Gates still has a long to-do listFor years, the Microsoft chairman has been a fiery advocate, inside the company and out, for the notion that computers should be controlled, not just by mouse and keyboard, but also by more natural means, such as voice, touch and digital ink.
But, as Gates prepares to shift to part-time work at Microsoft next year, his vision is still more common inside the company's research labs than inside the typical home or office. Unbowed, Gates said he expects to keep plugging away as he takes on a new, more limited role at the company.
"Big screens, touch, ink, speech, that's something that I think, along with cloud computing, is the next big change in how we think about software," Gates told CNET News.com on Tuesday. (Cloud computing is the notion that many of the computing tasks handled by individual computers today will instead be tackled by servers in huge data centers connected over the Internet.) "Ray Ozzie is driving our cloud computing stuff...Some of the natural interface stuff, I think he and Steve (Ballmer) will ask me to sort of keep the energy and vision alive there."
Gates continues to lobby hard inside Microsoft for investment in speech and handwriting recognition, though neither has been a huge financial success for Microsoft. The Tablet PC, a frequent staple of Gates' Comdex keynote speeches in the 1990s, remains a fairly niche product. And though the ability to control PCs through voice is built into Vista, the feature has gotten scant attention, and the operating system itself has received less than enthusiastic support in its first year on the market.
Gurdeep Singh Pall, a Microsoft vice president, who has worked closely with Gates in the areas of unified communications, said that Gates has expressed frustration with how slowly speech recognition has found its way into the mainstream. Pall noted that the software maker has been investing in the technology since at least 1991.
"Bill is a very big believer in speech and the potential of speech as a natural way of interacting with machines," Pall said. "That's an area where he is very interested and wants to understand what are the limitations and how do we get past those limitations."
A number of Gates' pet projects have yet to make it into the mainstream. The digital watches that use Microsoft's Smart Personal Object Technology have remained geek toys, and his dream of an all-new Windows file system based on SQL found itself on the cutting room floor when Longhorn became Vista. But other big bets, like Internet television and the Xbox, appear poised to start paying off after years of investment.
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