Billion dollar brain

Bill Gates's schoolmates didn't like him much. He was the guy least likely to succeed, "with the emotional maturity of a six-year old, who spent all his time in the computer room", according to one Seattle stockbroker. "No one would talk to him because we were all too busy hanging around". Now, Gates doesn't answer the phone when they call.

Twenty years out of school, Bill Gates has changed: $7 billion dollars makes a difference. Now, Gates is America's richest man. The computer-obsessed kid turned into, a puter-obsessed 37-year-old". Gates is building a house (a modest 520-million dream home) packed with electronic gadgets, including some that do not exist yet. The house is becoming almost as well known as he is. "It won't be finished for almost three years, so it's probably the most famous house in the world that doesn't exist", he says. It is not meant as a prototype for 21st-century living. "The only thing that's really special is the idea of being surrounded by extremely high-resolution screens, and a very large image database, where you can call up about a million different images, of which 400,000 arc works of art. It's art on demand: show me the Rembrandts, show me the Michelangelo, show me Mount Everest, show me Moscow, show me sail-boats, a sunset, the desert, and immediately you'll see these wonderful pic­tures on the walls. Just click, click, click". The trouble is, with Gates you're not sure if it’s the instant art beautiful landscapes he appreciates or the powerful computer technology that makes them possible. He believes that his company's computer products will change our lives: it is the magic of the machines that drives him.

Gates loves computers. At school in 1968 (at the age of 12) he and a friend made (4,200 writing a set of programs to sort out class timetables and his school used it. By the time he was in his senior year at high school, he was a programmer for TRW - one of the biggest aerospace electronics concerns in America. That was the last time he had a boss.

The empire he's built up in less than two decades (Microsoft) is the world's largest soft­ware company. It's overtaken IBM's profits, even though the "Big Blue"* sells $65-billion-worth of products every year, compared with Microsoft's $2,8 billion. Gates always used to say that he wanted Microsoft to become "the IBM of software". But with the Big Blue losing money and business all over the world he has changed his mind. "It's a very challenging industry", - he says. "We moved the comput­er from being the centre of the organisation to being a tool for the individual. IBM didn't take part in the change. You can see now how smaller, fast machines have replaced the larger computers. IBM didn't move their skills into software and networking and the other things that are important in this new envi­ronment. In the future of the computer indus­try no company will have the powerful posi­tion that IBM had in the past". Ironically, it was IBM that started off the irresistible rise of Microsoft, and Gates's empire.

In 1980 IBM was building its first personal computers, and needed a crucial piece of software - an oper­ating system. This is computer code at the lowest level: it tells the disparate collection of chips and processors how to become a com­puter. It controls all the machine's most basic functions. IBМ came to Bill Gates. Gates did­n’t have an operating system, but he knew where to find one. Microsoft paid $ 100.000 for it, called it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disc Operating System) Microsoft Seeks Domination Over Society, as its competitors are fond of saying) and sold it to IBM. The attractive part was that the deal didn’t stop more sales to other computer companies.

So once IBM’s PC had set a technical standard, and millions of clones had appeared. MS-DOS could be sold to every other PC maker. Soon MS-DOS, not the PC itself, was the standard everyone depended on.

The operating system went some way to fulfilling one of Gates’s dreams. Twenty years ago his goal was a computer on every desk and in every home. Is that still desirable? I have a clearly defined vision of what kind of tool a computer can be: it’s a tool to help people. We can make it easy enough to use that people want it in their homes. I think we’ve made very good progress. I’d even say we’re half-way to achieving it”. MS-DOS worked very well for the computer-literate, but even its best friends wouldn’t claim that it was particularly user-friendly.

To get a com­puter into every home, Microsoft would have to make them more accessible. “Windows” was the answer. It was an eas­ily understood way of working in which, for example, deleting а filе is caused by merely clicking on a picture of a folder with a pointing mouse, and dragging it to a bin on the screen. Pointing to other pictorial icons start the computer was processor, database, or even video.

Windows may not be enough to persuade everyone to use a computer. Gates’s latest enthusiasm is for pen-based computers, which recognize ordinary hand­writing instead of relying on keyboard and mouse. “We’re still in the very, very early stages. There are a lot of people working on these machines. We need better hardware and software. It’s not an easy problem but I think that in the next few years most personal computers will recognize hand­writing. We will create those possibilities”.

Gates has visions well beyond personal computers, though. “The idea is a product that is quite different from a TV or a PC, but combines both”. But as the possibilities advance, the complications begin to multiply. “You’re faced with too much choice – any movie, any TV show, you want to look at government services, you want to look up information. You need some kind of graphical user inter­face there, just to help you find what you want. We’ve been designing new consumer-type products with Windows applications especially developed for that specific purpose. It’s called Modular Windows. The aim isn’t real­ty a PC, nor a TV: it’s something completely new”. This new medium (“hyper TV”) could seriously upset the television applecart. “Without question”, -agrees Gates, “this computer revolution means big changes for the televi­sion networks. They thrived on having a limited number of channels, so that they were commanding huge chunks of the viewing audience. But when the viewer technically has the ability to choose any movie ever made (or any number of channels) it obviously changes the whole TV business fundamentally”.

Microsoft is also making big changes in itself. Instead of being purely a software company, it is becoming, in Gates’s words, “an information company”. Microsoft has linked up with picture-led UK book publisher Dorling Kindersley to produce multimedia products combin­ing text, pictures, music, speech and animation including “Dinosaurs”, a prehistoric tour. Gates expects Microsoft’s consumer division, which pro­duces these products, to be the biggest in the company within five years, overtaking the programming business.

One day, computers may even be able to write better programs than people. “I’m about the most optimistic person you’ll meet”, comments Gates, “and even I don’t think computers will write programs in the next twenty years. But one day, the nature of what it means to write software will have been automated so much as to change our business drastically”. Gates himself no longer writes programs. “The last time I sat down and wrote lines of code was about ten years ago. I spend most of my time with groups which do write programs, going through what’s going on; what are the changes in the marketplace; what has the product got to be like?” He has spent twenty years, trying to beat the competition. “There isn’t any guarantee, you know, looking forward and we have to fight over and over to stay ahead. But I’m still enjoying it very much, and if there’s any fatigue I sort of ignore it. I’m 37 years old, and it’s a very advanced age. You know, I used to work for forty hours straight I can’t do that any more”.

Notes:

• The article was written in 1992.

* The "Big Blue" is the nickname of IBM.