Gates, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Future, and Google

We don’t know if it’s keeping up with Melissa’s demands in the sack, or if Bill Gates’ meds need adjustment, but every time the man opens his mouth it’s like Cringe City. He sounds more and more like the lame ghost of Christmas past. OK, the ghost wasn’t lame, but Gates is. And he certainly is stuck in the past. Like the early 90’s. But hey, don’t listen to us, read what eweek has to say and see for yourself.

Philanthropist Bill Gates is able to take things a little slower these days, since he doesn't have to worry anymore about the day-to-day irritations of running a major multinational corporation. He mostly thinks about how to give his -- and colleague-in-cash Warren Buffett's -- money away for the betterment of mankind through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Do not misunderstand: Gates is still chairman of the Microsoft board, and he still sees progress reports, goes to the occasional company strategy meeting, speaks at keynotes and intervenes in big customer deals as needed. But he also has more time for events like TechNet, held Nov. 15 at Stanford University's venerable Memorial Auditorium.

Gates was interviewed by PBS's talk-show host Charlie Rose in a wide-ranging, hourlong conversation before an audience of about 1,000 Stanford students, media members and various guests -- including Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger of California.

TechNet describes itself as the "bipartisan political network of CEOs that promotes the growth of the innovation economy."

The 200-member organization held its third annual TechNet Innovation Summit at Stanford to discuss the state of innovation and the public policies needed to sustain the United States' competitiveness in the global economy.

Here are some observations from Gates in response to questions from Rose:

# On whether there's another idea today that is as powerful as the idea of the personal computer in the 1970s: "If I knew medicine like I do computers, I would like to be able to control the [human] immune system, to fight against the onset of disease on a world level ... but I think the idea of the PC still would have topped that."

# On Microsoft's increasing competition with Google: "I've been told that Google is the company most like ours. That may be true. Well, we overlap in a lot of areas. We're both software companies, so we're competing on a lot of levels. They hire a lot of smart people, we hire a lot of smart people. Google Earth is fantastic; what they do is free and a huge benefit to all. They're very good at knowing how to use high traffic at their sites and turning it into profit.

"We're going to compete in search. We think our Live.com will be a better search in a lot of ways. Competition between our two companies will be good for the whole industry."

# On Microsoft's often-contentious relationship with the European Union: "We feel very good about our relationship with the EU." There was loud laughter from the audience.

"No, really," Gates said. "They were mainly concerned about security and open-document formats -- those were the big issues. We have worked out our differences. If they wanted us to leave out some of our components for some reason, we could have delivered a European version of Vista for them. But it turned out that wasn't necessary."

# On what changes IT will make in society over the next 10 years: "Changes are now coming faster than ever. We'll be seeing more and more students using tablets instead of stacks of books in schools and in online learning. We'll have computers that can see and learn like people ... we'll continue to see major breakthroughs in software development, in things like voice recognition, gaming [and] video. We're on to new and important advances in IT, just as we were at the advent of the PC.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060022,00.asp