Gates on takeovers, TV and future tech
Published: 21 Feb 2008 15:19 GMT
…dramatic enough that it's a qualitative change, you almost laugh at: why did we have physical film? Why did we have TV that was very channel-oriented?
There are a lot of these things about books, and note-taking and TV watching that are basically unchanged by the digital revolution today, even though there are some avant-garde users. Whereas 10 years from now, the mainstream users will act like, well, of course, it was always supposed to be this way.
So, the notebook, the TV and a couple of other things are things that we're just going to laugh about in a few years. Any others that strike you as things that are just hopelessly outmoded, that are maybe one technological breakthrough away from obsolescence?
If you look at the ones that have already gone away, like the CD, it took about five years from when people first said that it wouldn't happen. Now it hasn't happened, but the writing is on the wall in terms of those trends.
With the encyclopaedia, it took a long time from when we started doing Encarta, the Wikipedia guys started doing their thing, before now you really can say, hey, the depth, the richness, it's completely changed; likewise with photography.
A decade is a good period of time to take because, for many of these things, that's where you go from avant-garde to common sense.
There are some schools today where all the kids use tablet personal computers. They are a small percentage of the schools, but the lessons we're learning in those schools in terms of how do you get it into the curriculum, how do you get the teacher comfortable with it, where is it better, how do you make sure the class is still concentrating in an appropriate way… those lessons have been learned. And so as you get the price down and younger teachers are embracing it, then it can spread quite rapidly.
Video on the internet... is video mainstream in the internet today? Well, you can sort of say it is. People go up and watch a lot of clips, and yet there's still this bifurcation between your high-popularity video off cable/satellite, and your sort of broad lower-resolution type that's internet-oriented.
The PC and the TV are very different today. Even the way you move between the phone and the PC is very different today.
One of the things that overlies all this is the cloud, the intelligence in the internet, and how that gets used.
Another thing that overlies all of it is the software breakthroughs and the sensors [that)] let us do natural interface — the touchscreen and the camera [and] the microphone.
Are newspapers on that list of things that are on the verge of going away in their present form; and, if so, do you have any thoughts on how journalism is paid for? Is that something that can be paid for in the digital economy?
Certainly [with] the paper-based form of newspapers in the US and some other countries, readership has been going down for a long time; even before the internet came along. Give TV credit for the fact that there's been a real change there. It's probably being accelerated now by the internet, that you can go and get so much news online.
And particularly if you take the younger demographic, the quality of online news sites — Microsoft and dozens of other people in the broad sense, and then more vertical providers like CNET in a focused sense — it's unbelievable.
You know, you want to see a new gadget, hey, there's a couple sites that you really ought to go to and they do an incredible job, versus any type of print thing that is going to come out later and not let you kind of disassemble it and animate it and compare it. It's a lot like the encyclopaedia where in a sense you can say, yes, of course, this is going to change.
Now, the ability to charge for the online version, either through advertising or a subscription fee, [raises] a lot of questions. As you have tail content, the advertising model just isn't going to generate much in the way of revenue. And for the encyclopaedia, it turned out that a volunteer model was able to do quite a reasonable job.
For journalism, there are a lot of things I doubt that alone will give us the kind of in-depth professionalism, persistence that we'd really like to see, and so you'd like some form of the financial reward to be there. I hope that readers…
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