[Music] [Music] yeah in twenty years of distinguished lectures of the MIT lab for computer science I think this is the largest crowd we've had congratulations bill as all of you know we're celebrating the 20th year of the distinguished lectures of the MIT lab for computer science and our policy is never to invite a speaker again but since this is the 20th year we broke the policy and Bill is coming here for the second time and I think that is very appropriate those of you who know about the seri
es know that we like to introduce our speakers with a little tidbit from their personal lives that may not be known since there are so many young people in the audience and after all these distinguished people are great role models bill as you all know grew up in Seattle went to school there then went to Harvard and I think everybody knows what happened from that point on so let's not talk about that instead let's talk about two things I'll keep this very short what turned him into science techn
ology software what were the earliest forces because I know many of you have been through the same kind of experiences well bill says that until the seventh grade he was getting lousy grades in math and then a great math teacher came and said to him I have confidence in you you can do much better then the teacher roped him in to do math puzzles then after he got excited with math puzzles the teacher got him to do them faster and one thing led to the other and the fire was ignited the other big t
hing that I asked all our distinguished lectures to do for the young people in the audience is to summarize their entire life's experience into one or two sentences giving the young people a charge a mission for what to do in their careers here is Bill Gates mission to you he said I don't know how it all happened I love to play with software it's a fascinating thing I said Bill give me a sentence or two he said find something you really like to do and about which you have a great deal of curiosi
ty and it may be very surprising to you and to the world even if it doesn't look like it might work at first it might work after all Bill Gates well good afternoon what I'm gonna go through today is talk a little bit about now the world of computing has derived on the communication scene and I'm gonna have a pretty broad impact because of that and talk about some of the research areas that suggest for software that are very exciting and at the same time very difficult and then I'll leave as much
time as I can for questions at the end well as was said I got into this thing by dropping out of school and I'm not recommending that but if the thing you're passionate about you think wait there's only a critical time window to get involved in sometimes it it does work and for me that was the kid computer on the cover of popular electronics in January 1975 my friend Paul and I had been working in software and we thought boy we want to be there early on and try and contribute some software and
that was based on Paul's educating me about Moore's law that these machines would become immensely powerful more powerful than even the most expensive computers of the day and so we we started off on that course really believing that software was quite distinct from hardware and that if you wanted to have a company doing state of the art software it ought to be very neutral to the various hardware providers and really optimize hiring and training around the software because it is quite different
and PC has come a long ways in the little bit over 20 years since then not only the power as Moore's law has has done its work but also the the overall experience the the use of graphics the communications in and out of the machine it's easy to look at the machines we have today and say boy you know how did we ever use the machines of four or five years ago but certainly four or five years from now we'll be seeing the same thing we'll be saying you know why didn't we have a better user interfac
e why didn't we have motion video 3d graphics built-in I think it's not being too presumptuous now to say that the PC is as it's connected to the Internet is will be as important as any major advance and communications people talk about this being the Information Age well what the heck does it mean information age very strange term well what it means is that in the same way we take electricity or running water we take that completely for granted now it's part of our regular experience we'll take
for granted the idea of using a variety of information appliances connected up to the Internet as our way of getting information abstain up to date of transacting business of finding people with with common interests and unlike those previous advances however this one in the period of a decade will become pervasive people have a tendency to overestimate what can happen in two years and underestimate what can happen in in 10 years and certainly with the internet I think we're seeing a lot of tha
t right now people who debunk it and say it will never be mainstream there they're just wrong at least we're betting in a big way that they're wrong but people who think all these problems and in acceptance will come in two or three or four years time I think they're under estimating that it does take times for these things to be adopted even today you know when I go to read the newspaper yeah I go up and and I look at the Wall Street Journal online and I look at the trade magazines online but I
always find myself picking up the real Wall Street Journal and scanning it now it partly has to do with the resolution of computer screens it partly has to do with familiarity but I don't I know very few people who moved all together to rely on on the Internet for all the information they get so it will take some time and yet if you compare it to these previous advances it's far more rapid than any one of those in fact these advances took place over at least one generation so somebody who was a
round and in working when the invention came through didn't really have to care about it it was only people who were growing up the next generation who had to think how to how to make it part of their everyday activity now as this is all happening of course the machines and I used the term PC very broadly will be improving quite dramatically a larger storage is important so that we can start to do caching at many levels so all those pages that you like to go out and see on a regular basis they'r
e just going to be there the faster processor is is important to create a 3d virtual environment to do the kind of rec recognition and inference that you want to have in these environments I think voice input is is absolutely necessary to get into the mainstream I think people underestimate the importance of screen technology and it's wonderful to see there are literally dozens of approaches for getting low cost much higher dots per inch type screens available at very broadly eventually I think
we'll talk about computer devices primarily just by seeing what the size and the resolution of the screen is all the way from the pocket-sized device to the desktop device to the wall size device to the stadium device that will be the one unique distinguishing characteristic this internet phenomena is an incredible thing and although for many many years we were optimistic about online services that people would dial up at 1200 baud and find something cool there it was disappointing it just never
caught on it never got enough people for it to make sense to build a community or to invest in publishing or to think about advertising as a meaningful thing there and it certainly was a surprise to me that in 93 and 90 or a lot of things that have been around for some time tcp/ip and in some newer protocols particularly HTTP HTML actually got electronic communication to critical mass I started to get a glimpse of it when one of the people who worked worked for me went back to his University Co
rnell and said that it wasn't just computer scientists out there on the web it was everybody in the university and that was that was 93 by 94 the phenomena was in full force and a phenomena much more with a lot more attention being paid to it than any that I than I have ever seen before when the PC industry was getting going there were a lonely group of people a few people who believed and we'd get together in these small little industry shows and say we know and and IBM doesn't know well leader
we had to invite IBM and to help make it happen but that's a long story it was it it was a group of pioneers working on their own with this revolution in electronic communications it's so mainstream you can't get away from it even if you wanted to you can't turn on your TV set without seeing lots and lots of URLs you can't read magazines without encountering that and there's almost a a Gold Rush type phenomena that we're seen here that's a fantastic thing because it means the level of investmen
ts are very high the innovation is is quite rapid and we actually went out and interviewed musician down in Bermuda and we talked to a lot of people but we thought he was the most articulate about what the state of the art is and and what's really going on with the internet phenomena so let's go ahead and look at a movie of what this musician he had to say hahaha it's digital mine it's really please if you have a satellite dish on the lawn and now computer is your best friend you spend your free
time losing the info from your on the net for hours on end if you think you understand my fluid and all the deals that Villa is pursuing if cyberspace is your kind of place and you're a technophile at heart your state-of-the-art oh yeah your state-of-the-art [Music] so necessity mari de cuando futur back up to me these cookies provide to internal computer but he can my lord krishna chest simply traveling hora c vu toka TV pen serial aguado dollar swara k comparing a low spot a televised evil la
IBM that weapon attends immediate writer Matsuura salon PhD mother teresa castle antipas or grazie Padre Rasheeda write poetry Paternoster immediate a mental gratified yeah proposing to della swara que para ninos party IBM atresia Mille grazie Padre her may your previous collie spot in quicken / Eva in mythical Charlie Charlie [Music] the latest in technology and anti athlean connection you've got your names without a biology and have a digital obsession if you be in the best home pages a reall
y cool cuz they are right if you like to have another guys unit back and you think that makes you smart you're state-of-the-art [Music] have you ever worn a fax machine on your head you will and the company that will make money every time can you convert your state of they are with the web of wealth system you can start today with an online service then run an interactive television system from the comfort of your own living room you'll learn how to make deals to lunch and take 15% of the gross
so get John a vs. amazing web of wealth system by calling this toll-free number today Thank You friends before I discovered my web of wealth system I was working two menial jobs I couldn't even afford to buy my wife a used car but today I'm on wife number four and they all drive fabulous cars just like this by realizing that venture capitalist have to turn ordinary people like you and me into millionaires or they don't get rich either plus just mention the Internet in your business plan and they
won't care if you're on parole you'll be funded I guarantee it why because as this chart proves soon there'll be more internet than people folks nobody understands the internet but everyone's afraid of being left out with my web of wealth you can be a part of this explosive growth yeah I'd really like to be on that superhighway to fame and riches so did you sign me up today to the web of wealth my point to you is that everyone has some worthless content languishing around in their garage some w
eird little fetish tucked away in some closet please put it on the net and you too in days we'll be a global sensation folks everyone is cruising the net from busy executives eager to expand their mind to people with so much time on their hands they just don't know what to do it's how they stay informed about what's hot what's not folks let's hear from some of the thousands of people who have used my web of wealth system I started my first software company with a high school buddy it turned out
okay but since then I've discovered the web of wealth and Hollywood's beat a path to my door thank you John avarice believe me it's so easy to get into the online service business if I can do it so can you order John a versus web of wealth system today and get into the digital age operators are standing by now you'll be banking we'll be ordering pizza and you'll be sending mail with a $12,000 computer instead of 32 cent stamps before we discovered the web of wealth system my friends and I were j
ust struggling filmmakers but now we've got our very own media company and thanks to the web of wealth we're no mickey mouse operation [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] all right so we've got all this excitement the biggest rolled gold rush of all time taking place what what's going to hold it back well as I say there's social adoption getting used to using this to gather information and buy things but we also have a technology barrier there's one element in this picture that doesn't pr
oceed it sort of Moore's law type Ric type rates and that's the local loop connecting up primarily homes but also businesses and here we can look at sort of three generations of capability we have today's Potts phone next network where we can use 2088 modems and dial-up and of course text is very fast in pictures are just barely okay it takes anywhere from two to ten seconds to get a webpage down that has fairly high resolution images now across pots people think they might be able to squeeze ou
t another factor of two particularly if they go asymmetric in the use of it but that's going to be about it and yet for quite some time that'll be how a high percentage of households are connected up originally there was a view well five years ago there was a view that the companies would skip over any sort of mid band approaches and go right to broadband in fact there was a view that they'd skip over the PC and they connect up TVs for video on-demand in cable and phone companies we're trying to
outdo each other with big promises of how many millions of people they would have hooked up by now well if you go out there and look at how many people are hooked up it's a few thousand it's a number that rounds to zero and so something happened well as they were making those promises they weren't really thinking about what the revenue opportunity was people saw that that simply by doing digital compression in using broadcast digital broadcast your take rate on pay-per-view where you only do sa
y the top 10 or 20 movies you get 75 percent of the revenue of a true video on-demand system so your extra money to fund from that application to fund a true ATM fiber network is very modest indeed and new applications whether for medical or travel there was no way to bootstrap them that is without the users there weren't the applications without the applications there weren't the users time warner made a valiant effort with their orlando trial putting twenty thousand dollar machines into people
's homes to just try it out but it didn't spark into something important now throughout all this clearly the PC was getting stronger I'm particularly in terms of the home market and then the internet came along and and woke everybody up to the fact that there's an evolutionary path that is we can keep increasing the bandwidth get better audio support get better video support and move to have higher and higher bandwidths that eventually will reach every home now some of those intermediate steps a
re grouped under what I call mid band here is DN PC cable modems ADSL any of these approaches let the still images come in incredibly good speeds and let you start playing with video none of them are good enough that you'd sit and watch a two-hour movie through a mid band connection so that awaits sort of the ultimate Holy Grail which is the broadband and broadband will happen we were spending a lot of time developing software for interactive TV and a lot of the work we're now applying to the in
ternet insecurity a lot of the new user interface work we have comes out of that interactive TV work in fact the idea of being able to partition media servers so you can deliver audio and video using low-cost technology you don't have to have a essentially a supercomputer server to do that that all comes out of that interactive TV working is directly applicable to the internet so now the world at large I think has a more realistic view of how bandwidth rolls out and to be honest I think there's
a lot of households that as long as it's narrowband it's just not fast enough or compelling enough the information they need they can get from the newspaper or calling someone up and it's only when we get into the realm of rich interaction that it'll start to be as pervasive as we want it to be now there will be quite a few physical device types hooked up the PC and and we'll see more and more differentiation between desktop and portable and certainly there will be a way of using your TV to conn
ect to the web pages are not authored to work with that type of display today that's fairly straightforward we need to define have a well-defined subset of broad HTML in particular in terms of what kind of add-on capabilities what variety of media objects we're going to support so that if we have two ROM that software make it run in a finite amount of RAM and this can work so set-top boxes building the electronics and the TV or using game machines which are out there and you can plug in a modem
and a browser those would be how the TV gets pulled in certainly a voice handset makes sense connected up it's a great trade-off in terms of the the size of the device and simplicity and that's often what you want and it should be nice to have the connectivity for voice with the way that that things are tariff there we also are big believers in a machine that you carry around in your pocket that connects through digital wireless in a sense these personal digital assistants things like Newton or
the sharp machines or Scion are sort of progenitors of this class but I think there's a a radical change in how you think about it when you have the digital connectivity when you can just walk through a hotel lobby and out by having the wireless connection where you can board an airplane without physical tickets and select a see-through using that digital connection when the GPS feature is cheap enough that your scene maps and it's populated with all the nearby things that you might be intereste
d in and certainly there are many many other locations will see pcs including in the automobile there's a lot of industry competition and it's part of what makes our industry so much fun there are multiple companies with operating systems there are multiple companies with browsers Microsoft is a distant distant number-two in that competition we having just entered it fairly recently there's a lot of competition over defining what is openness openness to me means that anything to me clone there's
no patents there's no intellectual property that stands in the way of somebody creating something that's compatible but better and the beauty of that is it forces you to keep prices extremely low and listen to the customer feedback about how you can do better versions all the popular products that Microsoft has ever done DAWs windows they've been cloned but we've been able to move fast enough to stay ahead here we've been on the other side of the coin in businesses like spreadsheets and word pr
ocessing where we started with very low market share but the companies involved not only didn't they have anything proprietary that they could protect but they didn't move their application along so whether it's one two three or WordPerfect their market share fell over time you know perhaps NetWare is a similar situation and if we do extremely well then we'd add browsers to the list of such competitions now part of that is that we have a vision of integration of actually having the local informa
tion we access on the PCB is easy to get to as remote information and in fact your things like help files well wife those just be webpages there's no reason you should have to think about help any differently from any other text that comes up on the screen and likewise directories themselves you should be able to annotate you can think of today's directories it's just a degenerate case of a web page it's a web page with where each file is essentially a link which sort of harkens back to the kind
of Gopher approach well we want to take and let you put arbitrary HTML including ActiveX controls into those pages so it's it's easy to find your way around the there's a major thing that's always gone on of PCs versus expensive computers as the chip technology and pcs has gotten better and better as the software has gotten richer it's taken over more and more of the computer marketplace and it's fair to say that within the next two or three years that performance and capabilities will be such
that you can reach up virtually to the top of the computing hierarchy and this is greatly reinforced by the positive feedback phenomena of getting more app the more applications you get the more volume you get the more volume you get the more its attractive it is to build those applications more recently some of these these people like well son in particular have taken attack of not trying to sell a more expensive computer but selling something less and we don't know what it is yet when they're
there actually exists this is a so-called networked computer we'll be able to see what the trade-off involved is if you're talking about a high quality screen that you're gonna sit close to and something that runs a browser it's tough to eliminate much that's in a PC because a browser is the most demanding PC application its users more RAM it grows faster than anything including word processing and spreadsheets all the classic things that tend to push the limits are out the window it's the brows
er and browser growth if you just take Netscape as an example it's doubling in size every nine months and you know at some point there's got to be a limit there in terms of what can be done but still it's very relevant additions that are being put in so it certainly isn't gonna stop anytime soon they there's so much software involved in making the web fulfill this dream of information at your fingertips there's there's programming tools but I I'd be the first to say that most people who create w
ebpages won't be programming even if they want to put in little animations and buttons and rich interactive behavior they'll just have a palette of controls and if they say okay I want my users to vote on this they'll drag in a voting control and it'll automatically be connected up to the right database capability there so the actual programming tools where job has now come in it's a first-class language that's going to be a choice just as much as C has ever been or COBOL or basic or any of the
other popular languages that's one dimension here but there's another dimension of helping people manage large webs of content when you get thousands and thousands of links it's very hard to picture they're all correct and when you start to reorder your taxonomy how do you make sure that links that people are still holding that they get redirected to the right place you also have tricky issues of versioning if I want to prepare do some work preparing a new website I don't want to duplicate every
thing I have today I just essentially want a version off of that versioning also comes up in terms of preservation now one thing about written material is you know usually we can go back and dig around and find a historical record of what a product brochure looked like or what a company was offering with the web there's a tendency now to just completely wipe out the historical electronic presence and that certainly won't do over time we have to have an approach that allows for archiving so you c
an always go back and and see what was being said at any point in time so managing this type of content brings in some new issues if we go back to the people who are in a sense the conceptual pioneers of hypertext people Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research or Ted Nelson with his Xanadu project they had a much richer concept of what hypertext would be all about in terms of annotation and tracking and even even commercial mechanisms that might make sense there than we've been able to implement to
date so lots of work to go on that has to go on in an integrated fashion one problem that corporations have is that administering all this software we have database software male software web software a file sharing software you have all these things have different interfaces different administration different security that's a real mess and so we've got to really pull it together and take public key encryption and these these x.509 certificates and make that the foundation for directory that ca
n be used across all the different applications and therefore not only simplify the cost within a corporate network but allow these inner enterprise applications to work because the trust hierarchies can be set up so that information moves where it should and doesn't move where it it shouldn't now the Internet is today buta sort of an environment that government's not involved and it'd be nice if we could leave it that way but I have to say that it's I think it's very unlikely that institutions
like the security Exchange Commission are gonna let people you know do offerings on the internet without looking at the honesty of the material that's being promoted I think it's unlikely Federal Trade Commission will let people scam buyers without looking into that and and laws related to libel or copyright and those things probably will I have to be accommodated but it's a very difficult accommodation because we haven't really defined modes of behavior and we haven't dealt with the fact that t
his is a global network and it's going to be a terrible problem if there's overly restrictive laws that really prevent people from taking advantage of but certainly the telecommunications deregulation bill went too far in terms of trying to limit indecency on the internet that is there's now a court suit that Microsoft and a bunch of people other people are involved in in suing the federal government to get that overturn which I'm I'm very optimistic about there are major issues if this thing is
as important as we like to think it is of making sure it's pervasively available so sort of duplicating the creation of the public library system which took a period of over a hundred years to make sure anybody could get get two books that's got to be done and the investments in communications infrastructure has to be there and one of the hot issues right now that I'm going to go down to Washington DC for another round of lobbying on is that this country has restrictive export laws on encryptio
n technology and today they only let us export 40-bit encryption which of course can be broken by many people in this audience and it won't doesn't take you more than a day C to do it it's a pretty ludicrous situation because it's not as though there's some US monopoly on understanding encryption technology and the problem is that software vendors outside of the US are now starting to provide packages that have very good encryption the problem is that organizations like the National Security Age
ncy justify their budget on being able to tap into people and if mass-market software has very very good encryption then it just makes their job dramatically harder most of the work they're able to do benefits from sloppiness and by having it built into these electronic systems you'll get rid of a lot of that sloppiness and so it's a tough issue and believe me it's very hard to lobby against these intelligence organizations but we'll see what what can be done there so definitely a lot of issues
that come up I was always very proud of the fact that you know for the first ten years of Microsoft history we didn't have to think about government and you know lobbying and anything like that it doesn't seem like that much fun in some ways but now as a major company in the industry there are a broad set of issues you know making sure immigration laws don't get overly restrictive that we have to spend time in and get involved in I want to quickly talk about some research areas and you'll see yo
u as I talk about these that these are areas that there's great work going on all over the world some of them are ones that that Microsoft has a research group with about a hundred and twenty people nowadays that it works on some of these and they're all predicated on computing cost communications cost declining so that we can almost think of them as free over time and one of the things I think that's wonderful about software is unlike a lot of companies where research tends get very decoupled f
rom the mainline company and almost be partitioned off as though it wasn't part of the same company in the software world the ability to take great research ideas and when they work out being able to put them in products and take advantage of them is quite incredible and we've already even though we when we started the research group we didn't expect that we're only three years into it and we're already seen things like our word processor ship with work that the natural language group has done I
want to do a little demo of a fun thing we put together this is just one person in research Dave Carlin who was thinking about computer dialogues and how boring chat is and what he could do about that so he was thinking well maybe this 3d stuff is great but there's no record and it's hard for lots of people to to watch into that and so he actually came up with a fun idea that we call comic chat and it draws on a very rich art form so I'm gonna ask Craig belington to come up and he's actually go
nna connect up and hopefully show us a comic chat with some people across across the nation on the west coast great thanks bill you mentioned a few things earlier things like internet explorer 3.0 which yesterday went to beta one you can get that I heard you on www.microsoft.com/mechanics off is very excited about that release bill mentioned the ActiveX technologies that's included in Internet Explorer you'll see things like support for Java support for scripting languages like JavaScript and VB
script support for frames animated gifs all that good stuff that you like in HTML or that you don't like so much in HTML one of the things that I'm going to show you is an application called comic chat which is actually what we call an active document so this document when you click on it could come up in place of whatever container object you happen to be working in something like a Microsoft Word Microsoft Excel or a particular web browser like Internet Explorer 3.0 I'm just going to I keep h
earing this hissing noise I'm just going to introduce a to comic chat I have a character here named Armando and that's bill G your name is right there I've always wanted to do this and pretend I was Bill G up on the Internet a lot of people do that I've heard that what we have here is kind of a more fun version of a chat room with a record or a history of things that go on in that chat room if we can see all the people that are in the room here's myself as bill G there's a mark Emmy and Tapscott
in fact I want to get these people's attention so I'm gonna go ring mark and he just saw a little dialog box on his computer and hopefully we've got his attention now and I can now that I've selected mark I can say something like hi and you see my character waves how are you and it also points to you can everybody see this okay why don't we make it a little bigger okay hi how are you you notice that as I typed something like hi it started to wave but then it said how are you so it pointed to th
e person that I selected we can scroll down a little bit someone doesn't believe that I'm Bill Gates right I'm Bill Gates and I'm really Ross Perot can we talk someone asked me how I am and I'm being wrung back by Mark whoever that is so he wanted to get my attention as well so we can scroll down are you never mind Elvis was here a while ago this must be a very popular chat room say I'm glad to be here this is cool and you notice that he's pointing to himself as I say that what are you up to Bil
l pleased to meet you all kinds of chat things going on I'm glad to be here there's cool pointing at himself so is it still raining in your neck of the woods I can say things like cheer up the Sun is coming out and when I do that I can put the typical colon and parentheses the little smiley face and of course when comic chat sees that it makes my character smile we just have to catch up to it there we go we're smiling while we put the little smiley face in our bubble there I could say something
like laughing doesn't hurt either and I can do the acronym of laugh out loud so put that in there and my character is laughing hysterically as you can see just by using the laugh out loud piece there's all kinds of emotions that you can draw out though which aren't automatic if I want to say hang on let's show some emotions and send that across I'm gonna actually just make this a little bigger so you can see my character over here and I can you notice that we have this wheel on the bottom right
it's kind of like a color wheel and that you can bring out ranges of emotions so someone can be kind of happy or very happy or very angry so as I move around it's very easy to bring out different impressions looks like he's doing a little dance doesn't it not only can you talk to these characters you can do things like normal things you'd find in a comic book actually what we're calling a comic chat so bill likes to take risks every once in a while so we can say runs with scissors and instead of
saying that I could think it or I can even make it an action and what happens there is it actually puts it at the top of the screen much like you would see in a comic book so there would be this narrative going by in the chat room as well as I'm describing things I can highlight everyone so I can say something to everyone and all the people show up in the room so we can see everybody it's easy to right-click on someone and I can ring them again I can get information about them with their profil
e and that should show up at the bottom hey Bill what's up this man was raised by armadillos at a roadside park in Texas he knows lots of armadillo songs want to hear one we'll skip that so other things that you can take advantage of besides the emotions being the fact that you can save any of these you can print these out and it looks like a comic book this will work with any normal RC server so I can go up to the Internet and the people who don't have this client well I'll actually see them as
characters and if they type something like the smiley face their character will be smiling and people who don't have this client will see well my text completely normally so it'll work with anyone else who's using something like this just to shock them a little bit we do have the option of changing our character so let's spruce bill's character up a little bit anybody have any choices Anna perhaps I'm not exactly sure what Connor is we'll have to look into that some aliens out there and again y
ou can experiment with their different emotions in the different settings so something a little fun something that came out of the research group again you'll see that shortly both for the web and for MSN that's coming chat thank you I think it illustrates there's a lot of room for creativity in terms of how we're gonna do collaborations just moving on on the topic of where the frontiers are one of the big ones that we see is is parallelism it's been kind of a Holy Grail in computer science for
a long time and as long as you know process for performance and in memory subsystems scaled up where most programs could run on a single computer it wasn't that important and so you'd have to say that progress has been been fairly limited but now that we're looking at database problems that are absolutely gigantic deep analysis problems we clearly need to be a lot stronger in partitioning distributing problems across different computers and there are huge commercial payback for being able to tak
e sort of arbitrary SQL and see what the patterns of usage are and being able to design a system that sets up the date of the right way testing is another area where I have to say I'm a little bit disappointed in the lack of progress if you think at Microsoft in a typical development group there's about sixty percent as many testers as there are engineers writing code and yet the engineer spends well over a third of his time doing testing type work you could say that we spend more time testing t
han we do writing the code and if you go back through the history of large-scale systems that's the way they've been but you know what kind of new techniques are there in terms of analyzing where those things come from and having constructs that do automatic testing very very little so if you know a researcher out there and wants to work on that problem boy we'd love love to put a group together certainly Security's a tough problem you've probably all been reading about two companies in Japan th
at just lost over a hundred million dollars because the pachinko electronic cards the encryption on the was cracked and so somebody actually fed in to the marketplace before they noticed this is pretty impressive a hundred million dollars worth of pachinko little credit slips and just shows you how much pachinko gets played in Japan but the idea of having good security and yet being able to change those systems that they're broken and having the amount of damage that can be done during a period
where say you're your private key has been accidentally released that's a very tough problem I'm very much a big believer in structure unification today we have all sorts of storage systems we've got files we've got pages we've got documents we've got records we've got messages all of those are stored in different ways and I really believe that there's some sort of super file system that has the replication security rich properties indexing that can actually unify a lot of those together and cer
tainly that the experience of using a computer would be dramatically better as a result of that some of the great frontiers have to do with sensory things generating real video type images the most advanced graphics work being able to do more and more of that in real time there's a reaaargh attacking of the graphics subsystem so you don't have the memory bandwidth bond-like that the frame buffer is creating that we we've been very involved in investing in and all sorts of high-level tools for sy
nthesis one of the companies that is now part of Microsoft is Softimage whose software is used to create things like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and we want to take those tools and make them so they can be used by high school teachers and put neat things together certainly video recognition is a great thing as long as you're gonna have a video conferencing camera why don't you recognize when somebody sits down why don't you recognize when they want to scroll more of a document to read more if
they want to throw the document away or whatever other crazy gestures they want to make the computer ought to use all those spare cycles to sit there and recognize that now certainly speech is the Holy Grail 20 years ago people are optimistic today they're optimistic I saw a wonderful demo of the work that Victor zoo's group has done recently and you know I think certainly over the next five to ten years those things will be deployed and used in a powerful way text to speech we've actually made
a lot of progress recently where we can actually take a speaker and listen to them and then do speech synthesis that we will really sound like the speaker I'm you know it's amazing how bad speech synthesis has been but it looks like just in the next year's that will improve and certainly linguistics being able to parse documents and gather knowledge from documents is one that that's very important I think software will also get involved in deep analysis deep modeling analysis whether it's using
Bayesian inference or some other type of engine underneath as you browse the web you think you go to it and you think well what should I do this weekend well how can the computer help you with that you shouldn't have to type in a bunch of URLs to go do that it should synthesize for you that information based on senior past behavior well that's a fairly deep set of analysis that that we're just at the beginning of and likewise bind something learning about something modeling what you understand
what you don't in rich collaboration require actually techniques that are our deep deep AI problems in terms of really rich learning I was saying to a smaller group here meeting with earlier I'm I'm surprised how little progress there's been in the last 20 years maybe it's just because I'm I'm over optimistic but when I left working in computer science I thought the thing I was gonna miss was that within the next decade computers would start to be able to learn in a meaningful sense not just hav
e a pattern that's pre-programmed in that they can happen to match against but really a general-purpose learning eventually if we don't figure this out will sequence enough and figure out how the brain does it so we won't have to figure it out we'll just use evolution solution I think we've got maybe 20 or 30 years before the that approach overtakes somebody who's trying to do it de novo so this whole software area is was said in the introduction I kind of got into it through serendipity it's a
fun area to work in it's a fast-moving area and by surprise it's actually a great business looking ahead there's a lot more room for breakthroughs and a lot of great value in in doing these kind of products well thank you no pun okay let's turn on the lights we'll have five minutes of questions please there are microphones I don't think we'll be able to take more than about four people so if you'd like to ask a question come to one of the mics I think there's only one mic which makes it easy hi
I have a question today there's a great push in our school systems for especially the lower grades to push kids into learning today's latest technology and mastering the today's current computers of software and stuff just wondering based on web something that I've heard you say in the past and read about is this a mistake that we're not focusing on the basics of learning versus today's technology and making good technicians of what is popular today and welcome to Boston well there's no need for
kids to learn the specifics of technology I mean the computer is just a tool and you know I don't think understanding that is very valuable because if there's anything that's going to change rapidly it's it's the way that those systems are put together you know I I think learning a programming language at some point is valuable because it gives you a sense of what the computer can do and what the computer can't do but I certainly don't see that as as being necessary as part of a high school cur
riculum you know the biggest issue nowadays is just getting enough computers out there so that people can individually pursue what they're curious about following all the great material that's out there on the Internet and it's it's more of a resource problem than a pedagogical problem I think okay why don't you identify yourselves as you before you ask the question please Alden Hayashi with data mason magazine was wondering if you could talk a little bit about a research that you're doing speci
fically at Microsoft's labs in some of the areas that you talked about in your presentation well there's a broad range of things going on in the graphics area if you go to SIGGRAPH you'll see some of the things where we're playing around with there some fun fun progress that's a great area we published a lot of papers about what we're doing in in natural language a few of the groups are more obscure there's a group headed by Charles Simoni that's looking at programming languages and can we expre
ss our intentions in a higher-level form it's been an area a lot of people work on and not made much progress he calls it intentional programming and it's fun to have you know risky things like that Charles wouldn't like it if I characterized it that way but I that's certainly how I do it there's about nine different groups right now in the in the research group if you had to pick one the top one which one would you pick as your most promising well voice in linguistics is is the most central it'
s just so natural if you can choose that that word and the progress is is quite good I mean partly by brute force we're just getting more MIPS to be able to do these things we're understanding sort of black boarding where you take context at different levels and bring that that together you can't solve the problem just by thinking of it as a low-level problem you really have to have high level knowledge or context in order to do it well all right professor Patrick Wong from Northeastern Universi
ty computer science I have a question why internet is doing a lot of good things to us we are also seeing a lot of are not ominous signs for instance too many children and students are playing internet too many hours without eating sleeping and too much crimes such as illegal cashing out from banking Paul no information and so forth so what do you think we should do to avoid disaster before it is too late before it's out of control well I think kids should eat [Applause] eight seriously I haven'
t heard that I know you know Raman Huijin got into his math enough he didn't eat much but remember the average American kid watches TV thirty hours a week so you know what if we cut that into doubt a little bit what have we cut into the time that they play video games a little bit now we don't want to cut into the time they spend reading or playing with other people are sleeping and eating and so parents may have a role to play here and in terms of crime on the internet the internet will be no m
ore lawless or less lawless I guess I should say lawful then any other domain is and so you know the people who are criminals in real life will be criminals on the internet it it it requires the police to get a little more sophisticated but I don't see any you know as the internet moves to the mainstream all those things will show up it's just part of the maturation of the of the medium except that the transporter flows will cause governments to worry about each other how do you handle that it t
hat is a very tricky problem because if you took a least common denominator approach you know what does Saudi Arabia want to sense or what does Singapore want a censor you'd be down to almost nothing and censorship is going to be very tough in this world we're working with w3c which is is hitting an initiative to have reading so-called pic system where you have either self reading a third-party rating of pictures with the up pages yeah it's great and that you could have a pantora parent who says
I'm only willing to let my kids see things that have been rated if it's unrated and it's outside the country say I won't let them see it or more strict might be not letting them see things inside the country but there are some very tough problems that have yet to be worked through about what kind of laws apply and how do how do things work all right please my name is Tim McNerney I'm from Harlequin incorporated I don't speak for my employer competition is good for innovation and market share is
a big concern at people who are looking at Microsoft have you guys stopped to consider that you guys could have a very large effect on creating competition in the marketplace by some sort of action on your part you spoke about openness earlier but there are other people who are concerned that your operating systems and your standards de facto standards are cutting competition off give something to say about that [Applause] there's a couple of things first of all there there is lots of competiti
on I mean you know Scott McNealy and IBM and you know HP there are several dozen people would come up here and tell you about the great things they're doing in operating systems another key thing to remember is that when we sell someone an operating system they own it and they can use it do whatever they want with it forever the only way that anybody that we get any additional income at all is come up with a better version of that operating system that they might want to purchase and so we're in
some sense our own biggest competitor the installed base of things that are out there if it's not a super improvement if it's not super inexpensive then nobody's gonna buy the new operating system they're just going to continue to work with what they have and particularly as pcs are getting to saturation levels where every desktop worker has a PC the replacement market is the biggest thing going on there you also have what I'll call a middleware phenomena where you know is Netscape and an opera
ting system competitor absolutely even though what they sell today is not an operating system it is growing to be an operating system and so the only question is do we do a good job taking Internet features and put those into Windows so it's integrated while they're building an operating system around their browser and there's plenty of room for both companies to be very very successful this is to close to not ask this question will the browser and the windows and all the good stuff merge and ye
ah it's just one thing it's a feature of the operating system that's my opinion and that'll be played out in the marketplace whether that's that's right or wrong all right thank you just just to build on that that exact same question you a sort of a business strategy question if you look at Microsoft's at netscape's home pages from time to time it appears there's a bit of a pissing contest going back and forth and he said oh my name is Bill Habib I'm an alum from class of 1980 so on a software c
ompany here in Cambridge so I'm wondering if you could elaborate on where you which space you think Microsoft needs to sort of dominate in the Internet in order to succeed as a browser desktop is a server as it commerce which arity you do you think Microsoft really needs to dominate in in terms of where the future will go and where do you think that'll leave Netscape well in a sense nobody in the other of the PC rules or internet rules anything is cloneable anything is cloneable and so if any of
the marketplace it buyers think that you're dominating any space then somebody will come in and clone it offer it at lower price or offer it with better features and so there's nothing that stops people come coming in and those are the name and you know that's why the PC industry has been so successful is that people have been able to clone what iBM has done in every product we've had has been cloned by many people now we've been able to do new versions and keep the prices down enough to stay a
head but it is a very risky business nobody has any guaranteed leadership you know take an example like tcp/ip stacks we decided to put that in the operating system do we dominate it well you know anybody can offer those things it turns out volume wise yeah people like it to be tested and built in and when you know we put ipv6 in there they'll want that to be nicely integrated in as well so it's an element of the system well browsers move that way well it just depends if we capture in the operat
ing system everything people want from the browser then yes to the degree we don't people either extend using our architecture or they'll build something up from scratch and do it that way so you know that it's not like a manufacturing business where you own a bunch of factories and so nobody else can come in and build factories in this world what's your factory you just put the bits on the internet and boom you can have a hundred percent market share if you have a better product yes we'll Clurm
an second year at the Sloan School MIT Sloan School and organizing team of the MIT 50k entrepreneurship competition question for you some of us are going to Netscape for the summer what what what advice or message would you have a stake with us what nets keeps a good company no I think going there for the summer would be very exciting thing the the software you know send me some email after you're done you know Jim Jim Clark was our Distinguished Lecture here just a few weeks ago so no they're t
hey're doing the work they the piece of innovation on the Internet is really fantastic and there are four or five companies that are part of that and you know a lot if you get to the content side there are literally tens of thousands of companies doing great things if you mentioned you know some other companies I might not I might say they're not on the cutting edge like Netscape is today how we won't get into that all right let's go let's go hi I'm Vincent loop Ian an acoustical engineer here a
t MIT and my question is slightly personal I'm wondering well that person I speak I heard several times the words neat and fun and as an engineer I can certainly relate with that but I also see some dangers with technocratic mentalities sometimes which can lead us to perhaps have to narrow of view on life and I'm wondering in your own obviously you've enjoyed a lot of success but at this point in your career how can you justify say getting up and working on neat and fun things every day as oppos
ed to perhaps you know given the reality that there are people starving or you know no but I this is a question that I've wanted to ask you and like as I said it is somewhat of a personal question it's I'm putting you in a hard spot but social responsibility yes let's go [Applause] well I have a fun job and so I mean it just makes it worse I you know I get to work with smart people I get to work on neat things you know I would change a thing so that's why I get up and do it if you know as I get
older you know I Microsoft is still successful then I'll have resources to give away bill let's take a point here let's take the countries of the world that do not have many resources and you spoke earlier or something like public libraries is Microsoft planning or thinking or maybe it's doing something say for example to promote the internet ization the computerization the litter you know getting into this technology in the third world in the developing world in Asia and so on in the US in the
u.s. yes that also works in there thank you well that there's a number of projects there's a thing called libraries online where we take libraries and we fund staff and equipment and communications there so that kids can come in and lose the internet today where I was at the computer museum because they have an outreach thing called the computer Clubhouse where they're going into some of the poorer neighborhoods in this community and making computers available in some of the housing groups and M
icrosoft has funded that so there's things I do personally and there's things that the company does I do believe that this technology is very empowering and that the inequality we have around the world today will be lessened you know as all the universities around the world get hooked up to this your ability to have the same access to knowledge will be much better than it ever was in a physical world when you can electronically hook up to all the latest knowledge it's easier to get to get to an
equal footing than it is when you have to to put together a library of you know millions of books and all the kind of in I think in terms of knowledge I agree with you but in terms of the information helping those who already have a rich Market Basket and resources and not helping the ones that do not my did not exert a counter force left to its own devices without people paying attention might not information information technology helped more those who are rich get richer both his countries an
d as individuals and leave the other ones behind thereby expanding the gap instead of closing it is knowledge yeah you could certainly say that when books first came around they accentuated the gap between the haves and have-nots the people who are literate could read to do a business and it took a long time between then and when people said hey let's have libraries let's have everybody get out and use those things hopefully this time there's not nearly that same time leg between seeing a social
imperative for it to be pervasive I think you're saying it's gonna be like that maybe all right I'm a grad student here at MIT I have a question about internet in the future and how you see Microsoft in it there's more information out on the net and because of Java you're gonna see things where the information on the net is like programs and in the future do you see Microsoft more as an internet provider of information provider of programs or organization that collects software and ideas for an
d different collecting content and redistributing it like your deal with NBC well they the biggest businesses worrying is building productivity tools like Microsoft Office and building and building the operating system and those will probably be our biggest businesses for a long long time to come we're in the content business so you know we did we did games starting eighteen years ago and we were at the e3 show showing off some of the new things that we've done and the stuff we've done in a join
t venture with DreamWorks and we are doing some content things but that won't be the largest business at Microsoft we just want to lead the way and show some examples what can be done but they'll be that will be a very diversified business the biggest impact will have will still be in in defining tools and helping to contribute to the platform bill as a distinguished lecturer and past lecturer of LCS I want to thank you LCS is the home of the web we welcome the Bill Gates who is what Carnegie wa
s to steal Rockefeller through oil Bill Gates the software best of luck best wishes [Applause]
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