The successor to Windows, Longhorn, visualized by Bill Gates two years ago, now rests on the back burner because the weapons of mass destruction, i.e. computer cockroaches such as virus, bugs and spam, continue to dodge the clever inspectors at Microsoft
CABIN FEVER? No, you can’t call it that. Febrile seizure? Sort of. Electrifying his mind, dynamo Bill is holed up every six months at a location only he knows. No e-mail, no outside contact. His wattage for that one-week is the millions of light bulbs coming on, interjecting his sleepless hours. He must decide which ones to choose, which to discard.
“I read the hundreds of papers people send me with brilliant ideas. I read all the ambitious ideas. I then write out my own,” says the man who changed life’s trajectory with the software he helped invent for our PCs — 600 million of us today, who get up each morning and have personal computers that we use in a very rich way.
It was during one of these hermetic weeks when Bill made the Internet a reality. Ten years back. The magic browser that brought information across the entire Internet!
“It is so exciting to glimpse the future in the new genre of fresh inspiration, to imagine its synthesis ....” Bill Gates, 48, leading the world’s pack of billionaires, speaks to Charlie Rose on what the seven-day pool of silence educes. At the home of the President of MIT, where Bill is spreading the word that the moment for computer science has yet to arrive so do carry on breaking new boundaries, he takes time aside for an interview with Rose of Channel 13.
“Things will jump at you,” he tells the students.
Ask many, why is Bill Gates richer than we are? The short answer: “Bill is just smarter than everyone else. There are probably more smart people per square foot right here than anywhere else in the world, but Bill is just smarter,” says a Microsoft vice-president of the founder-chairman.
Yet, two years on, Bill’s quest to make trustworthy computer systems is but a dream. Curdling cyberspace thefts, malicious intrusion and silent attacks is all but impossible. Despite Bill’s shady beginnings — while still at school, he and his accomplices hungered after the hulk, wanting to split open the huge machine that the computer company had installed in their school. Soon problems surfaced when these young hackers performed their autopsy. The computer crashed many times, making its security system go haywire. Finally, the culprits were found and banished from the school library.
But not for long, the computer company called these buffs and commissioned them to search for bugs in the system. “I became hardcore. It was day and night,” Bill remembers his moments of computer mania that made him to be the first man to set foot, not on the moon, but on the software sprouted by planet Earth!
The successor to Windows, Longhorn, visualized by Bill Gates two years ago, now rests on the back burner all because the weapons of mass destruction, i.e. computer cockroaches such as virus, bugs and spam, continue to dodge the clever inspectors at Microsoft (with millions of dollars at their disposal)!
Offering handsome rewards in the shape of huge grants to universities to track down these killers, Bill became a Bush when he told the world that he was winning the war! Hitting the headlines, glibly he announced that in two years, spam would be uncovered.
Today, he’s not too sure. And he is resigned to the attacks. Sleeping late one weekend at his $97 million state-of-the-art lakeside home, Melinda and he got woken up by an excited seven-year-old’s scream: “You’ve got to come, you’ve got to come,” she bunged them out of bed, shouting, “I was using the computer and it’s amazing ... we won, we won money, dad!”
The sleep-deprived richest dad in the world almost screamed back: “Hey, we don’t need more money.” Instead, he dutifully followed his kid “and of course it was one of those come-on type things, and there’s my seven-year-old who thinks she’s won some amazing contest, and I’m trying to explain to her that it’s just somebody trying to get her to go to that web site and all that.”
Bill Gates, the sharpest livewire around got spammed right in his hi-tech castle which is built to keep intruders off-limits!
Unfazed, Bill now moves on to medicine and insists that the smart people must now return to computers and help America maintain the edge in medicine. And that’s the reason Bill Gates is back at MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Illinois.
He worries that students here may soon lose out to China and India, where computer-savvy, highly-skilled youth swarm computer sciences like locusts. “The excitement in China is much higher than in America,” he reflects, but he gives an example of Japan as the economic miracle that induced the rest of the world to follow its ways. It paid the US to stay aloof and do its own thing. Now, Bill wants biology and computer science to team up in America to be the par excellence, a model for all to want.
A Harvard dropout himself, he well remembers the dingy lab where Paul Allen and he wrote out the first software ever to be written for a computer. That ‘dingy’ lab, today, is a splendid jewel in Harvard’s crown, thanks to the generosity of Allen and Gates who built the science splendour in memoriam to their dead mothers.
“It was a freezing cold day when Paul came to my room and declared ‘the future is here’! He got me to quit Harvard to start Microsoft.” Bill packed up and has never looked back again. “I’m always a tiny bit embarrassed speaking in university groups, because I, myself, am a dropout, but I’m not here to spread the word about becoming a dropout.”
Does the genius; the philanthropist; the world wide web man who goes to work in the morning in order to give away the money he made, in the afternoon, still has music left in his heart? You bet!
With the so-called blogging, and Wikis, pulling in millions to talk to each other half way around the world; play games with friends or strangers half way around the world; Bill Gates’ software has bootstrapped our PCs where soon we will not just play but also talk to each other, see each other — things we will eventually take for granted, as we now the Internet.
If Bill was to start all over? “I would work on artificial intelligence, make the computer learn to be time savvy, to recognize speech.”
People waste a lot of time on various communications modalities, he says. “Today software doesn’t know which calls or e-mails are important to you. We’ve all been in meetings where peoples’ cell phones ring. We’ve all gone to our e-mail and found lots of unusual, unwanted e-mail that wastes our time.”
He wants the computer tasked with organizing our day, to think up all the different things we want get done, notify us about deadlines, take our phone calls, recognize the caller’s ID so that it can schedule on its own a meeting time. “But we need a software model. We need something that’s adaptive, that learns, that has the right authentication built underneath.”
This is indeed the digital decade. Wow! What surprises Bill Gates has up his sleeves for humankind. We can’t wait for the visceral and intellectual.
The successor to Windows, Longhorn, visualized by Bill Gates two years ago, now rests on the back burner because the weapons of mass destruction, i.e. computer cockroaches such as virus, bugs and spam, continue to dodge the clever inspectors at Microsoft 
