BILL GATES: AN AMERICAN GLADIATOR IN THE DIGITAL ARENA redherring.com
William H. Gates III, Chairman & CEO of Microsoft Corporation, talks exclusively with The Herring about his company's plans to be a major player in building the information highway.
I stumbled on this when trying to check for further info on that other story. Another one of Bill's famous Potemkin village operations. This is from Oct. '93, when Bill and his secret #2, J. Allard, were already well on the road to hijacking the internet.
The Herring: Is Microsoft planning on being a big player in the interactive TV market?
Gates: Isn't everybody planning to be a big player in that business? (Laughs). The holy grail in the consumer market will be to bring new applications into the home. Chief amongst those applications will be software that will provide two-way communications through a new device we call the TV/PC. The TV/PC will be like a TV in that it will be fairly inexpensive, fit in your living room, and will be operated by a remote control device.
Bill wouldn't want to give away the secret plan here. A bit of clever misdirection for those sucker journalists out selling advertising.
The Herring: Are we going to be running Windows on our TV sets?
Gates: No. The user interface on your TV will have to be very simple to use. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but I can guarantee you that it is not going to look like a computer. It won't be Windows on your television. It will take a new genre of software. This will not be a canned package, either. The technology and intelligence in the operating system will learn what you like and present options to you that take into consideration your preferences.
We wouldn't want the unwashed masses to have to deal with Windows, would we? At least in the Potemkin village phase of the internet hijacking. Now, everybody needs to learn Windows, but there'll be this visual-speech recognition- AI interface that learns to do what you mean, not what you say. As soon as somebody figures out how to do that, and Bill makes them an "innovative" offer they can't refuse. Finally, for the "let Bill be Bill" crowd, we have this:
Gates: Random. It's a random number. It's all finance! Demand means nothing! It's some market analyst spewing out numbers because he's supposed to! Once you prove that the revenue stream is there, you can borrow the money you need to build the network which runs the applications that create the demand. It's all finance. No one can project what the numbers are going to be by the end of the decade. It's random!
I think Reggie would like the "it's all finance" part, but Reggie seems to like projecting numbers for a decade from now. Might they be "random" too? Who can say?
Cheers, Dan. |
