Napalm Riot

In the September issue of PC Magazine, Michael J. Miller sits down with Microsoft founder and former CEO Bill Gates and talks about what Microsoft has done in the past, what they'll be doing in the future (even though he's leaving), and where Microsoft (and Windows) has succeeded and failed.

The complete interview will be available online in September, but for now, chew on this.

Michael Miller: From a technology standpoint, what is your biggest success?

Bill Gates: The most important thing is the creation of the software industry and a platform that anybody can write to. There was no software industry before the PC came along. The whole magic was that computers became so cheap, and you need a lot of software so people can sell software in volume and price it quite reasonably. The magic of high volume-low price just wasn't possible in an era with a very modest number of very expensive computers.

MM: Over the years, you have talked about many technologies you thought were going to be successful but haven't reached the mainstream. Why did some things become popular but not others?

BG: Half the things Paul Allen and I dreamed of are still in front of us. I have no doubt that the current way we interact with keyboard and mouse in the next decade will change deeply. Not that it will go away, but it will be supplemented by speech, vision, and ink-type things. With the Tablet, we are a factor of 100 away from what I wanted to happen -- and I believe will happen -- where every student, instead of having paper textbooks, has this device connected to the Internet that lets them edit, create, record voice, browse in this very deep way.

MM: When you look back at the Internet revolution, what did Microsoft do right and what did it do wrong?

BG: The key thing we did right is we got more than 100 million PCs out there ready to be connected. Then, at some point, the cost of the connectivity got to the right point and a protocol was picked. We were caught in some of that craziness in the late nineties. We bought a few things. I still believe in the Sidewalk vision: the sites for a city where you could see all of the events and merchants and plan things. It's really going to happen more on the mobile phone. We created Expedia, Slate, Sidewalk, MSN. We bought Hotmail, we bought Link Exchange. I bet I can't remember all of those crazy things we bought.

The thing we did well was helping businesses think about the Internet. For some of the more consumer-ish things -- and what would or would not catch on -- we didn't have the magic answer. Why didn't Microsoft do a better job in search earlier? Well, we can't do everything -- we don't expect to do everything. We do a lot, and we have a longer time horizon than anyone else.

Say there is an ocean out there and some big wave starts up. There is going to be somebody who is right where that wave is, and they are going to be surfing before you know it. The Google founders are bright guys and were there when it started. They weren't even the first, but they executed very well and they took the AdWords stuff and created a good market with it. Boy, did they execute well. They've stayed ahead and did good execution on that.

One thing that never comes out is that the software business is bigger selling to businesses than it is to consumers. Microsoft is really in touch with the practicalities: How do you make workers more productive, what are the pains in an IT department, what does corporate site development involve? When you think about why information workers will be far more productive ten years from now than they are today, I would point to the ideas in Microsoft Research Labs about interactive whiteboard, the Surface-type desk, the way communications will work, and how modeling will let you express things.

MM: Everybody is talking about software as a service and cloud computing. How does the move toward those models affect Microsoft's legacy of desktop computing?

BG: There's always been this question of where computing is being done, right next to you or far away. Now we are in a position where you can get the best of both worlds. When you call a subroutine, that subroutine can exist on another computer across the Internet. Everything in computer science is to just write less code. And the technique for writing less code is called subroutines. When you want to draw a map, now you can call Virtual Earth or Google Earth. In the extreme case, we can take somebody's data center and run it on the cloud. All the issues about administration, capacity, who owns the data, what happens when things go wrong and when people get error messages, that's cloud computing, and there is a lot of deep invention and work going on. I would say we are investing more in letting businesses use cloud computers than anyone is, and we have some brilliant projects that Ray Ozzie will be talking about more over the next year.

People get confused between storage in the cloud -- where it is clear that your file should be up there and geo-distributed and backed up -- and computation in the cloud. Those are both great, but the one that is without any tradeoff is to have the logical storage master up in the cloud. The one that you have to be careful about is computation, because computation is not free. And you have big problems with latency, off-line, and scheduling that resource. but we are actually taking some pilot customers and moving huge parts of their data centers into our cloud, where we manage it for them. Some people say data centers will move to the cloud very quickly, but I tend to think it will vary a lot. We're working on making it easy to write those high-scale programs that are running in cloud data centers in a way that you really understand what is going on.

MM: What has gone right and wrong with Windows? What do you need to add over the next decade?

BG: There's a famous quest of mine called "integrated storage," where you have not just a file system but a very flexible object-type database of your contacts, calendars, and favorite photos and music. We will get this extra storage structure with cloud storage. Say you want to move data between multiple phones, multiple PCs, TV, car. You don't want to move just files; you want to move things that have more structure. This integrated storage, or unified storage, hasn't happened yet. You see a little bit of it where Apple and Microsoft are doing string indexes in the background, but it's only a partial step.

Operating systems have a huge role to play in natural user interfaces. We have taken Windows and put it into our Surface device, but how do you add the programming model, how do you interact with those types of things? And there's a lot of work to be done in security. We haven't made the breakthrough that makes it easy for people to understand what type of risk they are taking for which actions. Even with all the great mechanisms, they can do things that are quite dangerous. It is not an easy problem to solve.

You know the whole thing with the operating system existing across devices, where I update the operating system on this machine, I update it on that machine, and so on. If you have a house full of machines, you should just say, "Hey, I want this Adobe application on all of them." That way, you can do things holistically. We are in the process of solving that, but it's really a mess today.

The cloud stuff gives you a slightly better way of doing these things. We can store your music rights, preferences, and software rights in the cloud. Then when you buy a new device, if you've got connectivity, you can pre-configure the thing. When you get a phone, it's a lot of trouble today. Why? You should say "Hey, I am Michael Miller. Make this thing like that other phone I have." Even if it's from a different manufacturer or has different software. You shouldn't start like some newborn.