Newsmaker: Gates sizes up the Web's next generation

Think Web 2.0 and think Microsoft? Not necessarily.

The company has long provided the tools for building Web sites. But it's been a couple steps behind when it comes to some of the bigger ideas and business models that have surfaced around Web 2.0, such as advertising-based software.

In addition, Microsoft has long made devices--whether it's the PC, server or handheld--the center of computing design. Now Web sites are becoming programmable, allowing people to "mash up" data from different sites.

To try to capture--and participate--in some of the buzz around Web 2.0, Microsoft organized a conference in Las Vegas called Mix '06 aimed at Web developers and designers. After his keynote speech at the conference Monday, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates spoke to CNET News.com about the push into hosted services, competition with Google and mobile computing.

Q: A lot of the buzz and thinking around Web 2.0 has come from outside Microsoft. Is this conference an attempt to get more involved there? And does that concern you at all?
A: Gates: Well, for the key new technologies that enable us to take the browser to a new level--DHTML, JavaScript, XML capabilities--we've been the pioneer.

If I'm a consumer or small-business owner, I could get a lot of applications in a hosted version, from project management to word processing. In that world of Web applications, how do you make Windows Vista a must-have?
Gates: Well, Vista is probably more relevant now than ever because, as you're browsing, you want to download Active X controls and have a security framework in there. Having the kind of "reputation" services we built into Vista makes the community value more important: We know which Web sites are phishing Web sites. We know which controls people have had a good experience with. That kind of reputational value may be one of the biggest things people get out of Vista.

Video: Gates on
Web 2.0
In interview with CNET News.com, Bill Gates says Microsoft is ready to mix it up with rivals.

Likewise, the ability to download code and compartmentalize it--that's kind of a breakthrough that's come out of the fact that we're down the learning curve on security--way more than any other company--I can say 100 times as much. In the last three years, it's been our biggest R&D priority, and we've made breakthroughs.

Vista, in terms of rich media--people are doing movies more. People want to organize and find those things. They want to work offline as well as online. We picked the things where people want Windows to (work) better.

People are designing applications with the Web in mind. In the past, you've been more Windows-centric with development tools. Will you be pointing developers to write applications where the Web is the development platform?
Gates: The Web is where a lot of code is being written, and you can go back to the year 2000 and the .Net initiative. .Net was designed to let people do state-of-the-art Web sites. In fact, .Net's success has been the primary platform for building Web sites. It's been quite phenomenal.

People are using other tools--around scripting, PHP and all that. But we've come in and really targeted that market. And as people do richer Web sites, we think the richness of what we've done there will go beyond the scripting-language-type approaches, which are fine. But more and more people will do sophisticated things. So there's nothing dramatic here, in the sense that the Web just happened.

The Web is evolving. There's a little bit more maturity now, in terms of business models with advertising coming in, with some of the late-'90s mistakes understood. But we're probably, as an industry, making some of those same mistakes. And that's OK. The ferment, the creativity, is incredible to see.

You've been talking about the Web as a development platform for years. Internally at Microsoft, have you made the switch?
Gates: (Microsoft's) first company meeting around software as a service goes back over seven years now. We said it's a lot better for us and customers. Instead of viewing software as a one-time thing--you buy a new version, you're using that--if we have a continuous relationship (with) something like Watson, where we monitor what people are doing and the drivers they are using, Office Online can get templates and download new things.

It's letting our software innovation be more connected to the user, more customized to what they want. It's a great paradigm for us--to create new value. We did underestimate advertising, so an element of what we're doing there is catch-up.

There was a major demarcation when Ray (Ozzie) put out his memo last year, really saying the primary applications model will have everyone delivering through the Web, monitored through the Web, updating through the Web. And many of these services, like storage or authentication, that you think of as

More Newsmakers

[itispals]

Live

It was interesting to know his views and more over he has accepted the fact that Google is giant in Search technology. Only time and user experience would say whether LIVE, lives up to Gate's expectations. Yeah even i feel, net is evolving and probably we are going through the second phase of evolution. Five years down the lane things might be totally different and we have to wait and watch. Always, advertising would be one good area to generate revenue.
http://www.buckleupnow.com

[cnet123_20]

New member

New member

[e-247]

Bill Gates should keep an eye on...

MSN and Bill Gates should keep an eye on the new search engine Xista.com. That could become a very popular web property that they may won't in their family.

[TheShane]

Cool idea but needs more development

This site has a cool idea but it is far, FAR, far from complete...

[Pete Saman]

DHTML, JavaScript, XML = Open Source= Communism

This time last year Bill Gates and the MS droids were telling everyone that opensource developers were communists and cancer-like. Now he's embracing open source formats and telling everyone that MS are pioneers in this field. Laughable..

[arunbharatram]

Asynchronous JavaScript, XML = AJAX

May be the word pioneer is debatable and I think Use of this Framework or Technology dated long back when Google started to build Rich Internet Applications and they just did that by Mastering this Framework ( FAT Client (AJAX)). And fortunately or unfortunately this happened before ATLAS was christened.

Hey U

hey, AJAX is not a Open Source Technology, it was developed by Microsoft in 1999, and first browser to support it was IE5.01 then other browser makers copied the idea and implemented their own. now who is coping ?

OSS/GPL = Communist

[Joe Blow]

Gates Obviously Doesn't Understand Anything Outside of Billionaireville ...

or he would know that remote and/or poor villages will be far more likely to have simple wireless network connections (via a few satellite and/or medium-haul terrestrial RF links) long before any cell phone telecom provider would ever bother to install cell phone infrastructure in The Middle of Nowhere, for people who have better things to do than fall into the trap of becoming cell phone babblers (at least not without snagging endless government suckling rights). Some First/Second World governments made a deal with the devil and encouraged cell phone providers to offer universal, unlimited cell phone access for a few dollars a month per subscriber in trade for monopoly markets, and the result was societies that are being destroyed by the same rude, noisy, self-absorbed behavior everywhere (ceaseless gabbing about the inane) that sensible people wish we could put back in the bottle. I don't know if it's true, but Gates supposedly mentioned that the cell phone devices could use TVs as display devices, and this demonstrates his complete lack of comprehension of the problem, given that most of the target populations for the $100 computer have no electricity, much less TVs or even being within range of TV reception.

He also continues to be blind to (or, more likely is ignoring, due to competition for even more income that he covets) the fact that local/regional software developers will be in a much better position to produce appropriate applications and services for the remote/poor target populations than some programmer (I won't even dare to call them software engineers, since all they do is sling code without any real thought about appropriate design) in Redmond, or even Bangalore. One of the goals of the $100 laptop computer project is to accelerate technology education, and you can learn a lot more about technology with a real computer than you ever will with a mere cell phone. The very fact that you have to tack on a larger display and a keyboard to make a cell phone-sized device useful for education shows how detached Gates is from the reality of the economics involved.

As for Gates' bleating about the communications and services infrastructure that's required beyond the laptops, does he really believe that poor, uneducated people need his company's "rich applications" and services that are the finest examples of bloatware in the known Universe (and most likely, the rest of the Universe, if there really are any intelligent life-forms Out There)? Does he honestly believe that the target populations are going to wait patiently while an army of local prospective MCSEs, et al, spend a lifetime getting boned up on the panoply of proprietary Microsloth development tools needed just to get things up and running, much less customized for local needs?

As for the educational infrastructure in the form of materials, curricula, etc., where has Gates been while MIT has been putting every byte of its curricula on-line for free download for the last several years, which currently includes the entire Computer Science curriculum, and that for many engineering majors? I would guess that the curricula for teaching Education majors how to teach is high on the list to be put on-line, if it's not already there, as that would definitely benefit those on the lower rungs of the prosperity ladder. Maybe I missed it in all of the standard self-congratulatory BS that their PR arm spends all of its time promulgating, but I don't recall Microsloth announcing where its free world-class educational curricula (not just technical training, which is what MCSE, etc., is about) can be downloaded by anyone for free. I would guess that there are a heck of a lot of MIT research efforts, theses, and dissertations that include worthwhile software development projects that will directly benefit the $100 laptop recipients.

Gates needs to spend more time playing cards with his fellow billionaire buddies, and stop wasting everyone else's time promulgating his worthless "visionary" negative comments about real efforts to improve peoples' lives. Saving people from starvation, diseases, and other ravages of the poor, as the Gates Foundation is doing, doesn't make much sense if it isn't coordinated with a real education effort so that the affected people can lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to prevent themselves from sliding right back into the cycle of poverty they desperately need to escape.

All the Best,
Joe Blow

[203129769353146603573853850462]

I liked the part...

...about cell phone babblers. Drives me crazy.

[203129769353146603573853850462]

Tired of his face?

Is anyone else tired of seeing his %#!& face everywhere? Jeez. Almost as bad as Trump was.

[JFDMit]

Chilling

So BillG says, "Well, advertising--nobody really knows what the limits to that are. There will be experimentation to having you watch ads while you're doing anything on the computer, because people will see if they can't make money that way."

And this is from the chairman of the company that wants us to dump our third party adware/spyware software and let Vista/Defender/OneCare handle all our security?

Riiiight.

[Jeff Putz]

Gates is a real geek

I was at Mix, probably 10 feet from Gates during the keynote. Of course he had to pull the company lines, but when he started getting grilled by Tim O'Reilly, you can see that Gates gets it, he's a true geek, and he's the real thing.

Atlas is awesome. It's going to make my life as a developer a lot easier. Lots of other thoughts on my blog...
http://www.campusfish.com/Jeff

[BogusName]

Gates' Way of Describng His Anti-Competitive Practices

People are using other tools--around scripting, PHP and all that. But we've come in and really targeted that market.

What a joke. I'm tired of hearing this guy hijack every web innovation and destroying the business model with his anti-competetitive practices. They have to be #1 in search too? Why?

MS is just not good for the industry at whole. I guess that is my point.

[gengaretjax]

its funny...

I have worked with and for MSFT for quite some time, and have been a Sr. Web Developer for just about a decade now. Each year I watch and listen to the countless bantering of ney sayers and individual speculations about how the web, software or some such other targeting market where MSFT is currently flourishing and hear the same banter: "...They are slow, they have issues, they get viruses, its hard to use etc etc."

Lets put things into perspective: The first websites (BBS's) where neither MSFT or any other product...they were for lack of any other term RTF enabled sites with hotscripting. When MSFT released their first incarnations of Internet Information Server..(Allowing hosting of web html content), we suddenly and quickly saw a rise in web usage. I am in no real way a proponent of MSFT practices or ideals. I am however, someone that uses what is USED, not someone that niches the 1% Client Usability. If you want to draw clients and make money on the web you at this moment have two foundations in which to grow your site: PHP or ASP in some form...Sure there are other languages and other services..however, for the mass majority its PHP/ASP and thats it.

In usage and development I find it so much easier to develop code rich, feature intense sites using ASP than I do with PHP. I also, look at the commercial reusability of ASP and continue to use it from that perspective.

I agree that opensource is a good idea in theory, however in my experience its practice and methods are a bit questionable. There a great deal many solutions that seem promising however, a great many others that are complete failures.

In the ASP world things progress quicker and are released more often. I am more in tune with this ideal.

In summary: For the Time being MSFT Drives our digital world like it or not. OpenSource is something that has the potential do take away some of that driving force but, we still have to wait and see if it actually moves.

Gates is in my own opinion not only a real visionary but, also someone that understands where the market is at. Search is first page a person uses...why not use that as a leveraging agent for your own software usage...Makes sense to me.

Anyways...peace.