An interview of Bill Gates in News.com.

server-equal-service

The idea that the computing industry can simplify its offerings dramatically by having this server-equals-service approach, and having richer services, absolutely I believe in that, and we need to be at the forefront of that. The idea that management can be more automatic and software updating can be more automatic, state-replication more automatic–there are some big things here that can drive the industry forward. They are very complex, because we have to make things very reliable and very secure if you are going to do this. It’s just now that we have the maturity of XML and the Web Services protocols that we can start to do (this).

Positioning difference between Google and Microsoft

So Google is not offering development capabilities yet. Of course, I expect they will. But they’re not in that game at all today. In fact, they have this slogan that they are going to organize the world’s information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world’s information. It’s a slightly different approach, based on the platformization of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organizer.

Information at our fingertips?

Do we have information at your fingertips today? No. Do we have a lot more than we had in the year 2000? A huge amount more. We’re getting decent Web search, we’re getting RSS. So software as a service has been moving along. We needed the Internet. We needed low-cost connectivity. We needed XML. The scale economics of doing large server farms…you can do those and do those well.

Free and commercial software

The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software. So there will be a balance between those. I think that we are going to have a lot of both. There are some zealots that think there should be no software jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at night.