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Gates: Restricting IP rights is tantamount to communism

• Tags:
• Bill Gates,
• Longhorn

Michael Kanellos CNET News.com

Published: 06 Jan 2005 13:20 GMT

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One of the big phenomena of the year has been blogging. Has the growth surprised you?
Well, actually I think the biggest blogging statistic I know, which really blew me away, is that we've got close to a million people setting up blogs with the Spaces capability that's connected up to Messenger.
 
Now, with blogs, you always have to be careful. The decay rate of "I started and I stopped" or "I started and nobody visited" is fairly high, but as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has gotten more sophisticated and value-added search capabilities have come along, this thing is really maturing.
 
And we've done some things in Japan and Korea that are unique blog experiments. The Spaces thing is a worldwide effort. It's a great phenomenon, and it's sort of built on email, and so we need to integrate more blogging capability into the email world -- and as we do the next generation of Outlook, you'll see that. We need to integrate it more into our SharePoint, which is our collaboration Office platform, and then, as I discussed, MSN is embracing it so that instead of thinking about, "OK, I go to one community to do photos, one community to do social networking, one community to do this," we say, "Hey," off of Messenger, which has got your buddy list already, then, "Let's let you do the photos and the social networking and everything -- but starting in an integrated way off of Messenger."
 
Which ones do you read, if any?
Well, it's interesting, I get a lot of people -- and this is very typical for me -- I get people who are forwarding things on to me, so I sort of have human search engines that will say, "Hey, there's a particular thing that's hot and that's interesting."

I just type in various keywords. We have a lot of blogs that are just internal to Microsoft where people are completely open about what's going on with this, what's going on with that.

I've toyed with doing one myself, but I don't want to be one of those people who start and then don't finish it, and again I'm thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks -- something like that. I'd kind of like to, but I've got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.

I'm wondering, too, as you look forward 10, 20 years from now--what are the big problems that technology industry really needs to focus on?
Well, the technology business provides tools of empowerment, tools to let people be creative, to communicate, and there's no end in sight and certainly a decade's worth of work to make the ease of use and the power of these tools better. If you just think about meetings and the ability to record the video and the audio of the meeting -- create a transcript, notify people, have them see the parts they care about -- it's crummy today, and that's solvable.

When people want to manage a project with many companies involved -- keeping data confidential, tracking and knowing what's going on -- that's very crummy today compared to what it can be.
 
We, with our Office franchise, are committed to making workers far, far more productive than they are today. And believe me, we're not running out of ideas. The phone is inefficient today with phone tag and busy signals. Email is inefficient today with seeing stuff that's less relevant and how you organise it -- bringing in the blog-type capabilities is very important there.
 
There's plenty of room to do dramatic horizontal innovation that will drive productivity in every sector of the economy. Whether it's scientific discovery, health care, engineering, marketing, sales -- you name it -- the tools around Windows and Office are not even half of what they will be.

If you take that and map that into the home, that's where you get the idea of movies, music, games. There, again, we're not even halfway to what we can deliver in that digital lifestyle.  

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