The price of fame

Do you walk around on the show floor?
Yeah. I spend at least a day every year out there going around, both going to the companies that I already know and seeing what small companies are doing. This year there's a pavilion, which they call an Internet pavilion, although everything is Internet-related this year. What's the distinction? But there are interesting things to see there. And then every year, you see what's the latest in storage and flat-panel display technologies, etc.

Do people recognize you?
More and more. I have to be sure not to pause because I'm going to get a lot of people coming up to me. Although that's nice, my goal is to go out and see a number of product demos. So I move at a pretty good clip. Last year [NBC news anchor Tom] Brokaw and I did a piece, and because they had the cameras following us, that's a real crowd attractor.

You wrote a book about technology and you write a regular syndicated column. Why is it people are so interested in what Bill Gates has to say about technology and the future?
I think they're interested in the future and how they should be planning for their careers or some entrepreneurial thing they want to do. It's an unbelievable subject in terms of the magazines that people buy and these shows. The depth of interest always surprises me. I wrote the book, which is called The Road Ahead because there are some things as a technologist that I think have broad societal implications. And you don't just want technologists to be thinking, "Wow, schools could be doing certain things, or privacy rules may have to get more sophisticated in certain ways, or maybe libraries should become a place where anybody can come and have access to these PCs connected to the Internet." Sharing those thoughts makes sure that the debate about how we shape these opportunities starts a little bit earlier than it might have otherwise.

Why do you think they are so interested in what you in particular have to say, rather than, say, someone like Jim Barksdale?
I think that there's a great interest in any of the leaders in this industry. Microsoft has a range of products; we've been around and done more than anybody else has in the software arena. And so we have a lot of users. If you take all of the [Microsoft] Office-related products, that's over 50 million people there. If you take all the operating system products, that's over 200 million people there. We're putting more into research and development than any other company because we're optimistic about speech and vision and learning, and that optimism--which we showed with our commitment to graphical interfaces, with our commitment to CD-ROM, Windows NT--again, we're making some risky bets and people enjoy knowing where we are going.

People are interested in my role as the leader of Microsoft. We're not just talking a vision. We're saying where we're going to go next year and we have so much customer feedback...We get millions of calls every year. We spend a lot of time logging those calls and I spend a lot of time listening in on those calls and then seeing statistically what the issues are. Really shaping our product developments based on that feedback makes sure we're not getting off track. What is it that's confusing? What is it that's not powerful enough?

So if you combine the use of that feedback--which is just getting richer and richer all the time because now we have people on the Internet--and right in the middle of when you are using the product, you can see, "the feature I'm using now, I want it to be different." More and more feedback together with the research guides us in what I think in the right direction.

NEXT: No conflicts here