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By - Darren Straight

Q&A: Bill Gates Spills About What’s Next for Microsoft

This is part 1 of an interview between Time magazine and Bill Gates:

TIME: How do you think about innovation? What are your cues? Is there a way you look at the world and derive a vision of the future? People wonder how Bill Gates comes up with the next big idea.

Gates:There are tons of great people here at Microsoft who are always coming up with ideas. I go off for a week every six months and read hundreds of papers from people who are telling me about big advances, and their ideas about things they think we should do. Take a simple concept. You’re a parent and your kid is growing up. How do you collect all the photos, email, video, calendarsall those things—and make it so that sharing it with relatives or going back 10 years later and finding some neat moments are very easy to do? Obviously today’s software lets you do that better than you could 10 years ago, but it’s still very hard, very manual and nothing like what it will be. Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it’s taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, “Let’s get out the camera and get that shot.” You just have that and software helps you pick what you want.

Actually the first place they used this is with people who have medical problems where their memory is not working. So they’ll meet their son, which is a big event for them, but they won’t be able to remember what was said. If you use this camera and play back the images for them, it reinforces those memories. That’s not the mainstream application of it, but it’s this amazing thing that who would have thought the right kind of software could take that memory impairment and really just change the life of someone like that and let him or her have those memories in a very simple, fun way.

It’s really great to have the research people constantly talking to the product group people “hey, we’ve made this breakthrough and why can’t you apply it?” The product people are so much in the real world they’ll say, well, it’s too hard to set up or someone will have a privacy concern that if you have all those photos how are they going to be used.

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