'MICROSOFT IS STILL ABOUT THE MAGIC OF SOFTWARE'

On a visit to India to receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace for the work done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates also caught up with the activities of Microsoft India and his pet project, Microsoft Research, which is doing ground-breaking work on humancomputer interaction in Bangalore. In an exclusive interview with Business Today's Rohit Saran and Kushan Mitra, Gates talked about everything from the Apollo moon landings and the controversial AIDS initiative of the foundation to the magic of software and even a passing reference to Google. Excerpts:

It has been 40 years since the Apollo II expedition to the moon. What did that mean to you as a young boy in America in 1969?

Well, a lot. Staying up at night watching updates on TV. Thinking of the scientific advancements that were required to achieve this safely! What really led to this was the competition with the USSR. It made the US put more money into math and science and the dividends on that paid off over time. The so-called DARPA (the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) money was a result of the science of which the moonshot was an exemplary project.

Do you feel the US is losing some of the edge it has had in research since the end of World War II? Forty per cent of the PhDs being done in the US in Science are by foreign citizens ...

Well, there is nothing wrong with that. A lot of smart people have always wanted to go to the US from across the world. Current US policies do not take full advantage of that and I have been critical of that. But when you think of improvements in the world, it is not a goal to have the US' relative position as strong. The US' relative strength was the strongest in 1946. So, in a certain relative sense, it has been downhill from there.

A lot of advances, in computer and medical sciences, are still being done in the US.. It would be good for the rest of the world to reduce that relative lead. Not reduce the absolute innovation, but more in proportion with their share of the world's IQ. It's great that at least India and China are making progress in that direction.

You have put in an additional $80 million in the AIDS alleviation project being funded by your foundation. However, there have been stories written that the $253 million invested so far has been wasted ...

Listen, I'm sorry that you read journalism of that quality. You should do some research. These people are excluded usually from the benefits of protection from this disease (AIDS), and what Avahaan did in terms of building those communities and reducing risky behaviour and saving lives is phenomenal. The data is very clear: Condom use has gone up, violence has gone down, sexually transmitted diseases have gone down. Go to the communities, talk to these excluded people and then write.

Do you feel there are unrealistic or heightened expectations whenever Bill Gates comes along?

No. Half the world's children who are not vaccinated are born here. They don't know my name. They'll never know my name. They have no expectation or anything. The goal should be to get them vaccinated so that they don't die. And is that too high an expectation, that India should do as well as, say, Bangladesh in terms of vaccination? I don't know, but on behalf of those children we should be ambitious.

Do you feel the Internet has changed the face of software development, particularly with regard to free and open-source software?

Not really. There has always been both free and open-source software. I do think that the companies that pay salaries will continue to charge for their software and that there will always be software jobs. I think that commercial software will continue to exist because software is so critical to companies, because they value the competitive edge, the time, the quality and so on.

Software is a much bigger industry today. When we entered, the average price of a piece of software was $10,000. And when we came out with software priced at $10, $20 and $30, people thought we were crazy. The PC revolution could only happen due to low-cost software that gave people a reason to buy the personal computer. And the growth of the industry into a high-volume, low-cost model happened in the '80s and the '90s, and Microsoft was at the centre of it. And it is a bigger industry by at least a factor of 50 today than when we started out.

Where do you see software going in the future?

We will be integrating cameras with computers and with our game console, the Xbox 360, in the future. And that is because of advancements in hardware and software that will be able to "watch you . Our lab does some of that work. There is machine translation stuff that gives people without any knowledge of English access to the Internet. Speech recognition was one of the first Microsoft Research projects 20 years ago and there is very good progress on building it into the PC and the phone. So, this area of "natural interaction speech, vision and ink is the area where people will see experiences change the most.

What do you make of the sudden switchover to low-cost consumer hardware with the "Netbook revolution? Are you working to provide cheaper hardware and make computing accessible to people on this side of the world?



We have been working on low-cost hardware ever since Microsoft has been in existence. The key to our success is volume, a personal computer for everyone. And so, we wish the hardware was free (laughs), but we haven't figured out how to do that. And we don't just want to drive the price down, we want the power of the device to go up say, make it a high-powered reading device. The Kindle is a special-purpose device. But some of these new Netbooks with the thin-form factor and long battery life and the reading software help you navigate and take notes as we are doing in Windows 7. We think we can create a great reading device that also browses, does Microsoft Office, communicates, thus bring it all together so that you don't need to buy two devices.

The lowest cost computing device today is the phone. So you have people whose first computer is the phone..., then they will get a Netbook PC, then if they're doing super-well they'll get a 30-inch LCD to celebrate their great new job or something. So we want to have software that works seamlessly across all those devices, and all those price points are coming down. But it won't just be price, (but also things like) putting the camera in, putting something else in. Microsoft is in various markets manufacturing, healthcare, education and creating the software to help these industries take off.

How do you think Microsoft's approach to research differs from other companies?

If you take R & D (research and development), we spend more than any other company in the world. If you take pure research, we spend a very high percentage compared to most companies and we tend to do longerterm research than most companies. IBM has put some money into research, not as much as us, but they have done good, long-term research. They have somewhat the same open model that we have had. One of our competitors, Google, has not chosen to have the same level of openness in the work they do; hopefully they will make a good choice on that.

And this focus on research is not going to change in the future?

No. Even in these tough economic times, we did not cut back on research. We think it is the key to our future. We have things like quantum computing that in best case will be done in 10 years.

What role does the US government still play in research?

Well, the US government still funds a lot of research, but mainly in health sciences rather than computer sciences. Microsoft does not take much in the way of government money, but our university partners rely heavily on the government and we in a sense rely on them. As part of the research ecosystem they are critical. It is good that the Indian government is doing more, pushing the PhD level programmes, looking at other funding towards innovative universities. Industry and universities kind of grow together. We made an early bet on research, but we figured that the universities would come along with us.

Microsoft is doing some exciting research in software in healthcare. How can software help in making healthcare cheaper and more accessible?

Our lab in Bangalore has created a conference where we discuss such things. A few months ago, we were talking of cellphones for healthcare records and for banking. This conference is pretty hardcore about talking of the few things that worked and the lot of things that didn't work, and that is why bringing social scientists in was part of the original design of the thing. Some universities have been very proactive, such as Carnegie-Mellon, University of California, Berkeley.

You recently said that Microsoft has achieved the ideal of what you wanted it to become. Can you explain this?


Microsoft, every year, has to make new inventions and hire smart new people, and make its old products look a lot less capable than its new products. That's really our stiffest competition. Is the new Office or the new Windows worth the trouble? The new cellphone? The new video game? And the company does that. It has a culture of developing cool new software. The research piece that I've highlighted is the jewel in the crown. Microsoft is a big part of low-cost computing and the Internet. We are a big part of the research that gets done and I'm very proud of that.

So, what is next?

Well, more breakthrough research. It is a part-time thing for me now, but I'm very involved with where search is going and where Office is going. And Microsoft is still about the magic of software and that is not changing. So, in a sense, we are staying true to what we did in the very beginning, but in a far more ambitious and large-scale way.