...how can you afford [all of this]? Look at these offices! Look at this wasted space! Shuttles? Come on! Somebody is paying for all these shrubberies and things? You guys are crazy! You have too many people!". And just the cost structure would blow my mind, because I was thinking: "OK, should we let people have two chairs in their office or just one chair?" That kind of thing.
I'd come into this office and meet myself and I'd say: "Well, are you still reading all the code? I mean, these guys could ship some really crummy code; I hope you're still reading it." And I'd be like: "Are you kidding? It's been a decade since I took anybody's listing home and read it." It would be like: "Well, then how do you keep it good?"
The thing that I would drool over is to walk over to Microsoft Research and see that people are spending full time on vision, full time on speech, full time on machine learning, full time on software proof, while, at early Microsoft, we couldn't give back to the intellectual base. We drew on the base that the universities and Xerox had done, and we used it in a fantastic way, as did Apple and the whole personal computer industry.
Now we are very significant. In fact, if you leave universities out of it, we are probably the most significant computer-science research [body]. I mean, we're rated number one. We have the most papers.
So, I would be in awe of the hard things that this kind of scale and success lets you do, and I'd be really torn: "Should I go over to that research group and just go help those guys, or should I learn that chairman's office-type thing where you kind of have to give people positive feedback, negative feedback, balance that well, think about people?"
Do you have a sense of what technologies are going to be important to you personally in your new role?
Well, immunology is very important, because that's the science that teaches us how to make vaccines. Vaccines teach your immune system how to block diseases. And so in the biggest [Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation] program, Global Health, the key miracles we're looking for are vaccines: a vaccine for malaria, a vaccine for tuberculosis, a vaccine for AIDS, a vaccine for pneumonia, a vaccine for the various diarrheal diseases.
Someday they will write that Microsoft has peaked and someday they will be right
Bill Gates
If you take something like education — the whole way that teachers improve and learn from each other, and what makes an effective teacher and how do you encourage them to adopt best practices — that's a very complex area that I want to learn a lot about. To some degree, online video can come in and play a role there, particularly as you get up to college and community college.
I'll have to read a lot of books and go out and do a lot of visits to play the right role, in terms of strategy-making and education.
Then you have new areas, like agriculture, where I'm just amazed at the way seeds work and how they can be improved. I didn't even understand fertiliser. I mean, 10 years ago, if you asked me how you make fertiliser, I would have given you this vague thing about nitrogen, but I didn't understand where it is, why it costs money, how you apply it, how much of it drains away, could it be put in something where most of it doesn't drain away, so you don't need as much. Anyway, there are some really brilliant things that are coming along in that area, where you need far less of it.
And things like cold chain [with] vaccines — what is the gating factor once you have a vaccine of actually getting it out to rural areas? It's the fact that they have to be in refrigerators the whole way. If they ever get too cold, they freeze and they're bad, and, if they ever get too warm, they denature and they're bad. A lot of these new vaccines we're making are quite large unfortunately, and so the refrigerator capacity of this delivery chain is nowhere near adequate for the new things that we want to put into it. So, thinking through: "OK, do you do better refrigerators; do you do these super-Thermos things?" The answer is super-Thermos things, you know, but how do you design those and what are the particular needs of developing countries? So, there's a lot of technologies but, if you had to pick one, it would be immunology.
You mentioned early on that there was this question of: "Would IBM be the IBM of the software world?", and it's still an important company but it doesn't occupy the role that it did. A lot is written that Microsoft is going to find itself in a similar bind.
Someday they will write that Microsoft has peaked and someday they will be right. They said we didn't understand server operating systems, and that only Sun with Unix understood those things, and...
no matter what, this guy will always be the geek loser at the party. Money can't buy you out of that.