Q&A: Bill Gates Looks Ahead, Defends Software Security

Article: Microsoft Tries to See Academe's Future Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

Bill Gates offered some predictions of the future and a defense of Microsoft's security practices, in an exclusive interview with The Chronicle's Andrea L. Foster.

Q: How do you think technology is going to shape higher education in the next 5 to 10 years?

A: Technology has already had a huge impact, in that finding the state-of-the-art research in any field is now something you do on the Internet. And a lot of the collaboration you do, whether it's building courses or solving tough problems, you're collaborating with people at a distance using the software-driven tools that are the latest technology. And these things just keep getting better and better. . . .

One particular dream we have about technology and education is that we're taking the so-called portable personal computer and between us and the hardware people making that thing smaller and smaller and smaller. And also bringing to it the ability to take -- record speech and use a pen, so that you can have ink as well, so it becomes this tabletlike device. And eventually it becomes natural that a high percentage of students in universities would use that.

And eventually you'll move away from having printed textbooks because the ability of the professor to take the curriculum they want and assemble it in a rich way and have it be interactive is just so superior in the digital form, as well as the cost is lower, and the convenience to the student of always having their tablet that's connected up wirelessly to the Internet, to always have all their textbooks with them, and they can collaborate with their friends and annotate things they don't understand and share that with other people.

Tablet PCs

Q: Microsoft has been active in promoting tablet PC's in the past, but they really haven't seemed to take off in a big way at colleges right now. Some officials have the perception that Microsoft has kind of lost interest in this -- that the support and promotion for the tablet isn't there. Can you tell me where Microsoft is with the tablet PC in relation to academe?

A: I'm personally the biggest believer in this idea. It's definitely at an early stage. We've gone from most students using desktop computers to using portable computers, and so the question is, how, over time, can we make those portable computers something where they not only have the keyboard, but they also have the pen, and they have the ability to work with speech as well. We have this piece of software called OneNote that's actually doing super well on campuses, that lets people take notes, record things, and it works with both text, ink, and audio in this very nice way.

The concept like a tablet PC doesn't happen overnight because all the things about the hardware, the software, even just the ink-recognition piece take years and years of refinement. Tablet PC sales, although off a small base of percentage of PC's, have doubled this year versus last year. It's still a very small percentage, but we expect that to keep growing. Our investment in the tablet in terms of the product-development group, and the collaborations we have, is greater than ever before. ... I think it's probably a perfect example of the kind of patience Microsoft has at taking a concept, nurturing it, getting the feedback, refining it, seeing it through.

Q: That tablet growth that you talked about -- is a lot of that happening in academe?

A: Yeah, but it's off a small base. The places we've seen the biggest growth are in health care, insurance, and education. ... So, when is it going to take off super big? Who knows, but we're building the base of enthusiastic users, and making pretty fast improvement.

Software Security

Q: We hear a lot of college officials complain about the security of Microsoft software, and in particular its Web browser. I understand that Microsoft has plans for Internet Explorer 7 to be more secure. But do you think these improvements are enough to lure students and professors who have already switched from Internet Explorer to, say, Firefox or something else, to move back to IE?

A: Yeah. I think six months ago that people were asking us those questions. In the last six months there -- just go look at the data or talk to somebody objective about it. There have been more security problems outside of Internet -- with Firefox in particular -- than with Internet Explorer. So the contrast of how diligent we've been about fixing things, doing things, updating things has been made clear. ...

It turns out in security, it's very hard when you have bad people trying to take advantage of things -- it's very hard to write secure software. It's one of the great areas of research. Internet Explorer, on a relative basis, has been doing super well. But there's still breakthroughs in security-type areas that are important for the future.

Q: Some college technology officials also complain that they're frustrated by what they describe as band-aid-like efforts by Microsoft to make its software more secure. Giving away antispyware software, offering patches, assembling antivirus software. They say Microsoft instead needs to fundamentally re-engineer its software with security in mind. How do you respond to those complaints?

A: I meet directly with our customers. That's always a better dialogue than some indirect thing. I don't know of anyone who thinks that software updating is not part of having a secure environment. Software updating will always be a key part of a secure environment. There's no solution where you just let the software sit there and be -- not be possible to change it. ... There's nothing better then an automatic-update-type approach to these things.

Q: It sounds like you would say that Microsoft is fundamentally engineering its software to be more secure?

A: There's no doubt that Microsoft puts more into security research -- go talk to the top universities who do security stuff, and say, Who's pushing the state of the art on these issues, and pushing these things forward? Who's the most responsive on fixing these things? This is old news. It's about three years ago that we made security our top priority. We can go through the milestones we've achieved along that.

It's a challenge. It's something that has to be solved for this digital future to become a reality. But the degree to which we've prioritized that and made the breakthroughs -- certainly in the academia communities that are experts on security -- I think they're amazed that a company can move as fast as we can.

Microsoft vs. Open Source

Q: Many college officials are intrigued and even excited about open-source software, in large part because it seems compatible with the values of higher education -- collaboration and openness. What would you say to a college technology official who is considering replacing a Microsoft product with an open-source product, say Microsoft Office with StarOffice, or Windows with Linux?

A: Well, people should use the best technology. And Microsoft Office is extremely popular in universities because of the kind of advances we make in it, and the improvements we make in it. And, in fact, we make it extremely inexpensive -- we've been showing this new version where we have things like the map formulas and the citation things, a lot of special things we've done for education. People are very, very enthusiastic about [it].

Obviously the technical-research things we do with universities are done where the source code is open, shared collaboratively, and worked on. And all the different joint research projects we have with universities are done where they're working on the source code, we're working on the source code. We have this whole shared-source program that makes things available. ...

If you're doing research in the area, then you'll want to have the source code of the relevant thing that you're working on. Microsoft Research has all these people that are sitting down with universities, talking through, saying which things do you want the source code for. That's why these people are here, because of that relationship.

Government Support

Q: You were in Washington, D.C., this spring, pressing for more federal funding for science and research. Do you have any indication that your advocacy has turned the tide a little?

A: Well, understand what we were advocating for was that -- not so much for more, but to have them stop having less. That was the main point that [I] was making was, hey, let's, at least in this period where computer science is the tool for many things and is making these great breakthroughs, let's at least be at the peak, which we are well below ... in many, many respects -- particularly because the Department of Defense money that was funding some of the most tough challenges in computer science has become much more short-term focused, and not focused on general problems, more focused on specific problems. ... So has there been an improvement in it? No. The funding for computer-science-related things continues to drop.