Bill Gates still loves the Tablet PC

In his keynote at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit yesterday, Bill Gates and Rich Kaplan held a very relaxed and unscripted Q&A session following Gates' address. A number of really fine questions were posed regarding the philanthropic work Gates is doing through his foundation, the role of technology in education, entrepreneurship, and the ever-increasing impact of the net and Software as a Service. My favorite question though was what technology was Gates most excited and proud to have helped introduce. After mentioning some of the obvious things like his original BASIC interpreter for the Altair, his work on the TRS 100 (I had a whole 32K to work in so there was quite a bit of room to stretch out"), and Windows, Gates delivered the best line of the morning (from my admittedly biased perspective). He announced tha, as everyone in the room knew, the one technology he was really roud of and still very excited about was...

the Tablet PC!

Of course the Tablet PC MVP contingent (of which I am a proud, card-carrying member) let out a loud chorus of cheers and applause at that.

Fellow MVP Hugo Ortega from Australia who pens the Uber Tablet blog and an absolutely charming fellow I'm glad I've been able to spend some quality time these past couple of days has video of the moment.