Gates: Microsoft chairman pictures increasingly interactive software
Vito Pilieci
Sun
OTTAWA — The next 10 years will bring “extraordinary” changes to the world, predicted billionaire businessman Bill Gates on a whirlwind tour of Ottawa Tuesday.
Whether it is through new medicines delivered by organizations such as his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or emerging technologies, exciting and challenging times are ahead, the chairman of Microsoft Corp. said in a speech at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa before hitting Parliament Hill to make a major AIDS funding announcement.
“This is a very exciting time in the software industry,” he said. “The digital revolution is proceeding to change the way we live and work.”
He pointed to the growing popularity of voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) telephone services as a sign of new technologies emerging to change the way we communicate with one another.
“The telephone network is completely disappearing and becoming an application of the Internet,” he said. “Even TV itself will be delivered over the Internet.”
With the explosion in new Internet services still in full swing, Gates pointed to YouTube and Wikipedia as indications of what websites will look like in the future.
Microsoft is working on its own line of interactive offerings, including an online video service, a la YouTube, called SoapBox, and an interactive mapping tool called Live Earth. The mapping system shows all the things a person would expect to see on a map such as locations, routes and points of interest. It also has a feature that turns a map into a virtual 3-D representation of a city. By doing so, skyscrapers rise up, trees and parks are given contour and even traffic jams are depicted in real time.
The new map software is already available for use online at maps.live.com, although it is still in its preliminary testing stages. When it is finished, Gates said a person will be able to pull up a
3-D map of a town — Ottawa, for example. The Parliament buildings will jut out of the scenery like as if they were part of a pop-up book. Moving a pointer over top of them will allow a person to see if Parliament is sitting, what bills are being debated and whether the session is available to be viewed over the Internet.
Similarly, moving a pointer over a shopping mall will show what stores are inside, whether they are having sales and which ones offer online shopping.
While he applauded the ingenuity that went into creating the new online services, Gates said the software industry is heading for a drought of talent that could hamper the fast-growing North American software industry.
Except in Asia, enrolment in post-secondary science and math programs are down, said Gates.
While additional investment in post-secondary education is important, Gates urged governments to put more resources into promoting science and technology courses at the high school level. He said by getting high school students interested in computers and science, it will ensure they pursue technology and science degrees in university.
Gates also urged businesses to become more involved with post-secondary schools. Big companies do not create technology clusters of small startup companies, he said. High-quality researchers at universities do.
“Large research universities are the ones who spin out biotechnology and software startups,” he said, adding one of the reasons Microsoft has been so successful is because it closely partners with researchers at post-secondary institutions to monitor what types of projects they are working on.
“Half of the breakthroughs at Microsoft come from the university environment,” he said. “We became very good at meeting top professors and explained we wanted the top students to come and work for Microsoft.”
Gates said capturing and retaining top-level talent has allowed the company to continue to dominate the market for software over the past 33 years.
When asked about emerging threats from competing companies such as Google –which has its own word-processing and spreadsheet software –or others in the open-source software community, Gates became defiant.
“Is this the year free software was invented? I’d remember 1981. It was hyper-competitive then.” he said. “If there was ever a year that passed when people didn’t say we would go out of business, I’d be worried. Keep up the record, 33 years straight.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2007