Bill Gates

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“It’s All So Brand New That There’s Nothing To Go By Yet”

February 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Steve Ditlea, who wrote the 1981 Inc report about Apple Computers banishing typewriters from its offices, published a piece in the same publication the following year about the birth of the software industry. One of the players he mentions was Gary Kildall, a star-crossed software pioneer who was elbowed aside by Microsoft and died young after some sort of mysterious injury suffered in a biker bar in Monterrey. An excerpt from Ditlea’s article, when Kildall and others were trying to code the future:

“In 1976, Bill Gates, then 20, and Paul Allen, 23, were running a company they had started the year before in Gates’s college dorm in Boston. That same year, Gary Kildall, 34 was starting a company in his backyard toolshed in California. Tony Gold, 30, was still a credit officer at a New York City bank. Dan Fylstra, 25, was starting at the Harvard Business School. Dan Bricklin, 25, was getting ready to apply to business schools in Massachusetts, and Bob Frankston, 27, was working as a computer programmer near Boston.

All seven of these people started and now run companies that produce and/or publish software for personal computers. All five of their companies — whose combined revenues just missed $50 million in 1981 — are doubling or tripling in size each year. All of these entrepreneurs are, or soon will be, millionaires. All are likely to be the leaders of the personal-computer software industry — quoted during economic crisis, looked up to by future business-school students.

The five companies they founded have created a new industry from scratch. And now they’ve been joined by as many as 1,000 more companies offering for sale some 5,000 software programs. The pressures to stay on top in the industry are intense. Some of the biggest companies in the country have turned their attention to micro software in recent months. Professional investors are scrambling to pour millions of dollars of venture capital into the leading companies. And the independents — only a dozen or so had sales of more than $1 million in 1981 — are straining to stay out in front.

‘It’s a tremendous business to be part of,’ says Mike Belling, 32, who bought the three-month-old Stoneware Inc. in June 1980 with his partner, Kenneth Klein, 42. ‘But it has its pitfalls, like cars used to. It’s all so brand new that there’s nothing to go by yet. There’s no history to tell you how many copies of a program to produce, for instance.’

Five years ago, the micro-software industry didn’t exist.”•

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“Can You Describe Your New Role At Microsoft?”

February 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Bill Gates’ As Me Anythings are always among the best, with wide-ranging and intelligent discussion. A few exchanges from the most recent one at Reddit.

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Question:

Hey Bill, have you made any plans to artificially prolong your life? Honest.

Bill Gates:

No I don’t. Other people think about that but I wouldn’t want to extend my last few years unless that is happening for most people.

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Question:

I’d just like to know, what is something you enjoy doing that you think no one would expect from you?

Bill Gates:

Playing Bridge is a pretty old fashioned thing in a way that I really like. I was watching my daughter ride horses this weekend and that is also a bit old fashioned but fun. I do the dishes every night – other people volunteer but I like the way I do it.

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Question:

If you were a current computer science student what area would you start studying heavily?

If you feel like expanding on that, why do you think this area deserves the attention and how do you see it changing the technology game in the next 10 years?

Bill Gates:

The ultimate is computers that learn. So called deep learning which started at Microsoft and is now being used by many researchers looks like a real advance that may finally learn. It has already made a big difference in video and audio recognition – more progress in the last 3 years than ever before.

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Question:

Hey Bill, if you didn’t go into computers and later found Microsoft, what do you think you would be doing?

Bill Gates:

I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn’t end up in computer science.

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Question:

Any luck with the condom-design competition?

Bill Gates:

This is a sensitive topic. The idea was that men don’t like the current design so perhaps something they would be more open to would allow for less HIV transmission. We still haven’t gotten the results. One grantee is using carbon nanotubes to reduce the thickness.

"This is a sensitive topic."

“This is a sensitive topic.”

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Question:

Any advice on how entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow should go about balancing business and philanthropy… or do they have to succeed first in order to give later?

Bill Gates:

Just creating an innovative company is a huge contribution to the world. During my 20’s and 30’s that was all I focused on. Ideally people can start to mix in some philanthropy like Mark Zuckerberg has early in his career. I have enjoyed talking to some of the Valley entrepreneurs about this and I am impressed and how early they are thinking about giving back – much earlier than I did.

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Question:

Can you describe your new role at Microsoft?

Bill Gates:

I am excited about how the cloud and new devices can help us communicate and collaborate in new ways. The OS won’t just be on one device and the information won’t just be files – it will be your history including being able to review memories of things like kids growing up. I was thrilled Satya [Nadella] asked me to pitch in to make sure Microsoft is ambitious with its innovation. Even in Office there is a lot more than can be done.

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Question:

How do you feel about the NSA and its oversight of computer usage?

Bill Gates:

This is a complex issue. Privacy will be increasingly important as cameras and GPS sensors are gathering information to try and be helpful. We need to have trust in the way information is protected and gathered. There is a role for the government to try and stop crime and terrorism but it will have to be more open. I do think terrorism with biological or nuclear weapons is something we want to minimize the chance of.•

 

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“Well, That Was Quick”

January 24, 2014 in Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Magnus Carlsen, best chess player in the world, destroys Bill Gates in nine moves.

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“They Went Around The Country And Created Computer Clubs Everyplace They Went”

January 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Medium, Walter Isaacson posted a new excerpt (which awaits your crowdsourcing) from his forthcoming book on Silicon Valley creators. His latest segment concerns the famed Homebrew Computer Club, the original cult of the microprocessor, which was spread across the country with a Johnny Appleseed approach several years before there was an Apple Computers. The first two paragraphs: 

“The Homebrew Mentality

In June 1975, the month that Gates first moved down to Albuquerque, Ed Rogers decided to send the Altair or the road showing off its marvels as if it were a carney show exhibit. His goal was to create computer clubs in towns across America, preferably filled with Altair loyalists. He tricked out a Dodge camper van, dubbed it the MITS Mobile, and sent it on a sixty-town tour up the coast of California then down to the Southeast, hitting such hotspots as Little Rock, Baton Rouge, Macon, Huntsville, and Knoxville. Gates, who went along for part of the ride, thought it was an amazingly neat marketing ploy. ‘They bought this big blue van and they went around the country and created computer clubs everyplace they went,’ he marveled. ‘Most of the computer clubs in America were created by MITs.’ Gates was at the shows in Texas, and Allen joined for the ride when they got to Alabama. At the Huntsville Holiday Inn, sixty people — a mix of hippyish hobbyists and crew-cut engineers — paid $10 to attend, then about four times the cost of a movie. The presentation lasted three hours. At the end of a display of a lunar landing game, doubters came and looked under the table assuming there were cables to some bigger minicomputer hidden underneat. ‘But once they saw it was real,’ Allen recalled. ‘the engineers became almost giddy with enthusiasm.’

One of the stops that summer was Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto. There a fateful encounter occurred after Microsoft BASIC was demonstrated to a group of hackers and hobbyists from a newly-formed local group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. ‘The room was packed with amateurs and experimenters eager to find out about this new electronic toy,’ the club’s newsletter reported. Some of them were also eager to act on the hacker credo that software, like information, should be free. This was not surprising given the social and cultural attitudes — so different from the entrepreneurial zeal of those who had migrated up from Albuquerque — which had flowed together in the early 1970s leading up to the formation of the Homebrew Computer Club.”

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“The Dream Of Having The World Database At Your Fingertips Will Have Become A Reality”

January 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1987, two software moguls, Bill Gates and Dr. Timothy Leary, were asked by Omni to make predictions about life 20 years in the future. Gates was more accurate in his prognostications, though Leary provided some gems like this one: “What will you be? A performer. Everyone will be performing.”

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Bill Gates, Chairman of the Board, Microsoft Corporation:

The processing of digital information is improving very quickly. In ten years you’ll have 30 to 40 times as much computational power, and you’ll be able to manipulate the images and sounds that you now receive just passively from TV — you’ll insert yourself into a game or even change the outcome according to your wishes. So in 20 years your ability to get information will be expanded exponentially.

Take one example; You’re sitting at home. You’ll have a variety of image libraries that will contain, say, all the world’s best art. You’ll also have very cheap, flat panel-display devices throughout your house that will provide resolution so good that viewing a projection will be like looking at the original oil. painting. It will be that realistic.

In 20 years the Information Age will be here, absolutely. The dream of having the world database at your fingertips will have become a reality. You’ll even be able to call up a video show and place yourself in it. Today, if you want to create an image on a screen — a beach with the sun and waves— you’ve got to take a picture of it. But in 20 years you’ll literally construct your own images and scenes. You will have stored very high-level representations of what the sun looks like or how the wind blows. If you want a certain movie star to be sitting on a beach, kind of being lazy, believe me, you’ll be able to do that. People are already doing these things.

Also, we will have serious voice recognition. I expect to wake up and say, “Show me some nice Da Vinci stuff,” and my ceiling, a high-resolution display, will show me what I want to see — or call up any sort of music or video. The world will be online, and we’ll be able to simulate just about anything. Let’s say you want to go out to a racetrack. When you wake up you’ll say, “Hey, rent me one of those formula cars in Daytona,” and with some local controls, a little steering wheel you pull out of your drawer, you’ll be able to get the image and feel like you’re driving the car.

There’s a scary question to all this: How necessary will it be to go to real places or do real things? I mean, in 20 years we will synthesize reality. We’ll do it super-realistically and in real time. The machine will check its database and think of some stories you might tell, songs you might sing, jokes you might not have heard before. Today we simply synthesize flight simulation.

A lot of things are going to vanish from our lives. There will be a machine that keys off of physiological traits, whether it’s voiceprint or fingerprint; so in 2007 Mick Jagger will be onstage, and when Mick feels heat, you’ll feel heat. If a spray of water hits Tina on the back, you’ll feel that, too. I hope passive entertainment will disappear. People want to get involved. It will really start to change the quality of entertainment because it will be so individualized. If you like Bill Cosby, then there will be a digital description of Cosby, his mannerisms and appearance, and you will build your own show from that.

People will like the idea that the machine really knows them and that the machine can create experiences formed around the events in their lives to fulfill their particular needs and interests. But there’s a danger, too. It will be easy to feel worthless or overwhelmed by the amount of data. So what we’ll have to do is make sure the machine can tailor the data to the individual.

Probably all this progress will be pretty disruptive stuff. We’ll really find out what the human brain can do, but we’ll have serious problems about the purpose of it all. We’re going to find out how curious we are and how-much stimulation we can take. There have been experiments in which a monkey can choose to ingest cocaine and the monkey keeps on pushing that button until he dies. Well, we are going to create some pretty intense experiences through synthesized video-audio. Do you think you’ll reach a point of satisfaction when you no longer have to try something new or make something better? Life is really going to change; your ability to access satisfying experiences will be so large.

Take the change in movies in the last few years. Just a few years ago you had to find out where the movie was playing, then go to a certain neighborhood and stand in line to see the movie. Now you can go two blocks and find 10,000 titles. You feel inadequate. It’s going to be intimidating.

Twenty years ago I was ten years old. We already had color TV. I didn’t have theories about what the world might be like. But in the next 20 years you won’t be able to extrapolate the rate of progress from any previous pattern or curve because the new chips, these local intelligences that can process information, will cause a warp in what it’s possible to do. The leap will be unique. I can’t think of any equivalent phenomenon in history.•

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Timothy Leary, President, Futique Software Company:

By 2007 the problem of scarcity will be solved. Because most work will be done by robots and computers, you won’t have to work. Material possessions won’t mean as much to us as they do now, If there are nine Porsches in your garage. you’re going to say, “Take them away.” We’ve done that with wheat and grain, and we can do it with other things if we put our minds to it.

The way we define human beings will change. You won’t be a serf, a slave, or a worker. What will you be? A performer. Everyone will be performing. Passive listening, passive observing, passive watching will disappear. Of course, Big Brother, both of the Reagan and Ihe Gorbachev type, want us to be passive. They don’t want us to think for ourselves.

In 2007 you’ll be living in an information society in which information will be what money and machinery were in the Industrial Age. Everyone is going to be a psychologist, computer whiz, philosopher. Mind play, mind performance, psychological skill are going to be the equivalent of land, money, and power in the earlier ages.

Now to the nuts and bolts of this stuff: Every kid will learn how to communicate at a very young age; every kid will have his own computer — like a pair of sneakers, a pair of Nikes. No one will steal a computer, because you’ll throw them away. And everyone will learn how to chart his thoughts and his mental performance — like a baseball player’s stats. Even kids will plot their thoughts like they plot their batting average. The name of our species is Homo sapiens. That means we’re the organism that thinks, and our species finally will be proficient in thinking.

The biggest effect will be on blacks and members of other minority groups in this country. In the Information Age, to keep any poor kid from having a computer would be like keeping him from having food, medicine, shelter, or clothing now.

Within 20 years we’ll have scrapped the current system of partisan politics. Partisan politics belongs back in an age of feudalism, or at most the Industrial Age. It is insane to run a highly complicated, technological, pluralistic society like America when you have in the cabin of the spaceship a Democratic and a Republican candidate kneeing and gouging and beating up each other to see who’s going to be president for four years. In an electronic society an intelligent person would no more send Tip O’Neil to Washington to make his laws than you’d send Tip O’Neill to the wine shop to pick out a good wine for you.

Everyone is going to be responsible for government. It will be done by televoting, perhaps every Sunday between, say, twelve and one. But we’ll be voting on major issues — not parties, people, or a glamorous candidate who will play on our superstitions and emotions. You’ll educate yourself on the issues by using your own thought-processing appliances, the new computers. So you’ll be continually teaching yourself, continuously learning.

Right now there is a great deal of concern about the drug problem. In 20 years there will be hundreds of neurotransmitters that will allow you to boot up and activate your brain and change mental performance. There are going to be what I call brain radios — hearing aids you put in your ear— that will pick up and communicate with the electricity in your brain. You will be able to tune in any brain aspect, like sex, that you want. You will speed up or slow down your thinking. Anything you can do with chemicals you can do with brain waves, and they are so much healthier.

Drugs will be old-fashioned. No one will be addicted because you can just turn on the ultimate orgasm and keep it going for an hour. But how long are you going to do that? You’ll get bored. You’re going to want to turn it down or off. The criminality of drugs is what is causing the so-called drug crisis, but if you legalize a brain radio — and you’re going to have to — everyone will have the ability to dial into any emotional, mental, or sensual experience. We will use these radios to think more clearly and, above all, to communicate more clearly. The key to the twenty-first century will be five words: “think for yourself,” and “question authority.”

People will become more intelligent. I am really bored with the level of intelligence on this planet. There’s no one to talk to, and there is so much superstition. I am just waiting for people to smarten up. In 20 years I’ll have more fun, and I’ll have more people to talk to. People will be teaching me, and life is going to be more exciting. Twenty years ago — 1967 — the summer of love was just beginning, and I was busy performing the rituals that had to be performed then. The computers were IBM business machines that were used to de- personalize and control us. I frankly was too dumb to look ahead.•

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“Gates Often Sounds At Odds With The New Generation Of Billionaire Technocrats”

November 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because Bill Gates has only done three million interviews thus far in his life, the Financial Times’ headline writers thought they should label the paper’s new dialogue with him as “exclusive.” The crux of the discussion is an interesting one: Is it more important to give poor people access to the Internet or give them malaria medicine. If you have malaria, it’s a pretty easy choice. But I do think providing information where there is little empowers people. Sure, food, water and medicine first, but then let’s share the Internet. From Richard Waters “exclusive”:

“There is no getting round the fact, however, that Gates often sounds at odds with the new generation of billionaire technocrats. He was the first to imagine that computing could seep into everyday life, with the Microsoft mission to put a PC on every desk and in every home. But while others talk up the world-changing power of the internet, he is under no illusions that it will do much to improve the lives of the world’s poorest.

‘Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation,’ he says. But while ­’technology’s amazing, it doesn’t get down to the people most in need in anything near the timeframe we should want it to.’

It was an argument he says he made to Thomas Friedman as The New York Times columnist was writing his 2005 book, The World is Flat, a work that came to define the almost end-of-history optimism that accompanied the entry of China and India into the global labour markets, a transition aided by the internet revolution. ‘Fine, go to those Bangalore Infosys centres, but just for the hell of it go three miles aside and go look at the guy living with no toilet, no running water,’ Gates says now. ‘The world is not flat and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.’ “

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“Hey, This Thing Is Happening Without Us”

September 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Following up his authorized Steve Jobs bio, Walter Isaacson is writing a book about the icons of the Digital Era. Let’s hope he employs a large team of fact-checkers because such people tend to be fabulists. There’s an excerpt at Harvard Magazine from the forthcoming volume, about Bill Gates, who’s told a yarn or two in his day and is no stranger to the author. The opening:

“IT MAY HAVE BEEN the most momentous purchase of a magazine in the history of the Out of Town Newsstand in Harvard Square. Paul Allen, a college dropout from Seattle, wandered into the cluttered kiosk one snowy day in December 1974 and saw that the new issue of Popular Electronics featured a home computer for hobbyists, called the Altair, that was just coming on the market. He was both exhilarated and dismayed. Although thrilled that the era of the ‘personal’ computer seemed to have arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down 75 cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slush to the Currier House room of Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore and fellow computer fanatic from Lakeside High School in Seattle, who had convinced Allen to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. ‘Hey, this thing is happening without us,’ Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.

What Gates and Allen set out to do, during the Christmas break of 1974 and the subsequent January reading period when Gates was supposed to be studying for exams, was to create the software for personal computers. ‘When Paul showed me that magazine, there was no such thing as a software industry,’ Gates recalled. ‘We had the insight that you could create one. And we did.’ Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, ‘That was the most important idea that I ever had.’

In high school, Gates had formed the Lakeside Programming Group, which made money writing computer code for companies in the Pacific Northwest. As a senior, he applied only to three colleges—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—and he took different approaches to each. ‘I was born to apply for college,’ he said, fully aware of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized the month he had spent in Washington as a congressional page. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three, and chose Harvard. ‘There are going to be some guys at Harvard who are smarter than you,’ Allen warned him. Gates replied, ‘No way! No way!'”

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“I Guess It’s Fun, Because You Shoot Rockets Up In The Air”

August 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two exchanges from the new Bill Gates interview in Businessweek in which he criticizes, unfairly I think, the high-tech endeavors of Brin & Page, Bezos and Musk.

____________________

Question: 

There are other successful businessmen who are orienting their extracurricular interests around space exploration. Is that interesting to you? Is that worthwhile for humanity?

Bill Gates:

Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into.

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Question: 

One of Google’s convictions is that bringing Internet connectivity to less-developed countries can lead to all sorts of secondary benefits. It has a project to float broadband transmitters on balloons. Can bringing Internet access to parts of the world that don’t have it help solve problems?

Bill Gates:

When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.

Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they’re just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor.

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“Dealing With Refusals Is A Huge Part Of This”

May 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Bill Gates has, unsurprisingly, taken a data-driven approach to disease eradication during his second and staggering act as a philanthropist of the highest rank. Aiming to eliminate polio in the near term from the entire world as it has been in India, he told Ezra Klein of the Washington Post how the intransigence of illness is often not virus nor bacteria but misinformation:

“Ezra Klein:

So what did we learn that made eradication possible in India?

Bill Gates:

The two things that were done super well were social mobilization and mapping where the houses were. When somebody would refuse to take the vaccine, they would mark it down and they would have either a political leader or religious leader come in and convince them. Dealing with refusals is a huge part of this. If your team goes in, maybe they don’t speak the dialect, they’re not the same caste, the family has heard a rumor that the vaccine is bad, there’s many reasons you get refusals, and so you need follow-up for refusals. Usually you’ll get 10 to 20 percent refusals. But if there’s been a rumor, you get much higher refusals.

Ezra Klein:

A rumor that, say, the vaccine is bad, or it makes you sick?

Bill Gates:

Yeah or that the U.S. government uses vaccination campaigns to sterilize Muslim women. Vaccination always has problems with rumors. The U.S. doesn’t achieve nearly as high a vaccination rate as many countries. Vietnam is 99 percent vaccination, the U.S. is about 95 percent. Because people just hear ‘Oh, what about autism or something.’ But it’s particularly bad in poor countries.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“I Wanted To Share With You A Look At Their Work On Creating Alternatives To Meat And Eggs”

March 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Bill Gates’ self-published multimedia, slide-show piece, “The Future of Food,” in which the technologist and philanthropist is encouraged by in vitro alternatives to protein-rich meals:

“Meat consumption worldwide has doubled in the last 20 years, and it is expected to double again by 2050. This is happening in large part because economies are growing and people can afford more meat. That’s all good news. But raising meat takes a great deal of land and water and has a substantial environmental impact. Put simply, there’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. We need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.

Over the past few years I’ve come across a few companies that are doing pioneering work on innovations that give a glimpse into possible solutions. To be sure, it’s still very early, but the work these companies are doing makes me optimistic. I wanted to share with you a look at their work on creating alternatives to meat and eggs that are just as healthful, are produced more sustainably, and taste great.”

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“Things Are A Lot Better Than They Were 200 Years Ago”

February 12, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A few exchanges follow from the new Bill Gates Ask Me Anything on Reddit.

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Question:

What’s your worst fear for the future of the world? 

Bill Gates:

Hopefully we won’t have terrorists using nuclear weapons or biological weapons. We should make sure that stays hard.

I am disappointed more isn’t being done to reduce carbon emissions. Governments need to spend more on basic energy R&D to make sure we get cheap non-CO2 emitting sources as soon as possible.

Overall I am pretty optimistic. Things are a lot better than they were 200 years ago.

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Question:

What emerging technology today do you think will cause another big stir for the average consumer in the same way that the home computer did years ago?

Bill Gates:

Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at “computers.” Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways.

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Question:

If Microsoft didn’t take off, what would you have done and be doing instead?

Bill Gates:

If the microprocessor had NOT come along I am not sure what I would have done. Maybe medicine or theoretical math but it is hard to say.

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Question:

Oh! What’s your favorite book? 

Bill Gates:

My favorite of the last decade in Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature. It is long but profound look at the reduction in violence and discrimination over time.

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“It May Well Change The World”

December 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “A Robot in Every Home,” Bill Gates’ famous 2007 Scientific American piece which compared the nascent robotics industry to computers of the Homebrew era:

“Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when–or even if–this industry will achieve critical mass. If it does, though, it may well change the world.

Of course, the paragraph above could be a description of the computer industry during the mid-1970s, around the time that Paul Allen and I launched Microsoft. Back then, big, expensive mainframe computers ran the back-office operations for major companies, governmental departments and other institutions. Researchers at leading universities and industrial laboratories were creating the basic building blocks that would make the information age possible. Intel had just introduced the 8080 microprocessor, and Atari was selling the popular electronic game Pong. At homegrown computer clubs, enthusiasts struggled to figure out exactly what this new technology was good for.”

••••••••••

Homebrew Computer Club in 1978:

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“We Will Have Serious Voice Recognition”

July 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Bill Gates predicted Apple’s Siri in 1987. From the great Paleofuture blog at the Smithsonian: “Gates predicts the perfection of a technology that has been around for decades, but one that many people of 2012 might associate with the name Siri: voice recognition. ‘Also, we will have serious voice recognition. I expect to wake up and say, ‘Show me some nice Da Vinci stuff,’ and my ceiling, a high-resolution display, will show me what I want to see—or call up any sort of music or video. The world will be online, and you will be able to simulate just about anything.'”

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“Microsoft Had A Prototype E-Reader Ready To Go In 1998”

July 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The toughest thing for a company to do is to become successful. The second toughest thing is to survive success and continue innovating. From a new Vanity Fair piece about the decline of Microsoft:

“According to [Kurt] Eichenwald, Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready to go in 1998, but when the technology group presented it to Bill Gates he promptly gave it a thumbs-down, saying it wasn’t right for Microsoft. ‘He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,’ a programmer involved in the project recalls.

‘The group working on the initiative was removed from a reporting line to Gates and folded into the major-product group dedicated to software for Office,’ Eichenwald reports. ‘Immediately, the technology unit was reclassified from one charged with dreaming up and producing new ideas to one required to report profits and losses right away.’

‘Our entire plan had to be moved forward three to four years from 2003–04, and we had to ship a product in 1999,’ says Steve Stone, a founder of the technology group. ‘We couldn’t be focused anymore on developing technology that was effective for consumers. Instead, all of a sudden we had to look at this and say, ‘How are we going to use this to make money?’’

A former official in Microsoft’s Office division tells Eichenwald that the death of the e-reader effort was not simply the consequence of a desire for immediate profits. The real problem for his colleagues was the touch screen: “Office is designed to inputting with a keyboard, not a stylus or a finger,’ the official says. ‘There were all kinds of personal prejudices at work.’ According to Microsoft executives, the company’s loyalty to Windows and Office repeatedly kept them from jumping on emerging technologies. ‘Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,’ Stone tells Eichenwald. ‘Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.'”

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“Of The Great Entrepreneurs Of This Era, People Will Have Forgotten Steve Jobs”

June 8, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Malcolm Gladwell recently discussing entrepreneurship in Toronto, reassessing tech titans Jobs and Gates. (Thanks Cnet.)

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“Bill Gates Didn’t Think The Internet Would Be Big”

November 27, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In his speech, “Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong,” Nat Torkington (not to be confused with Karl Pilkington) draws a parallel between how book-lending facilities were destabilized by the Internet in much the same way Microsoft was. I think Bill Gates had more of an idea of the Internet’s potential power than Torkington gives him credit for, but it’s still an interesting speech. An excerpt: 

“Bill Gates wrote a bestseller in 1995.  He was on a roll: Microsoft Windows had finally crushed its old foe the Macintosh computer from Apple, Microsoft was minting money hand over fist, and he was hugely respected in the industry he had helped start. He roped in other big brains from Microsoft to write a book to answer the question, ‘what next?’  The Road Ahead talked about the implications of everyone having a computer and how they would use the great Information Superhighway that was going to happen.

The World Wide Web appears in the index to The Road Ahead precisely four times.  Bill Gates didn’t think the Internet would be big.  The Information Superhighway of Gates’s fantasies would have more structure than the Internet, be better controlled than the Internet, in short it would be more the sort of thing that a company like Microsoft would make.

Bill Gates and Microsoft were caught flat-footed by the take-up of the Internet. They had built an incredibly profitable and strong company which treated computers as disconnected islands: Microsoft software ran on the computers, but didn’t help connect them.  Gates and Microsoft soon realized the Internet was here to stay and rushed to fix Windows to deal with it, but they never made up for that initial wrong-footing.

At least part of the reason for this was because they had this fantastic cash cow in Windows, the island software.  They were victims of what Clayton Christenson calls the Innovator’s Dilemma: they couldn’t think past their own successes to build the next big thing, the thing that’d eat their lunch.  They still haven’t got there: Bing, their rival to Google, has eaten $5.5B since 2009 and it isn’t profitable yet.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Bill Gates enters the world of Doom, 1995:

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“Oh No, Allow Me, You Got The Last One”

October 27, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The future of mobile commerce, as predicted by Bill Gates in a CD that came with his 1995 book, The Road Ahead.

Microsoft’s new video predicting the future of tech:

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“Through Computers, And The Internet, The Notion Of Amateurs Working Together Is Becoming More Important”

March 25, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tyler Cowen: "Maybe it is stretching the concept, but you can interpret Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as amateurs too."

An excerpt from a post by economist Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution about the merits of amateur efforts:

“Amateurism is splendid when amateurs actually can make contributions. A lot of the Industrial Revolution was driven by the inventions of so-called amateurs. One of the most revolutionary economic sectors today — social networking — has been led by amateurs. Maybe it is stretching the concept, but you can interpret Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as amateurs too.

Amateurs are associated with free entry and a lot of experimentation. Barbecue quality is very often driven by amateurs, and in general amateurs still make contributions to food and cooking.  The difficulty of maintaining productive amateurs is one of the reasons why scientific progress periodically slows down. Specialization, however necessary it may be, can make big breakthroughs harder at some margin. This is one aspect of the division of labor which Adam Smith did not fully grasp, though he hinted at it.

Through computers, and the internet, the notion of amateurs working together is becoming more important. This includes astronomical searches and theorem-proving, plus collection and collation of data, and Wikipedia; this is Shirky’s ‘cognitive surplus.’”

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Description Of Bill Gates At 30

March 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I like Bill Gates the philanthropist, though Bill Gates the extrepreneur was a real a-hole. Longreads put up a link to a Fortune profile about Bill Gates from 1986, when the 30-year-old tech titan was about to take Microsoft public. Here’s how writer Bro Uttal described Gates at the time:

“Money has never been paramount to this unmarried scion of a leading Seattle family, whose father is a partner in a top Seattle law firm and whose mother is a regent of the University of Washington and a director of Pacific Northwest Bell. Gates, a gawky, washed-out blond, confesses to being a ‘wonk,’ a bookish nerd, who focuses singlemindedly on the computer business though he masters all sorts of knowledge with astounding facility. Oddly, Gates is something of a ladies’ man and a fiendishly fast driver who has racked up speeding tickets even in the sluggish Mercedes diesel he bought to restrain himself. Gates left Harvard after his sophomore year to sell personal computer makers on using a version of the Basic computer language that he had written with Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. Intensely competitive and often aloof and sarcastic, Gates threw himself into building a company dedicated to technical excellence. ‘All Bill’s ego goes into Microsoft,’ says a friend. ‘It’s his firstborn child.””

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Microsoft in 1986:


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Someone Actually Invented Control-Alt-Delete

March 10, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

He is IBM engineer David Bradley, and he is be-boppin’ and skattin’ all over Bill Gates. (Thanks Reddit.)

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“He Would Be Elbowed Aside In 1980 By Bill Gates’ Knockoff Version Of CP/M Called MS-DOS”

April 20, 2010 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Star-crossed computer pioneer Gary Kildall spent years trying to dissuade people from feeling sorry for him, but he eventually came to see their point. The Seattle native was a genius who was toting around a portable PC of his own creation as far back as the early 1970s. He understood the power of the microprocessor before pretty much anyone else and created CP/M, the first modern operating system, also in the ’70s.

But even though Kildall’s company DRI (Digital Research, Inc.) made him a good deal of money, he would be elbowed aside in 1980 by Bill Gates’ knockoff version of CP/M called MS-DOS. And Kildall’s time at the center of the computer business was over just like that, though he tried to take it in stride.

The computer scientist was eventually worn down by years of being compared unfavorably to Gates and wrote his memoirs to try to correct his footnote status in an industry that owed him much better. Kildall’s life went from tortured to tragic in 1994, when he died at 52 from a blood clot in his brain after being the victim of some sort of shadowy violence in a biker bar in Monterrey.

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From 1995:

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Old Print Ad: Altair 8800 Computer Kit (1975)

January 22, 2010 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Altair BASIC was an early programming language and the first product of Microsoft (then called Micro-Soft). Bill Gates (who was still at Harvard at the time) and Paul Allen apparently read about the Altair personal computer system in a science magazine and thought that making software for it could be a good business. You got that one right, boys.

This 1975 advertisement offers the Altair 8800 computer loaded with the MS guys’ basic language for the relatively inexpensive price of $995. In order to save records, you would hook up this computer to a cassette recorder and store the info on cassette tapes. The MITS (Micro Instruments and Telemetry Systems) company of Albuquerque, NM, distributed the computer and software. MITS was founded in 1971 as a calculator manufacturer and added computers to their inventory in 1975, so this was one of their first attempts at selling PCs. The Altair 8800 was the first commercially successful home computer and the Information Age was off and running. MITS co-founder Ed Roberts, who had earlier served in the Air Force for ten years, sold the company to Pertec Computer Corporation in 1976. He subsequently went to medical school and today practices medicine in a small town in Georgia.

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