I think the defining moment of Bill Gates’ onstage interview at the D conference tonight came near the end, when the Microsoft chairman pulled a Windows Mobile device out of his pocket and declared, “This is really going to be your reality acquisition device.”
It turned out he was talking about how a good networked mobile device would help you plug into information about your physical location and the status of other people in your network (i.e., your friends, relatives and colleagues).
But the phrase was just pregnant with other meanings. It wrapped together in one phrase the two great forces of Gates’ career — voracious capitalism and awkward geekishness. Others might dream of altering reality (or, as the phrase goes, “changing the world”); for Gates, what really matters is “acquisition.” Once it’s acquired? Then, I suppose, it can be…assimilated.
So when will Windows Vista ship, anyway? “We’re quite confident in the January date.” But with the beta 2 version just out, “we’ll see what we get from that.” So, er, it sounds like, maybe January, maybe not.
Walt Mossberg asked whether Vista will be the last monster version of Windows, with five years and millions of lines of code in one big (and slow-to-arrive) package. Gates didn’t really answer, instead talking about new features of future Microsoft OSes involving “speech, ink and vision.” (So it sounds like the next edition of Windows will be planned for 2010 and will originally promise to include speech recognition, handwriting recognition and face recognition. But as the schedule slips to 2012 and beyond those new features will all be dropped and instead we’ll get a more secure, less buggy version of Vista.)
Gates showed off the new interface for Microsoft Office 2007, in which the entire mechanism of drop-down menus has been eliminated, replaced with an array of tabs that activate toolbars. Hard to evaluate from a quick demo, but I’m thinking that a lot of people are going to hang onto the bloated devil they know rather than risk mucking around with this potentially confusing new paradigm.
Admitting that Google still leaves Microsoft in the dust in search, Gates still knocked his competition for doing “less in the way of innovation than I would have expected a year ago.” For Microsoft in search, he added, with shameless bravado, “there’s more upside than downside at this point.”
Asked about the excitement surrounding Web-based applications and, specifically, Google’s acquisition of Writely, Gates sniffed,
“The text control in Asp.net has more features than that. Or even Wordpad.” Web apps are too limited in responsiveness, Gates said; “You want to take advantage of the fact that it’s not time-sharing” and use the power of your local CPU. “The cloud” — the stuff out there on the Web servers your browsers talk to — is more useful for storage and backup.
Finally, Gates talked in very broad terms about TV/Internet convergence and Microsoft’s “IPTV” initiative. What, Kara Swisher asked, does that do to the broadcast model? Gates “It’s gone. It was a hack. People want to watch what they want to watch.”
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