[Internet access here at D is really flaky, so I’ll see how much I can get posted here over the next day or so.]
The dinner at the Four Seasons Aviara Sunday night was accompanied by wines selected by the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnists, John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, so when Kara Swisher kicked off the Bill Gates interview with a serious question about security, Gates offered a crack about what a great question that was after three glasses of wine — and then delivered an anecdote about Warren Buffett, at a dinner where the costly wines had been seriously fussed over, covering his glass as the waiter came by to pour and remarking, “I’ll take the cash.”
Gates seemed far smoother and more relaxed than on previous occasions that I’ve heard him speak,and better able to parry challenges without getting that impatient, “why are you bothering my superior intelligence?” look of yore. Either age has mellowed him, or he’s just grown into the role of Richest Geek in the World. Here are some of the things he said:
“Longhorn [Microsoft’s next revamp of Windows] is about structured information. The world’s not just about text lookup. Longhorn brings the idea of an object-oriented database to the wayinformation is stored.”
“Already there’s a class of users who basically stay in e-mail. So when they go out of e-mail to the shell, they get disoriented.”
The Journal’s Walt Mossberg asked whether Longhorn was more radical a change than Windows XP or Windows 95: “Radical sounds negative. It’s just way more of a switch in terms of the model of how you think about data.”
Eventually, “Search will be based on semantics, not just keyword matching.”
Users will benefit from the “galvanizing effect” of Microsoft’s competition with Google in search.
About digital music, the Ipod and ITunes: Mossberg asked, “Can you succeed in music without a hot device?”
Gates: “We’ll have dozens of hot devices… We just have a different model.”
Mossberg: “That’s fine, but it’s a failed model at the moment.”
Mossberg: As digital devices proliferate, will they remove the PC from the center of things?
Gates: “Where else are you going to organize your memories?”
Gates said he devotes 10 hours a week to his foundation work. “That’s the time other people are mowing the lawn.”
Mossberg: “So you just let it grow?”
Gates: “Somebody comes and does it, I don’t know how. Maybe it’s astroturf.”
John Battelle has a fuller report on Gates’ comments on Google here.
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