Bill Gates: the software revolution has just begun - American Thought - Brief Article

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 2002

The software revolution has only just begun, Microsoft chairman, chief software architect, and cofounder Bill Gates told Stanford (Calif.) University students. While the personal computer (PC) has brought power to the people, software advancements seem more evolutionary than revolutionary to users impatient for more-natural computer interfaces and Internet connectivity anytime, anywhere. However, dramatic improvements are on the horizon, he predicted.

"PCs essentially have become the most-important tool of empowerment and [have] driven a whole wave of productivity and additional communication and research and sharing," Gates stated, noting that 50% of homes now have PCs. "That's really fantastic. If the only thing the technology is used for is the advances in medicine that it enables to take place, that alone would justify everything that has been done. But of course it's far more than that. The key point I want to make is we're really just at the beginning."

What might the future bring? Gates envisioned PCs that prioritize e-mail so users are rarely bothered with low-priority items such as junk mail. On the other hand, a device that's part cell phone, part personal digital assistant could alert a mobile user if a high-priority message like "You've left the water running in the bathtub" were sent. Users could e-mail handwritten notes or listen to music from the Internet while driving in their cars. Technology will be a seamless means of personalizing your environment, wherever you may be, he indicated.

In the home, Gates anticipated a ubiquitous connectivity where technology would allow family members to point at screens to get the family schedule or select music to listen to. "Underneath that there's a lot of technology. There's a lot of networking, network management going on, security to make sure that your information isn't shared with the house next door or anybody that it shouldn't be. And yet you're going to want to be able to do that without being an expert in that underlying technology."

In the workplace, business-to-business e-commerce is the prototypical application, but in any meaningful sense it has not happened. Gates showed the audience a prototype of a product coming out later this year--a laptop computer that turns into a writing tablet by flipping the display around. Users can take notes with a pen-like device instead of a keyboard. A wave of similar products emerged five or so years ago, but they were flawed, Gates maintained, with clunky hardware, short battery life, and inferior handwriting recognition software. The product also could be used to do all your reading on one device, he noted.

Many tough technical problems remain to be solved, and that takes research. Obstacles include privacy concerns, which he implied may hinder software fixes. "It's only recently that we've put into our Windows products this self-monitoring capability so that if something goes wrong, if the application stops working, we see across the network what went wrong." Given an opportunity to e-mail a report back to Microsoft, about 70% of users do so. The report allows the company to trace what happened and pinpoint the problem, but it also has users wondering if other information is being collected about them.

If the industry doesn't make big advances in security, Gates argued, it will hold back the dream of connectivity. Passwords are a terrible way of identifying users, he said. "People take passwords that are easy to guess. They use the same password on very insecure systems they use on secure systems." He suggested a smart card plus a password.