What’s Next for Bill Gates?
This is part 2 of an interview between Time magazine and Bill Gates, in which the Microsoft chief talks about the battle against Google, Origami and other new products from the Microsoft machine.
TIME:What other innovations are coming from your research group?
Gates: Videoconferencing is another good example. There’s more of it going on today than in the past. But it’s still not really mainstream. Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image, because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things. So they’re showing this software that makes you look good, that understands about shadows and bags under your eyes and highlighting the twinkle in your eye and it’s very realistic. It’s what a great makeup artist would do, but the software is doing that with this face recognition and transformation. And so it’s things like that that will take something like videoconferencing and you’ll start to use it more and you’ll start to think of it and you won’t really realize that a fairly key element was a little bit of magic software.
TIME:What’s your strategy for developing the next great innovation that will make people go wow!, in a world where new technologies and devices come along frequently and as a culture we’re technologically spoiled and harder to impress?
I wouldn’t say that. People know very well that these machines could be easier to use, they could do more for them, and they have a pretty clear filter about whether it has helped them get done the things they like to get done. And if it helps them share memories of the kids growing up with the grandparents then they’ll use it. And some technology things seem very cool and then there isn’t lasting use that takes place with them. Some things are a long time in the works. This high-definition video game, Xbox360, we’ve been working on that 3 1/2 years before we came out with it. And the way that works is that platform will stay the same for over four years and then there will be a big leapfrog.