LONDON: You can tell Bill Gates is a man used to counting in billions. Asked about Microsoft's new multi-million-dollar deal with Universal Music for downloads to play on its new MP3 player, the company founder and chairman looks blank, then says: 'I have to admit I don't know our deal with Universal at all. It wasn't even in the newspapers I read.'
Someone gently intervenes: 'It was in the New York Times this morning and you're paying Universal more than one dollar per Zune [Microsoft's MP3 player set to take on the mighty iPod].'
Gates, as one might expect of the world's wealthiest man, is unruffled. 'We must have got some great exclusive rights for that,' he half-jokes. 'I sure hope so.'
The multi-billionaire, computer visionary, philanthropist and most influential new media player in the world is in Brussels to oversee Microsoft's 'Innovations Day' show of the latest technological fireworks from its labs. In person he is significantly more charismatic than many of his critics allow -- even his ignorance of the Universal deal is made to seem like a peripheral matter unworthy of a brain the size of his. But he is less surefooted when it comes to the sensitive subject of Microsoft's operations in China.
At the recent Internet Governance Forum in Athens his senior policy counsel, Fred Tipson, admitted that China's persecution of bloggers was worsening, and there might come a time when Microsoft would no longer be able to comply with government censorship.Quizzed about this statement, Gates said: 'I don't know what thing you're referring to. We don't set those rules. We're not involved in that. We follow the law -- that's what we do.'
But should companies collude with laws that infringe human rights? 'Well, is the internet creating more information availability in the country or not? Go to the country and judge and go talk to the people there about what are their issues. There's a tendency to bring Western priorities to other countries. Are they enthused about the extra information availability coming on the internet? We announced our principles for where we stand and what we do several years ago. There's nothing new about that.'It is not a response to convince Amnesty International, whose joint campaign with The Observer, Irrepressible.info, calls for freedom of speech online and has already earned the support of 50,000 people around the world.
Gates was a college drop-out in Seattle when he and Paul Allen founded Microsoft more than 30 years ago. At 51 he belongs to the generation of web entrepreneurs' parents, and he is unimpressed by terms such as 'Web 2.0', generally taken to mean the recent wave of websites, such as YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia, which thrive on content generated by the users themselves. 'All these terms have a little bit of a faddish arbitrariness to them,' he said. 'What's Web 1.0, what's Web 2.0, what's Web 3.0? You know, there's a hundred YouTube-type sites out there.'
For Gates, the next revolution is not in the content of websites but the way we physically interact with computers, with keyboard and mouse giving way to speech, touch and mobility.
'The pace of innovation over these next 10 years will be much faster than what we have seen in the past,' he said. Innovations on display at the grandly named Brussels Microsoft Executive Briefing Centre include a mirror which can remember and display people who have looked in it, computers capable of examining and telling the difference between objects, and a smart surface on which documents, maps and videos can be manipulated by hand gestures.
'I'm just sitting here, pulling up the information, showing it to people, and there's no paperwork, there's no old information,' enthused Gates. 'I'm able to access all that information just through these hand gestures. Every desk, every meeting room table, will have that technology in it, you'll just take it for granted.' Time is up and Gates, who two years from now will step down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft to concentrate on charity, is whisked to his next engagement. Money is never a problem, but time? That's something else. —Dawn/The Observer News Service
