Gates: PCs fall short
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In a chat with engineering students at the Universityof California at Berkeley, Gates said there is much work thatneeds to be done if the PC is to fulfill its promise.While maintaining that the "glass is half full," hesaid computers are still not as reliable or usable asthey need to be.
"It falls so far short of what it should be," Gatessaid, urging further work in areas of artificialintelligence that could allow computers to finallyhandle long-predicted tasks, such as speechrecognition.
The talk was the first stop on a day that will takeGates through the topics of education, philanthropy and industry. At lunch, he received a philanthropy award from Community Foundation Silicon Valley. In theafternoon, he will talk to others in the tech industryin a speech at the Computer History Museum in MountainView. His trip follows a tour of five East Coast colleges earlier this year.
Gates said America's top research universities,including Berkeley, are the country's biggest edge, as it isforced to compete more directly with other nations for techjobs. But he cautioned against protectionism, warningthat wealth is something that needs to be spreadthroughout the world.
Asked about Microsoft's biggest contribution, Gatessaid it is the creation of the software industry thatcame with the PC. But he also said the Tablet PC--a pet project of his--is pretty neat, too, as willbe the next version of the Xbox.
The next Xbox "may not be good for productivity, but it will be fun," he said. While not offering too many details on the device, he said communications will play abigger part in the gadget, as will the idea of having an audience in addition to just players. "It's not just one person sitting there shooting at artifacts," Gates said.
He addressed business challenges such as how to deal with piracy in China--99 percent of Microsoft software is not paid for in the country.
"We can't just charge in there and say overnight,'You've got to change that,'" Gates said. We need to "strike the right balance about intellectual property in that venue." Over time, Gates said he would like to see at least the businesses paying for the software but said there is not an obvious path for the company to follow: "Sometimes we will do too much, and sometimes we willdo too little."
America's richest man also talked about the ups anddowns of giving money away, which he said can be aharder job than making it in the first place. It iseasy to tell what works in business, but much harderin the nonprofit world.
Originally, Gates said he planned to wait until his60s to start giving away his fortune, after retiringfrom Microsoft.
"I thought it might be schizophrenic, where you had onepart of the day where you say 'Let's make money' andthen in the afternoon you say 'Let's give it away,'" he said.
But Gates said that as he was reading about trends inpopulation control and diseases, he became convincedthat he could not wait. He said he has tried tofocus on diseases that affect the developing world.
While "rich world" diseases get plenty of drugindustry and government research funding, he found outthat just 0.1 percent of research was going towardmalaria, a disease that kills 1 million people a year. One type is currently afflicting 200 millionpeople.
"I was stunned," he said, noting that he doubled theresearch being done on malaria when he gave $50 million toward it.
The reaction to Gates at the notoriously left-leaningschool varied widely.
A handful of students passed out fliersbefore the speech, taking Microsoft to task for itsbusiness practices and universities to task for allowingcompanies like Microsoft to dictate a corporatecurriculum.
Several of the students involved in that effort tookissue with Gates' assertion that companies can't builda business around software that is distributed underthe General Public License (GPL).
Gates: open source is a trade-offBut other students said they were inspired by Gates.
"They don't really realize how difficult it is to bein a position like that and how much good he hasdone," graduate engineering student Ben Wild said.
Still, others found a lesson for their own lives."He did make a lot of money, but he's doing work thathe just likes to do," said Jorge Yugovic, a Chileanengineering student who is at Berkeley to studyeconomics.
As Gates headed to his next stop, two of Microsoft'sBay Area-based "developer evangelists" stuck around tomeet with the students who took issue with thecompany.
"There are plenty of times when we get reamed out,"said Keen Browne, a former Linux enthusiast who joinedMicrosoft about a year ago. "I think we need to dothat."
Graduate student Morgan Ames said she was glad to talkwith the Microsoft representatives but said itdoesn't erase what Gates said. "He kind ofmisrepresents things a lot," Ames said. "Most of thepeople that went out of here went out with the wrongimpression."
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