Busy Bill's Asian Tour

Published: May 14, 2008

by Alex Woodie

With his full time job at Microsoft set to end in less than two months, chairman Bill Gates is undoubtedly under pressure to clear his desk in Redmond, Washington, and start the next phase of his life. But judging from last week's Asian tour, where he traveled to a ridiculous number of events to spread his message about the future of computing--including the upcoming Windows 7 release--he is already transitioned into his new job as the world's most technologically advanced philanthropic humanitarian.

Gates made appearances in only two Asian counties last week--Japan and Indonesia--but judging from his activity archive, the tireless billionaire managed to squeeze a month's worth of appearances and speeches into a single day. At that rate, he could visit 106 of the world's countries before becoming a part-time employee of Microsoft (but still its chairman) on July 1, and devoting the remainder of his fulltime efforts to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Last Wednesday was a busy day for Gates, with appearances at six events, including the Japan Premium Forum, the Windows Digital Lifestyle Consortium, the Japanese Business Federation, the National Diet of Japan, and a press conference, all of which occurred in Tokyo, as well as the 2008 Government Leaders Forum Asia in Jakarta, Indonesia.

At the Government Leaders Forum in Indonesia, Gates and his chief strategy officer, Craig Mundie, talked about the five innovation centers that Microsoft has built in Indonesia, and how governments can do more to improve the quality of services they provide to their citizens by using computers. He also talked about his vision of the "natural interface," or computers that are able to interact with their users through speech recognition, digital ink, and wall-size monitors, or walls that double as touch-sensitive interfaces, which will eventually supplant the traditional chalkboard, he says.

Indoneisa's president, H. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was also at the event, and he provided his take on the potential of IT and Microsoft's role. "Information technology is the most promising, important tool that the world has ever known to fight the perils of poverty and ignorance," the president said. "We are, after all, part of a world that is being transformed by the magic of software. That is why I am particularly pleased at our cooperation with Microsoft."

During his speech at the Japan Premium Forum the same day, Gates discussed "the next wave of business productivity" and the class of tools referred to as "unified communications." In the future, UC will revolutionize how we interact with other people, and even allow us to get rid of phone numbers, he says. Instead, Windows computers will interact with caller's cellular phones to handle the technical details of routing a call to the recipient's appropriate device instead, he says. "There's a level of integration here where your list of contacts and people you work with a lot is used across all these applications in the Windows environment," he says.

During a press conference in Tokyo, Gates reminisced about visiting Japan 30 years earlier, when he was working on writing BASIC for the PC 8000, and other aspects that make the country a unique consumer of IT. "This was the first market where Windows and graphics interface really took off," he said. "There's been a ton of firsts here."

Gates provided a glimpse into how Windows will evolve--perhaps with Windows 7, although he didn't say so specifically--to cope with the myriad of ways people interact with computers and data today. "In terms of software on the Internet, you'll really have computing in three places," Gates says" the mobile phone, the PC, and a set-top box connected to a TV. "All of those client devices will run rich software . . . and they'll have a lot of software that relates to visual recognition, ink recognition, speech recognition, modeling the user, and being more responsive to your particular interests."

Windows 7 was mentioned by name during Gates' speech at the Windows Digital Lifestyle Consortium in Tokyo that same very day. "We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7," he said. "I'm very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone."

Cell phones will integrate more closely with PCs, and provide another entry point to participate in UC, Gates says. "When I walk up to a PC, if I'm on the phone, I should be able to have the call, if it's connected through the Internet, run on the PC," he says. "And then if the person on the other end has a large screen, we should be able to bring up documents and edit them together at the same time we're talking with each other."

During his appearance at the Nippon Keidanren, or Japanese Business Federation, Gates discussed many of the same themes: natural interfaces, faster computers, the effect of the Internet, Microsoft's $8-billion-per-year R&D budget, and the need for technological enhancement in government, healthcare, and particularly in education.

He also made a bold prediction that should have every book-toting student nominating him for sainthood: The end of the 30-pound textbook.

"I'm very optimistic that the Internet is going to make a huge change in education," he says. "In fact, I believe that even the paper textbook will become obsolete in the next five to 10 years. I believe that instead of a paper textbook the student will have a very nice, portable computer, probably a tablet-like device."

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