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Bill Gates talks Vista and Linux

• Tags:
• Open Source,
• Linux,
• Windows Vista

Ina Fried CNET News.com

Published: 20 Nov 2006 13:48 GMT

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…available in the not-too-distant future. So that shared-use model is a very big deal — that's schools, libraries, community centres — a huge thing. And we did that in every library in the US; we learned a lot from that. We've taken it to many other countries.

The phone thing is a new thing for us. That's not out for a while, but the hardware industry is giving us the chips that can do the projection. And we've talked with some operators — they like the idea of what we're doing there. So there are many ways into this thing.

The PC itself keeps getting cheaper, and the multiuse phone gets it out even [more broadly]. Because, as you say, we do want everyone — certainly every kid, as part of their educational experience — to have that kind of access.

The dream for me is to get the tablet computer to be so cheap that it's less than you would have spent on textbooks. Then every kid has a tablet. We're still working hard to make that happen.

Listening to you speak at Stanford, it's almost like, if there are not two Bill Gateses, there are at least two really different viewpoints that come out. On the one hand, you talk about global prosperity as not a zero-sum game. And then, when you're talking about Microsoft and wearing your software hat, it's "We're either number one or we want to be number one" in everything. How do you reconcile those two?
Oh, no, those things are perfectly the same. I mean, when companies compete to do their best, when you have an economy like the US, where you have the infrastructure and the stability, consumers get a good deal.

And people who go into Google every day, they want to be number one. Our people go in and do the best they want to do. But the effect of that is that for things that are in demand in those countries, the market selects, and there's very rapid innovation.

The PC space has seen better improvement in performance, better reduction in price than any part of the economy. So it's fun to be in that part of the economy. It's more scary.

If you want a really stable job, our industry is not the place to be because [of] companies such as Wang or Digital Equipment — those are two companies I grew up admiring immensely. But you just miss a turn in the road or pick a few of the wrong people, [and] that makes it interesting. It means you come in every day and think, "Hey, I'll save the company for another year if I do something well today."

Those marketplace things work very well for most things. In [The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's] global health program, we're dealing with the fact that the people who want the malaria medicine aren't able to spend money on it. There, it takes a lot of cleverness to say, "OK, how do we take the skills that big pharma has, and the skills that the universities have, and bring those together in such a way that we get the smartness that they use in doing market products, but have them focus it on things where we know they couldn't prioritise it otherwise?"

The foundation is pioneering a lot of models like that. We have partners who are doing things in new ways, including people like One World Health, or GlaxoSmithKline on this malaria vaccine partnership, [who] agreed to do things a pretty different way and yet put their best people on the work, so we're super-pleased about that.

With Vista and Office, probably two of the largest examples of commercial software are both coming out; at the same time, Microsoft announced a deal with Novell around open source. Has your thinking evolved? What role do you see open-source development playing, beyond the fact that customers are asking for it?
Well, there are many issues here. One is that Unix has had a market share on servers for decades, and there's always been a lot of variety. Under that label — Linux — there's an immense amount of variety. But, in general, Linux is not nearly as high-volume as Windows is on servers. But [it's] significant, so customers want new kinds of interoperability.

We've done fantastic things on interoperability. Here, we're doing virtual machine interoperability. So you can just have a pool of hardware and applications…

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