology
and how democratic a society is," Gates said. "I'm very optimistic about
China because right now you've seen this huge rise in the use of personal
computers." 

Beyond his work at Microsoft, Gates seeds the accomplishments of others as
founder, with his wife, Melinda, of the largest charitable foundation in the
United States. With an asset base of $24.2 billion, it is dedicated to
improving health and learning in the global community. To close, Hennessy
asked Gates if he wanted to be remembered for his philanthropy or his role
in bringing computers to the masses.

"If I had to say what is the thing that I feel best about, it's being
involved in this whole software revolution and what comes out of that,"
Gates replied. "You can go all over the world and go into schools and see
these computers being used, and go into hospitals and see them being used,
and see how they are tools for sharing information that hopefully leads to
more peaceful conditions. And the great research advances that come out of
that. So from a professional point of view, the software is the thing that I
think I find most gratifying."


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