microsoft. bill gates

CARLSBAD, Calif.--In an interesting but perhaps unsurprising move, Microsoft plans to add multitouch interface to Windows 7, CNET News.com has learned. The interface will be shown in just a few minutes as part of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates' keynote at the D6 event here.

Update: Ballmer says it will come in late 2009. Corporate VP Julie Larson-Green demonstrated the multitouch technology, painting with several fingers at the same time to show how it can process not just touch, but multiple simultaneous input.

"It's much faster to do certain tasks than using a mouse," Larson-Green … Read more

CARLSBAD, Calif.--So I'm here live at D6 and ready to live blog the Bill and Steve show, along with Webware's Rafe Needleman. If this newfangled tech works, the live blog will be below.

I'm told the Windows 7 preview will be just a tiny--if highly anticipated--part of the discussion. My source on that, by the way, is Bill Gates.

OK, so the blog is up and running. If you need a break, I have another post based on some of Gates' pre-keynote talk. (short version--no comment on Yahoo)

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.… Read more

Bill Gates will step away from the day-to-day activities at Microsoft in about a month to focus his estimable intellect and energy on his nonprofit work, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He will remain chairman of the company.

As the figurehead, spiritual leader and most forceful personality at the company he founded in 1975, Gates will be missed in some of the daily skirmishes and debates over technology issues and how Microsoft wages its battles with Google, Apple, Oracle, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the European Union. But, Gates gave up the CEO title to Steve Ballmer … Read more

It wasn't exactly Minority Report but Bill Gates' technology demonstration at the company's CEO Summit earlier Wednesday may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough. (Cue Winston Churchill here about how this is not the end, the beginning of the end, but perhaps, it's the end of the beginning.)

As Gates demoed a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall, there was little resemblance to Tom Cruise's futuristic data juggling in that 2002 sci-fi performance as he moved 3D screens around … Read more

Microsoft must spend some days gazing around in a stupor. The company continues to print money yet its most recent product launch of Vista fell on deaf ears. Microsoft of course wants money, but it also wants to be thought of as a leader in the software world, and with Vista it is definitely following...but who it's following, nobody knows.

Now Bill Gates has declared that Windows 7, the next release of the operating system, won't be nearly as bad as Vista:

MIAMI--In two separate speeches on Friday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made the case that businesses need to see serving the poor as part of their mission and that governments need to see private businesses as potential partners.

One of the big topics for both audiences was the notion of microfinance--improving the access to credit and banking to the poor.

"The idea of how they create loans for the poorest is part of it," he said at the Government Leaders Forum. But although today microfinance has focused on loans, there is more to it. "We need to get … Read more

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:40 p.m. PDT to add more on Gates' and Mundies' policy talk.

WASHINGTON--It's not always easy persuading politicians on Capitol Hill to take up items on Silicon Valley's wish list, even if you're Bill Gates and his posse.

That was one message that the Microsoft chairman and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie had on Thursday for the some 1,100 local business and government representatives gathered at a breakfast here sponsored by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. (NVTC's board includes companies like IBM, Micron, … Read more

WASHINGTON--For the second year in a row, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates ventured to Capitol Hill and urged Congress to let more foreign-born engineers work in the United States and to direct larger numbers of tax dollars to research and education.

Just as he did around the same time last year before a U.S. Senate committee, Gates on Wednesday contended America's competitiveness in the global economy is "at risk." He said Congress, the administration, and the next president must commit to overhauling immigration policy and encouraging both public and private research investment.

"It makes no sense … Read more

Microsoft is not a beacon of free expression in the face of China's government restrictions on online speech. But in a talk at Stanford, he said no one can control free expression on the web.

"I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet," Gates said, according to IDC news service. "You cannot control the Internet."

As the article notes, Microsoft has been complicit in Chinese censorship. In the most high-profile case, the company shut down a blog by Michael Anti, a blogger … Read more