Gates on takeovers, TV and future tech
Published: 21 Feb 2008 15:19 GMT
…will be willing to pay subscriptions or watch ads or things that will keep the high quality and breadth of journalism alive and [make it] even better than it is today.
In some ways, we have better journalism today. In some things these bloggers, and the fact that you don't have to just work for a particular newspaper, in some ways it's better. [With] in-depth, certain kinds of journalism... there's still a question of how that gets funded.
What are some of the big technical challenges to getting to the type of technology that you talk about? When you think of the top two or three technical hurdles that we're working against today, what are some of the things that jump to mind?
Obviously, natural user interface requires software. I was just reviewing the next version of Windows and the great advance they make in that.
Will that be enough that everybody will obviously want to use it? Well, it didn't happen last time except in modest numbers, a few million, but that's still not mainstream. We've got vision software in the Surface, and we're trying to get that not just into retail stores but into homes and offices.
You've got touch, which is going to come in, and that's fairly inexpensive. We worked with some partners to do some really great things on the touch technology. So, I think that can move mainstream fairly quickly.
The version after Vista is a big step forward in terms of speech. It's a big step forward in terms of ink. It's a big step forward in terms of touch
[In] speech recognition, it's many decades of work and building up the databases and just learning where the mistakes happen to get made.
That was part of the great thing TellMe had. They had been doing directory assistance for a lot of the big phone companies, so their database of information of how people utter things was quite broad. And applying machine learning to improve the quality of that was a great synergistic opportunity.
So there are huge software improvements and, of course, we need our chip guys to give us the memory and speed to be able to execute these natural interface things.
So I'd say that's one whole area that's very important. There are some things about how we write software and prove its correctness... We've got to make it a lot easier to write complex software, not just because we want to write bigger things, but because we're relying on software in a more fundamental way for key infrastructure and private information.
Will the next version of Windows move natural language interface beyond the niche thing, or do you think it will still be a niche thing when we're talking about whatever comes after Vista?
The version after Vista is a big step forward in terms of speech. It's a big step forward in terms of ink. It's a big step forward in terms of touch.
I'd say that the likelihood is that touch will become mainstream on certain form factors very quickly, because we're working hand-in-hand with the hardware companies.
With speech and ink, it's a little harder to say. I'm a big ink lover, and so I'm hoping that that's where every student decides, yep, this is the time I want to get not just a portable Windows machine but a machine that I can put in notebook mode and use the pen as well.
We have OneNote, which has been a great advance in terms of showing people the application software that works with that. That's what these schools are building their curriculum around. Now we're getting feedback on that.
Anoop Gupta has our educational vertical — our group that is taking and doing enhancements of OneNote and doing enhancements to SharePoint to try and drive that. So, with ink I'd say it's unproven. I would vote yes, but I have a known bias.
Credit: Newsmaker: Gates explains why Microsoft needs Yahoo from CNET News.com
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