Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp."s chairman and chief software architect sat down with eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft to share some of his vision on where the industry is heading, what"s next in Microsoft"s sights, and the Next Big Thing for software developers. Gates granted eWEEK an exclusive interview at the VSLive conference in San Francisco last week, where he keynoted on his vision of Seamless Computing. Gates spoke with eWEEK on the day the European Union leveled a $600 million-plus sanction against the company, but Gates deferred questions on that to his attorneys.
On your most recent "Think Week" what were some of the themes or things that you came away with?
Those are in part probably the funnest part of my job, seeing some of the research work coming out of universities, getting very up to date on the research inside Microsoft, and then I"ll pick some areas of things I need to understand, like where are microprocessors going. This last [Think Week] was my time to really study some of the wireless technologies, Ultra Wideband and the so-called WiMax 802.16, to try to get a sense of who the key players are, what the new capabilities will be and how we should factor that into our software design. There"s a thing called mesh networking, which is software making all this stuff work together in a way that lets you do video and audio in a pretty neat way.