Caught a nice interview with Bill Gates at EWeek after he did one of his famous “Think Weeks”. You might wonder what this “Think Week” is. Simply put, when you’re as rich as bill you can afford to spend a week where you shut out the entire world and read about things that interest you.
Basically, Bill makes a pile of stuff he wants to read to learn about new technologies, ideas, theories, etc. Every once in a while that pile gets really big so he tells everyone to sod off and spends a week playing catch up. Usually afterwards he ends up running around talking with Microsoft staff and tells them what they need to focus on now.
This folks is the secret to Microsoft’s success. The fact that any other man that has all the wealth and success Bill Gates has would retire and goof off for rest of their life, Bill Gates refuses to stop and take life easy. He knows that sitting around for even a moment can give someone the ability to outdo him. He refuses to let that happen and is always trying to understand the latest and greatest new ideas out there.
Every graduate thesis to solve some computer problem some kid crank out at MIT or some other top tier computer school Bill gets a hold of and reads it. He’s a very serious man about always being at the forefront of technology.
I really idolize the guy. He’s been lucky enough to be a part of the beginning of the personal computing revolution. It must be amazing to know you where there with the ability to have a hand in molding the direction in which technology flowed. I’d love for the ability to just spend time and talk with Bill. Have him tell stories of the early days, share his thoughts on where the future of computing will go, to just be given the opportunity to bask in the energy of such an amazing man.
Anyways, on to the actual “Think Week” now. Bill covered plenty of issues.
He spent a lot of time on XML and web services. This is a big, big area right now. I’ve been trying to keep up with some of it just so I’m not out of the loop. There’s a ton of issues with web services right now especially in the creation of standards. Getting everyone to play on the same field is always hard in the beginning. Once a few standards are ironed out web services will grow very much in the future.
He talked shortly about hiring at Microsoft so I found that pretty interesting. He made a very good point about how the enrolment in computer science in the U.S. right at the time when enrolment is up in India and China. This rolls right into the current issues with overseas outsourcing.
Finally, they talked a bit about security and the future products out there. Like the next version of Windows codenamed Longhorn. Which by the way is way off now. Last reports put it no where near release before like 2007 or 2008 I belive.
Anyhoo, it’s a good read so check it out.
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Monday, March 29, 2004 