For two decades, Bill Gates has used his Comdex keynote speech to mark out his vision for technologies from the Internet to XML. This year he used the bully pulpit to make it clear that the industry is at one of its perennial crossroads.
Once considered simple nuisances attending the digital lifestyle, cyberattacks and spam have morphed into disruptions costing millions of dollars in downtime and wasted manpower. Against a backdrop of mounting customer frustration with insecure digital infrastructures, Gates laid out his vision for a new era of technology that removes much of the hassle of being a computer user. CNET News.com caught up with the Microsoft co-founder and chairman earlier this week to talk about the leadup to his "seamless computing" speech.
Q: You"ve been talking about seamless computing at this Comdex. Give us an overview of what"s on your mind.
A: The key reason I picked the theme of seamless computing was to talk about the frontiers we still need to solve in the next few years. I see the things holding us back as being boundaries between different software systems...Why isn"t e-commerce a reality? Why isn"t managing your schedule digitally with friends and colleagues not a trivial thing to do? We can look and say that many of the problems are software challenges. Certainly, the solution to lowering operational costs on systems, the solutions to spam, the security challenges, the need to think of all these devices and how they work together--that"s largely a software problem.