BILL GATES on Future of Computer Technology In The Next Ten Years
Taken from his lecture at Howard University in 2005.
I take this opportunity to share with you some of my excitement about the things going on in the world of technology, particularly the magic of software, how in the next 10 years we'll change the world far more than the last thirty. And this is something that is greatly underestimated, and yet will have an impact that's very, very broad.
Microsoft I think of as a young company, but, in fact, we just celebrated our 30th anniversary. So Microsoft is older than most of you here. I was 19 years old when I left school and had a vision, along with Paul Allen, that the personal computer could become an incredible tool, a tool of empowerment. And it may be hard to remember that back then computers were thought of as very threatening devices. They were only owned by governments and large corporations, and they were mysterious. They would send you a bill that made no sense, you'd have these punch cards and things, and people in that day and age would have always thought about the computer being against the individual.
So the idea that the PC, the personal computer has turned out to be the best tool to let anyone publish their ideas or communicate with their friends or collaborate in new ways or share new discoveries, that's a real change, it's a very different computer than we had 30 years ago.
There are today a billion personal computers in the world and the original vision of Microsoft won't be fulfilled until there's at least 6 billion, because we think everyone ought to have this as a tool for whatever task they want to achieve.
Now, the machine that got Microsoft going was a very humble machine. The first personal computer was a kit that you would buy for $360 and it ran with a very limited processor. The memory board that came with that system provided you with 4k bytes of memory, not 4 megabytes, not 4 gigabytes, 4k bytes of memory. And one of the major feats that I did that got Microsoft going was I wrote a floating point BASIC interpreter that ran in 3,100 bytes. And what that meant is if you have a 4k machine you had room for your program and your data inside that computer.
Well, it was very limited in terms of what it could do, and only by seeing the exponential improvements that the semiconductor industry has been able to provide that Paul Allen and I talked about that machine eventually becoming an incredible machine, even beyond what we have today, a machine that could understand our speech, that could have vision, that could understand what we're doing, a really unbelievable kind of a system. And so we're more than half way toward achieving that dream, but it's only in the next 10 years that we'll really get there.
A personal computer today, a good one will have 512 meg or even a gig of memory, so very soon having 4 gigs of memory will be quite common, and yet that's a million times as much memory as that original Altair that I did the software programming for.
Improving something by a factor of a million is quite dramatic. Imagine if cars got a million times better mileage or if food cost a millionth as much as it did today. We simply don't find that kind of improvement anywhere else in the world. And so this innovation dwarfs other things, it changes the rules of the game in every sector. Even something improving by a factor of 10 is quite unusual, and yet this factor of a million, that pace of exponential improvement will be continuing out into the future.
And so the hardware industry is going to give us more capability, let us be more ambitious, not just in the memory side but the storage capacity of these machines is more than a million times greater.
It would have been a joke to talk about being able to store all your songs and photos and documents on your personal computer disk drive in the past; today, that's commonsense. With the speed the drives are improving, the idea of storing all your personal videos and movies you like will become incredibly practical. So there's no limit there, it's gone up by an even greater amount than the memory.
Likewise, the speed of the network is more than a million times better. The Internet today operates at speeds of 100 megabits for some pieces, even more for other parts of that network, and so the idea of real time video, videoconferences, revolutionizing TV so that instead of being a broadcast medium it's a personalized medium coming over the Internet, that now becomes possible.
And so these frontiers have opened up to allow software to take on some very big challenges, software letting you do quite different things.
So what kind of software are we going to have and what kind of devices will it run on? Well, all of these computers between a wireless network and a wired network will be connected up to the Internet, and the way that software is developed will be far higher level than it is today. We'll have a wristwatch that will display the information you want to glance at, almost like in the * Tracy comic books.
We'll have a pocket computer, which will grow out of the phone but be far better than the phone. This is one of the latest devices, this is a Motorola RAZR device, so quite thin and nice little keyboard there. Of course, you can type text, you can take photos, pretty rich. This is another one also coming out in the next month or two. This is a Palm device with Windows Mobile on it that's a Treo type hardware.
So these have gone from being just things that you make phone calls with to things that let you browse the Web, see your electronic mail, update your schedule, so far better. But we have a plan just in the next year to do a lot more. For example, the camera that's on this device, if you're out at a business dinner, when you get the receipt, you just take a picture of it and the software will see that that's a receipt and send it up to your expense account software, understand what customer you were having dinner with because of your calendar, and that's all taken care of without any steps on your part.
If you're in a store looking at buying a product, you just take a photo of it, or the barcode, and your phone will tell you, hey, you could get a better price somewhere else – (laughter, applause.) And it will tell you that maybe there's a better choice. Or if it's a product you already own, it will tell you what the warranty is and how to get it serviced or if you're just confused about how to use it, it will bring up the manual to help you do whatever you want to do.
If you're in a foreign country, you can simply take a picture of any sign that you're curious about, and it will take that image and send it up to a server computer running lots of software that will do the language translation and send it back down to your phone, so the idea of being able to understand those signs will just be a commonsense functionality built into the phone.
All those things I described we'll be able to do in the near future.
If you move up to the next-sized device, that will be what we call the Tablet computer, something you take around with you and use to take your notes instead of a paper tablet today, that you'll use to read the newspaper, to read magazines, that will literally replace virtually all the paper that you have in your life.
For a student it means no more textbooks. I don't mean no more textbooks at all, I mean no more paper textbooks, the textbook will be on the Internet and your teacher will be able to take the sections that are important, customize those, connect them up, of course, to videos and rich information that isn't available in the historical form. And you can annotate those things, pass them around in a way that's far, far better.
Already the encyclopedia has moved from being something that's paper-based to being digital. When I grew up, the state of the art was the World Book Encyclopedia and I read it starting with A, then B, then C, then D. That's a very tough way to learn things because you're always skipping around from subject to subject and time period to time period.
Well, today on the Web you can take Encarta or Wikipedia and step through knowledge in a far more logical way, in fact, even test your knowledge and have rich displays of information that just weren't there in the best tool that we had when I was growing up.
So this is very empowering. The cost of this tablet is coming down. Today they're $1,500 and in a few years they'll be under a thousand; eventually we can get them down even to $500 and eventually, if we take a decade's time, to $200. And so this will eventually cost less than the textbooks they replace and yet be far more empowering as an individual device that you have and it will work with ink as well. It will be able to let you take ink notes, it will recognize that ink; that's a class of software we've been working hard on and it just keeps getting better and better.
On your desk you can have your entire desktop will let you display information and you'll be able to speak and write as well as use the keyboard, and then on the wall you'll have a big display that what used to be your TV will actually just be a big screen connected up to the Internet to let you watch TV shows and play games and all those things.
So all these computers connected to the same network, far, far more powerful than they are today with much better displays.
Now, what is the limiting factor in making these scenarios come true? Well, in fact, it's simply the ingenuity of the software developers, their brilliance, their energy coming together and writing these software packages.
So what will these new interfaces look like? Well, the answer is that they'll be far more natural than they are today. In fact, a lot of the breakthroughs we need to make relate to things that the user won't see in the future at all; for example, things like how you keep the software up to date, how you move your data from one system to another system, how you make sure that your privacy is protected as you're entering information and visiting different sites. The reliability requirements, the deep security requirements, those are very important issues that are requiring new software designs, new software approaches. And by having that resilience, having that trust in the system, then people will be willing to use these new capabilities.
In fact, the future designs will be far more user-centric. Instead of having, say, multiple phone numbers, multiple mail addresses, you'll just have one ID and whoever tries to contact you, you'll have software that works on your behalf and decides if based on what you're doing, where you are, if you ought to be alerted on the device that you have with you at that time; so again simplifying activities, taking things that were hard in the past.
We're going to make things a lot more visual. These screens are better, the resolution is now getting as good as paper. In fact, you could say we're moving to this high definition generation.
Let me show real quickly a couple examples of this. First I've got a PC and a fairly simple app that just gives you a sense of improved visualization. You'll have photos that you've taken your whole life, instead of having them in a shoebox you'll have them on your computer, and you'll have literally tens of thousands. And so the idea that you'll want to select a set and present them, that's got to be very straightforward.
So here we'll take some photos and say we want to browse all of those, start with some photos here. I can make lists by putting things on it and just selecting what I want. Or I can take all of these different things and then once I've got the list I may want to view it in different ways. I can do a classic slideshow or I can do a view that's more for a photo album, and you can see it sizes things down and puts multiple together in different ways. I can edit this pretty easily by just dragging and dropping something and move it around. Or I can visualize it in a way that I might want to have it on a mantle where it would be a little bit more of a 3D presentation, and as I step through that, things are coming in and any one of the images that I really like I can take and just go and zoom in on that or zoom back out. So it's a very straightforward kind of thing that you'd want to present in the background at your house about a trip you were on or send off to your friends.
Well, now let's switch to this little box here. I don't know if anybody recognizes this. This is coming out next month as the second generation of Xbox, so this will compete with the Sony PlayStation 3 in this next generation. And this next generation is more than 10 times better in terms of the visual realism, the speed, the depth of what you can do, but it's actually more than that. It's more than about just sitting and playing a game by yourself, it's being able to connect up to all your digital media in a simple way.
And, in fact, the living room has been a place where there's tough problems where you have all those remote controls, you kind of don't know what's going on. Once you have a box like this that is generating a nice visual display, you can use it to hook up and move your music around and deal with your photos.
Here we have this first screen you see on an Xbox where you can get onto the community, you can pick different games and things, see the demos, all of those are available.
Here is this media thing where if I go in and say I want to deal with music I can say I wanted to see a music player, and in order to hook that up I just take my portable music device that's got a little cord here and I connect that in into the Xbox. It's a little USB connector there. And you can see it will see that that's present, and then I can just go down here, select that. And if I go into music, it will go and pull a full directory of all the songs I've got there. And so I can simply just play that music.
I can also have these nice psychedelic visualizations, I can pick different ones of these things, however I like to do it.
Or I can decide to go back and instead of just having a visualization I can decide to use some cameras, some photos that I've taken so I back up here, you see there's pictures here. I select that and again I just use a simple cable and connect up my camera.
And the music device can be anything, it can even be an iPod if you want. The camera can be any kind of camera, they all have these connectors now.
So if I go into this one, I'll select that, and I can see it's going and going to pull up. That camera didn't have any photos on it. So, OK, I guess I'd better go take some photos before I can go and use that. There we go. It does have to be turned on.That's one tricky thing about it. So then I select, and I can just take any type of slideshow and play my pictures.
And, of course, I can take these pictures and use them to customize my videogames, I can upload them up to my PC, I can connect up to my PC and project that onto my living room screen. This box really is about integrating all the different digital sources together and making it very simple.
It's also about entertainment, so let's switch over to this device right here, and this is a machine that's running one of the new games that will come out, which is Project Gotham. There are a lot of different games that will make sense on Xbox. I'm not super good at this, so I'll just pick the easy level here, and have it load in. I think I picked a nice little Porsche Turbo that I'm going to use, and I picked Las Vegas. And as you'll see, the car is very realistic, the scenery inside the city is very realistic, so it's just going to load it up on a DVD that we've put in here. And now we're going to be off and racing.
There we go, vroom, vroom, vroom. Until you get to the corners it's not too hard. There we go. Whoa. OK, the spectators are very impressed with my driving. One nice thing is I can actually ask the computer to do the driving for me, so now I've got it helping me out. I can change my viewpoint, I can be inside the *, behind the wheel, and I can change my point of view; I can be off on the side, I can go out to this side, I can get out in front. You see a lot of realism in the way this thing works. If it take that control and drive myself, I can just have all sorts of nice crashes. And it will remember all the dents and dings I make on the car.
We also want to make it more of a social experience, so connecting up to the broadband and other people, whether it's your friends or strangers, we have some new research technology that lets us match people up so instead of getting matched to somebody who's a lot better than you where you can just lose all the time or get killed if it's Halo – (laughter) – we'll match you up to somebody at exactly the right level.
You can talk with your friends, we'll have a camera, so if you win you can gloat and your friends can see you celebrating, and so a lot of richness that comes into this experience. So it's gaming, it's virtual reality, it's communications all with that next generation of high definition device.
Now let's look at something that's a tiny big more futuristic, but not super futuristic; this is only two or three years away. And this is a scenario where I'm on a trip and I've got my cell phone with me. For some reason I didn't take my Tablet computer, which for me would be very rare, but I've just got the phone. And I got into an airport lounge that has a little table with a little device on it, and I can put my phone down and what happens is it uses the camera here with little infrared lights and it notices the phone and figures out whose it is, and then it asks me to verify with my fingerprint, so it ensures that I'm not just somebody who grabbed this phone from somebody else. And then it brings up all my information but in a full screen mode, so I can use this entire table to read things, I can take a little pen and edit things. In fact, somebody gave me their business card on the plane and I think I'll put this down here and the camera will see that and recognize the text. I've got a little note I took on the back here, so I'll let the camera see that, and it goes and recognizes that. And then I want to take this and I actually want to have it go into my contact list. So I drag that over and you can see it has a little animation there to say that added it to my contact list, and so that's set.
And then it will take my mail, open that up. This is a very important press release that wants me to say that I authorize that press release to go out, and then it will go back, and I can go through any of my information, I can run Microsoft Office, edit documents, do nice things.
Of course, it knows my calendar, so it's telling me when I have to leave and go walk and board the plane, so when that time comes I just pick up my phone and it recognizes this is gone, none of my information stays here, it all sits on the phone and I'm logged off and that table is ready for somebody else to go and use it.
Now, nothing I showed here is very expensive. These cameras are getting to be broadband cheap, inexpensive lights. The display still costs hundreds of dollars but even that will come down in price as new technologies like Lumileds come along and are very, very commonplace.
So as you start to take these systems and build them into the environment, in a sense they're more powerful but in a sense they're more immersive, you take them for granted. If we think about the home environment in the future, every surface that you have will be able to do a display like that, onto the kitchen counter or the walls of your room. We'll have little cameras around that are there; if you talk, your speech commands will be recognized so you can ask for any kind of show to be called up or any type of communication.
When you watch TV, it will be very different. Instead of everybody watching through a channel and see the same thing, it will be personalized for you, so when you go to the news show the news show will know what sports you like, tell you more about those, skip the ones you don't have an interest in. If there is an issue that you're seeing for the first time and you want to know more about that, you just say so, it will lengthen that out, go into more detail for you, and even perhaps send off your e-mail in a way that you can learn more about that issue.
Even the ads will be personalized so that they're less bothersome, more interesting to you, more valuable to the advertiser as well because you're more likely to want the information and there, too, if you want to learn more right while that ad is up, you do that and, of course, whatever show you're watching will still be available because it's not a broadcast type approach. You won't have to have a TiVO or a hard disk in your home because all of this will be done for you across the Internet.
And so all the different places you display things, it will be available. You can even if you're watching something you like and you want to leave and still watch it on your phone, it will work across those different devices in that very rich way.
The home activity of the future will be very digital, we actually call it the digital lifestyle. Your music, of course, is already moving away from being on a physical media to just being on a hard disk or streamed across the Internet. My daughter, who's 9, asked me as we went into a record store what a record was, and, of course, she's never seen a record, and five years from now people will say what's a CD, why did you have to go to the case and open something up and you couldn't sequence it your own playlist way; that will be a thing of the past.
Likewise, even for videos that will happen. The format that's under discussion right now, HD versus Blu-ray, that's simply the last physical format we'll ever have. Even videos in the future will either be on a disk in your pocket or over the Internet and therefore far more convenient for you. You can organize things the way you want and it will show up on all these different devices.
So the lifestyle, digital lifestyle will be more advanced, and the idea of scheduling things that way, working that way will just be commonsense.
If we think about the work environment, there, too, the way we operate right now is not very efficient. If we want to meet with somebody who's far away, that's hard to do; often they have to come in. Well, with camera technology and screen technology we ought to be able to take that remote participant and involve them in a very rich way, in fact let them see what's going on throughout the room and make comments at the right time. Or if that person is not available at the time of the meeting, simply by having the cameras we can record the meeting, do a transcript with the speech recognition, let them search for the thing that they care about, let them watch what happens. In fact, we even have technology if they want to watch a meeting, instead of just watching it at the same speed it took place, they can watch it about twice the normal speed and still be able to understand everything that went on, and so it's far less boring, they just go to the parts they want and watch it at higher speeds, so making people be more productive. If you can make meetings more productive, it's a big impact.
If you can let companies understand more easily what their customers are thinking or analyze their sales results and see where the changes are taking place, that allows them to make far better decisions.
Product design will be done on a digital basis. When you build a new car, you won't build a physical model, you'll build a software model and you'll try it out for efficiency and durability and cost way before you actually go and do anything with materials. This will be true from products all the way down to little toys up to the biggest airplanes.
And so even though mentally we say, OK, that's the manufacturing part of the economy, in fact, it will be software and information driven, information about customer tastes, information about new engineering opportunities. And all the jobs in those areas will require using software in the best way.
Even as we look at the sciences, take medical advances in the future, historically all the sciences needed math to express relationships. Well, now with all the data in genomics, proteonomics, we're going to need computers in order to data mine that and find the patterns and understand what new advances should happen, how things work, whether it's for disease or understanding the brain and making those breakthroughs.
And so people who understand software will need to be involved and that means our discipline is incredibly important and very exciting and it will be at least a piece of pushing that work forward.
When you work in this field you get to go out and see the software in use everywhere, in big corporations, in schools, you get to see kids pursuing their curiosity in ways that wouldn't have been possible before. You get to go to places, for example, where blind people are now able to browse the Internet and get the latest news, whereas just years ago they were limited to a few books that were moved into Braille that were very hard for them to get. We can go to developing countries and see that the price of the computer is coming down and down and, in fact, the hardware costs and software costs will be low enough that it's really just getting this network connectivity there and even that we have approaches through wireless that will make it possible.
So this is a technology that's destined to get into the hands of everyone, and it's destined to allow people to create and communicate in new ways. It's happening a lot faster than I think is recognized, because as we hit these thresholds of vision and speech and tablet and digital media, these things build upon themselves, they justify more and more people getting connected up, more and more businesses doing things in new ways. Even education will change as the great lectures are out and available for everyone to have access to.
To really see these new horizons, it's very key that young people come into the field, that you come in with an open mind, you can see these new horizons, and so it's really your generation and many of you specifically that are going to have a chance to drive this forward, to be part of these jobs that are having this impact.
And for me I feel very lucky that I've been able to be part of the start of this industry and now I'll get to watch what many of you will do to drive it to the next level.
