INTERVIEW:
Question 1
We would like to begin by asking you to reflect on how the new technologies are changing.
Answer
The speed of technology is quite incredible: the microprocessor chip doubling in power
every two years, the improvements in the software, the applications that are coming out.
It really is all moving far faster than any previous change that has taken place. And it's
a revolution in communication, the way that people buy products, the way that people
collaborate with each other, the way that people learn. Part of it is the device itself,
the very intelligent PC, and that won't be the only device, we'll also have intelligent
TVs connected to the same network, and pocket-sized devices that use a wireless type
connection. There's a challenge here to the communications companies to allow us to hook
these up at very high speeds; this is a necessary element that is still not in place. I
think the opportunity for building the infrastructures is really quite incredible. This is
one aspect of the revolution that will be different from country to country, because the
incentives and the regulations that encourage building these high speed networks will be
quite different from region to region. We're also now drawing in the media businesses, the
newspapers, the entertainment companies, to create on-line digital content. When we have
put all this together it will be quite dramatic. I think we could say that in five or ten
years from now most children will spend more time in front of a personal computer or an
intelligent device, interacting with that device, than they spend simply passively
watching TV. And that gives them a chance to learn the things they're interested in and
reach out and find people who have similar interests all over the world.
Of course the Internet and the standards it has brought to us are at the centre of
this. Although the Internet is very limited in many ways today, people shouldn't think of
the Internet as being static. The Internet is improving and changing all the time: the
quality of the content, the software that lets us create that content. Now it's not only
computer experts who can create those pages, people are creating their individual
homepages. And we're starting to see teachers and students contributing and better and
better ways of navigating around all of that information. The Internet is such an
incredible phenomenon. It's like many things in telecommunications. Once it's achieved a
critical mass, so you have enough people hooked together, then it just grows and grows.
Five years from now I think virtually every business card will have an electronic mail
address on it. And we won't be just sending short messages around, we'll be sending around
rich electronic forms. I talk nowadays about how businesses that use these digital systems
can be more efficient. And every business should make electronic mail the standard tool
that they're using, along with the Internet connections and the productivity software.
Every company should look where they use paper forms and say: "Hey, why can't we get
rid of these and collaborate within the company using these digital tools in a very rich
way." So the speed in the Internet will be going up, the security will be improving.
And then we'll start to see not just texts and images but also audio and video going
across the Internet. One great thing about the Internet is that it's a global network.
It's connecting every country and so all the information that's being created there is
available to everyone.
Now, the first place that will have a big impact is in business; business can afford
the equipment, including the communications costs because of the efficiencies that it
provides. But in the long run, the biggest effect will be on consumers, people at home who
will think of getting information in a very different way. If you want to shop for a
product, you'll think: "Hey this is a place to go and get information". You
won't necessarily always buy across the Internet but finding out who offers the product,
what a good price is, what the reviews say about the different products will become very
natural. Once you're used to using the Internet and browsing, you don't just use it for
one function. Not just for your banking or taxes or e-mail, you would start to use it for
everything because you just take it for granted: learning new things, playing games,
reaching out across the world, the Internet will do that. We can start to see some young
people who have access to the Internet already living this lifestyle. Most people who
graduate from college in the United States today have been using the Internet for many
years, and that's the way that they sign up for courses or stay in touch with each other,
so those young people are now moving into companies and spreading the ideas of how this
can be done.
Software is an element of this. There are many pieces that have to come together, and
it's interesting to see how the industry has structured itself in a very specialised way.
In the old computer industry one company did everything: designed the system, did all the
software, even did many of the applications. Today, the technology business is very
specialised. Chip companies are the best at making chips. There are companies that do the
foundation software like Microsoft. There are companies that do the vertical applications.
And it's this specialisation built around standards that allows this pace to be so very,
very rapid., Allowing people to independently pick the best hardware and pick the best
software has been a great impact. For many decades people talked about that kind of
openness where you could have the hardware choice be separate. But it simply didn't happen
until the PC came along.
Now the PC is getting richer in terms of what it can do. The big issues for the PC
industry right now are three: building in the Internet so it's much easier to use, and
that's proceeding very rapidly. Second is making it easier to manage PCs. They're a little
too hard to use, they're a little too difficult to keep up to date, and so there's a lot
of focus now on making it very simple by using the network so you can handle all the
systems that are about there. A final challenge for the PC industry is to prove that these
systems can handle the incredible demand that these networks will place on them. The
number of transactions on these networks and the desire of people to look at the
information about what different types of customers are doing means that we have to move
to a level that even very expensive computers never achieved. And that's often referred to
as a need for scaleability.
There are many applications here that are driving people to want to get connected up. A
PC that's not connected up doesn't deliver nearly the impact of a connected PC. A PC
that's not connected is great. You can do word processing and spreadsheets, but the
revolution here is that these devices are connected. Today, about half of all new PCs are
connected to the Internet. And I have no doubt that that number will rise and eventually
reach 100 percent. The ability to share documents and work together, the ability to find
the latest information no matter what field it's in, really does make the world a smaller
place and it brings a new level of efficiency that is very, very exciting.
So what, concretely, am I saying? Well, there's a real tendency when you look at the
future to think that in two years things are going to change a lot more than they will. I
think people are too optimistic about what can happen in two years. But then again if you
take a ten-year timeframe, I think people are underestimating the impact of the Internet,
because year by year it's going to grow as the leading businesses adopt that, which we're
already seeing. We're already seeing governments that are putting out public kiosks and
getting rid of standing in line and filling out forms. This network will have a wide
variety of devices connected. The PC will be the most important, but the small devices -
what we call the wallet PC or the intelligent TV that you can interact with - that will be
important as well. So there's a lot of work for communications companies to do to put in
these higher speed connections. In fact, if there's one element that is going to limit how
quickly this happens, it is this communications infrastructure. The software industry and
the chip industry are already moving at this exponential rate. So we're quite anxious to
partner with communications companies to put these pieces into place.
One thing I'd like to emphasise is that the shape of this revolution is clear enough
now that individuals and companies and even countries can already start to plan ahead for
it. This is going to happen. And understanding how the laws need to change, understanding
how to foster the entrepreneurial activities, is also becoming much clearer. Around the
world we can see examples of good work going on, whether it's putting computers into
education or building out the infrastructure or facilitating electronic commerce. So I
think it's a very exciting time and something that I'm certainly pleased to be in a
position to participate in helping to make it all happen.
Question 2 (De Julio)
I would like to ask a couple of questions. The first one ideals with the problem of
convergence among various technologies and markets. Of particular interest for us in this
discussion today is the convergence and the integration between computers and television.
There are different ways to get this integration: The Internet, digital television, cable,
satellite. We know that Microsoft is facing this new market from all possible
perspectives. The agreement to invest in Comcast Corporation as far as we know is the
latest in a series of initiatives including the acquisition of Web TV networks, teledesic
projects and so on. So my question is: Which way do you think is the most promising?
Answer
There are two key elements. There is having the very rich devices that connect up the
network and then there's having the very high speed network itself. In terms of the
devices, the PC is at the centre of what's going on. Over 80 million PCs were sold in the
last year, and the amount of software that's being developed for that, whether
entertainment or business software, is really quite fantastic. The pace of bringing down
the price of the PC and at the same time improving the capabilities means that it will
lead the way. So it will have 3-D graphics and motion video support, all of those things
as very standard. Eventually, the PC will even be able to understand when you talk to it
and be able to synthesise speech. We'll have a much more natural interface sometime in the
next ten years. Now, we'll take parts of that PC technology and put it into the TV set,
and we'll take parts of that PC technology and put it into the small devices but all
connected to the Internet.
The Internet is the set of protocols that will be used for all of this. In terms of the
network, I think that in order to get these high speed connections we need all of the
elements that you talked about. We need the satellite companies to put in more capacity,
we need lots of fibre, we need an approach called ADSL, which uses the copper twisted pair
that already exists and is able to drive data at very high speeds. To give one example, in
the urban areas where it's very dense you can afford to run new fibres and put it very
high speed connections. When you get out into the rural areas, it's not as cost-effective
to do that. And so it's in those rural areas that the satellite approach will make sense.
So these satellites, at least the one that's called teledesic that I have personally
invested funds into, is a complement to what the communications companies are doing, to
cover the areas that they would find it very difficult to cover. The user won't know
whether it is going to cross a high speed cable connection to go to the Internet backbone
or cross the phone line or some satellite connection, just as you don't have to think
about electricity or water. The technologies will work together in a seamless fashion
because they have very rich protocols now that mean that those networks will not be
incompatible.
Question 3 (Maurizio Decina)
The telephone companies and telecommunications companies are now investing in high speed
access or broadband Internet access by a variety of technologies, on copper wire, ADSL,
cable modems. And by fibre we are talking about ATM, which the telcos are very keen on.
The question to you is, is there any killer application around the corner, a new kind of
software application that Microsoft is developing in order to favour the development of
this broadband Internet access? Or do you believe that improving and enhancing current
Internet applications like Webcasting, Pointcast, etcetera is sufficient to justify the
taking off of the broadband Internet access in the future for consumers?
Answer
Well, that's a very good question and it's one we have to think about quite a bit. Five
years ago there was a lot of talk about interactive TV and how we'd use digital networks
to give people the opportunity to have video at any time. Well, many of those dreams were
unrealistic because the cost of building out the high-speed network simply wasn't
justified by the new revenue from movies on demand or the other applications. And so there
was no boot strap. We couldn't get it going. We couldn't get the application because we
didn't have enough people connected up, and all the technology pieces were much too
expensive. Now, fortunately during these last five years the technology pieces have gone
down in price a great deal. Things like motion video, compression/decompression, so-called
MPEG2 chips, are now very reasonably priced. ADSL is a way of using the copper wire. The
price is coming down on that. And so once again we can say to ourselves, Look, how do we
get there, how do we boot strap this?
The Internet is a great thing because even though it's fairly slow speed today, every
year people put up richer and richer content, which encourages us to increase the speed of
the Internet and so people put up richer and richer content, which then encourages us to
increase the speed of the Internet etcetera, etcetera. It is a lot like the PC: you
encourage faster and faster processors by having more demanding applications. This is
somewhat scary for communications companies because if they increase the capacity of these
networks then the price and the revenue that you get from the network will go down because
you'll have overcapacity and prices will fall. We need these digital applications that
actually use up far more capacity than the voice applications ever did. I personally have
no doubt that this will take place. First in the business world where very modern business
will need to be connecting up, sharing information, selling products across the web,
collaborating with their partners - we've already seen this. The same will happen with
ISDN and ADSL to business: as soon as the prices come down the volume of usage will go up
to match that. Getting out into people's homes, that's a little bit tougher and we are
starting to see that in the United States with the cable modems and the early ADSL.
There are some places like Hong Kong and Singapore that have so much density and so
much affluence that they've gone ahead and have built these very high-speed networks and
we are participating to demonstrate the applications. We are very dependent on the
telecommunications companies making these investments, in the same way we're dependent on
Intel investing in new chips. That's why we're doing so much to, say, how can you take
your Internet services and do hosting and provide new revenue streams for your making it
easy for people to get in and embrace the digital world.
Question 4 (Guido Martinotti)
My question has to do with education. In your book you have a chapter, a very
enticing chapter, on the marvels of Internet and PC on the educational system. For
instance you have a very good example of how an art professor could play around with a
painting by Seurat, I think the title is "Une baignade". I think you may have
simplified this because that particular art professor in order to be able to do all the
things that you describe, zooming and clarifying work with colleagues, has to do a lot of
preparation on that. And some of this preparation is very time-consuming and also costly.
And I make now the specific question which is an example of the more general one. Next
fall I will be teaching an entirely on-line course. It's an experiment. 50 students with a
mixture of First Class and Netscape and no classroom. I have in my regular course about
200 beautiful overhead projections which I can use freely. And now I found out that to use
that in my on-line course, 60 percent are not useable, 20 percent cannot be released by
"Scientific American" and the like, and 40 percent are too expensive to use. So
in fact I have to step down as a first experience. What do you think about the
difficulties of going from the artisan, the workmanship of teaching a university course or
a school course and doing that on-line?
Answer
Well, today I think it's very difficult for teachers to share their good ideas. Let's say
you're going to teach art: it is difficult to go out and see how other people have taught
it, people who have won awards for that and are doing it well. Today it's very hard to get
access to that material. When it goes up onto the network you ought to be able to build on
each other's ideas. You could take the course presentation, add a little bit to it
yourself, and then put it back upon the network so that they can see that as an edition
they'd be interested in. This kind of collaboration to me says that the quality of
teaching can improve instead of each teacher essentially starting from scratch. Now, it
does require a large display in the classroom environment where you can browse the
Internet and bring up the rich information that's out there. It also means that somebody
has to have a library of material that you can have access to without worrying about the
licensing.
I have an investment in a company that now has a million images on-line. It understands
the rights to those images, so for example it can give a campus-wide license for the
students in a university to take advantage of everything that's in that collection. I
think you'll see a lot of that. It is strange that they want to charge you extra for
presenting material to students electronically that you have the right to present in a
non-electronic fashion. It just shows that we're at the early stage here, because
electronic rights clearance should be a lot simpler than any other types. If you find a
picture, you should be able to just click on it, see what rights are available, and for
education it will often be the ability to use that material. You either pay nothing or
paying a very, very small amount.
I do see teachers getting together and there being known websites where you go if
you're an art professor to see what's up there. The kind of slide libraries that people
had in the past, you have to sort them around and pick them and display them, then if the
student after the lecture wants to go back and look at that, they don't have that slide
library and in their place we're they're going to study. But if it's on-line, not only can
they see what you've presented and go back and review it, they can say: show me something
related, show me more of the background about this person. So they can exercise their
curiosity and use your lecture as the starting point to go out and explore the world of
knowledge that's there. I'd be the first to admit that there's a lot to be done here, and
a lot of teachers will never move into this new way of doing things. In universities I
would hope that a lot would because the kids will start to expect it.
Moving that down into the younger classes is very hard. We've done something recently
where we taught in a class giving a portable computer to every student. They can take it
home with them and have personal responsibility for it. And the effect of the teacher
knowing that everybody has that tool and that they have it to use all the time has been
very dramatic on the way they teach the material and a lot of these classrooms are now
working together. And so I'm very optimistic about education and what this can mean in
terms of sharing and building good work.
Question 5 (Stefano Rodotà)
You have said many times one of the most important problems of the coming digital age is
privacy protection. So two questions. First of all, what is your opinion about privacy
today and what do you suggest as the best privacy protection today?
Answer
Computers have already stored a lot of information about people. Computers know every
check that you write, every credit card transaction, every phone call that you make, how
much you pay in taxes, so there's already a great deal of information out there about
people. What's happened now is simply that because everybody sees that the computer can
build information so efficiently, for the first time they're aware that all that
information is being stored. Clearly, the government has to have policies to protect
things like tax return information or medical information or banking records and make sure
that those are kept very private. In terms of the network itself, when you go around the
network, you are often asked to fill in a form to describe yourself and talk about what
you do and a company can gather information about what you're doing on the network.
There's been an industry group now that's put forward a standard so that whenever you go
to a site, you can see what their policies are about privacy. And you can declare that you
don't want information to be passed to other companies or you can say that that's OK with
you. And you can always go to one place and cancel anything that you don't want sent
around. I think this is a case where the industry is working very hard on the right
solution. If government by itself imposed standards, that would just be in one country and
would therefore make the Internet less attractive in that country. I think it's much
better for the governments and industry to get together. The fact is that choking off the
Internet by having overly restrictive privacy laws is probably not the best solution. The
best solution is to see what is going on and see where problems come up, and only respond
to particular issues that are arising. It is very tricky because of the global nature of
the network. Someone putting information on the network and wanting to interact with
customers cannot go out and study different regulations, and so hopefully Europe as a
whole will come up with one set of policies and sit down with the United States and other
developed countries to make sure things are aligned. But I would say it's very dangerous
for anybody to try and get out in front on this, and I think that privacy groups that
industries put together, which Microsoft and all the key companies are involved in, I
encourage you to spend time with that group before doing something that will really
constrain the ability of users to get information that's customised to their interests.
Let them simply decide when they want to give out information so that the only rules are
that you have to be clear about what is being done and let the customer make the choice.
Question 6 (Gino Cavallo)
The United States consumes 40% of computer software and produces 80%: Europe consumes 40%
and produces 15%. What one factor has allowed the USA to win this battle (even against
Japan) and what has prevented Europe from doing so?
Answer
These are global industries and the consumers everywhere are benefiting from these new
technologies in the same way that when somebody invents a new medicine or comes up with
more efficient way of doing agriculture. That's spread around the world so the efficiency
and the selectability is available to everyone. Although much of the original pioneering
work on the Internet was done in the United States, the benefits are there for anybody who
wants to use it. I agree though that it's very interesting now why has there been more
risk taking and more technology companies in the United States, and what you said about
Japan is very interesting. About 10 years ago people in the United States and I think
around the world thought that the United States was falling behind because we didn't have
these grand government projects that were not going after new technology. Japan had a
so-called fifth generation project where they threw a lot of money into doing artificial
intelligence and things like that. Instead, in the United States, each university and each
company was allowed to pursue its own ideas. And if you really look into the technology
business in the United States, over 80 percent of these new start-up companies go
bankrupt, you know, so it's not easy to just start up a company and do very well. It's a
system that selects winners and losers very quickly, and all you read about in the
magazines are the companies that do well. And so the fact that there is risk taking, it is
a very large market where the personal computer caught on early, there's a lot of
attention to copyright protection so that the software companies can sell their products
in the country very well. All of those things help. Once you get a software industry
going, there's a certain momentum that comes with that. Although the United States' lead
will be reduced over time as more companies come into this, I think it'll still stay
pretty strong. Now, there's a new era here where the content will be how most of the money
is made. The actual software that controls the network will be a good business for a few
companies including Microsoft, but there will be new opportunities to build on top of
that. When it comes to content, that's going to be mostly a local industry because the
things that people care about, how they want their kids to be taught, the news they're
interested in, the shopping they care about, that tends to be very local, not only because
of the desire to see it in your native language but also simply the content itself has to
be adapted. We will start to see lots of success stories in every country where new people
will emerge using the Internet in different ways, and Europe will certainly have its fair
share of that.
Now, what can be done by governments to facilitate in promoting more of these
entrepreneurial companies? Certainly, getting personal commuters into education, where
Europe has been fairly slow compared to other countries, making sure that these upgrades
in telecommunications take place and that it's widely available; that's a very key step,
putting the flexibility into the labour market that allows for the risk-taking. That's a
very controversial thing but certainly it's critical in the United States. If you had
restrictive labour practices where it was hard to reduce the size of a workforce, then
people would never take those workers on, so you don't let the economy adapt at the same
pace. And with today's changing environment allowing the economy to adapt very quickly is
critical. All the debates that are going on about this issue and looking at where the
success factors have come from, I think that's all very healthy.
Question 7 (Luca De Biasi)
Still about the USA and Europe: Microsoft is investing some US$500 million for a better
definition of your role in Europe. And Cambridge is an example of that. Could you explain
your strategy in Europe? And what would you have done if you had been born in Naples?
Answer
Well, Microsoft started investing in Europe very early in the history of the company. We
hire people in each country that can build partnerships in that country: partnerships with
the large customers there, partnerships with the other technology companies, and making
sure that the latest tools and technologies are available to the local software industry,
making sure that they get that information at the same time that everybody else around the
world does. So you get lots of software being built on top of that platform. We've had
incredible success and incredible growth throughout Europe because of the early commitment
to the market. Our share of the market around the world is fairly high but it's slightly
higher still in Europe because of the early commitments that we made there and the very
good luck we've had hiring really great people to run each of those operations. The
strategy is very dependent on partnerships; and even this next year we're expanding the
investments we make quite a bit, particularly doing even better working with the software
developers. That's a big increase in the number of people we have throughout Europe. The
effort to get involved in the European research community is something we've talked about
for a long time, and we did take concrete steps. Now we have our first European research
group in Cambridge. We think that we will use that as a foothold to really start a
dialogue with all the key universities doing advanced technology work in Europe. We're
going to put together a committee of the leaders there and really find out which
universities should we be doing collaborative programs with. Microsoft's goal is draw on
the best work all over the world, and now with these digital tools we can afford to be in
multiple locations and have the collaboration taking place across the network. So even
though most of our R&D has been done at our headquarters, we're now seeing the
possibilities of spreading that out a little bit and the Cambridge move is part of the
step that was taken there.
In terms of what would my career have been like somewhere else, it's hard to say. My
parents weren't that enthused about my dropping out of school and starting the company.
They thought I should stay in school and became a lawyer, do something fairly normal. And
I was just very lucky that the timing was right., and that my partner Paul Allen, , was so
enthusiastic about the opportunity, and we got going at an early stage and we were able to
hire our friends. So under any other circumstances I probably would be a scientist working
on medical technology or a professor. I probably would have gone down a different path
because there were so many different cases where what I was doing appeared to be very
risky that if anything in the environment had been a little more discouraging then the
pieces would not have fallen together to create a company like Microsoft.
Question 8 (Gualtiero Peirce)
In recent years we have seen the Internet as a great opportunity which was the exact
opposite of broadcasting: an instrument which allowed everyone to choose anything. Now we
are witnessing the great success of "push" technology, which in some way
contradicts this tendency. Some say that this technology is the revenge of the old
broadcasting against the personal media.
Answer
The Internet depends on interactivity and letting people explore what they're interested
in, when they're interested in it, and even to be able to have a topic that a very small
number of people care about, making it easy for them to find each other and publish a way
that let's them share. That's very fundamental. So push and broadcast are not going to
change that. Now, in any medium, whether it's books or movies, where you can go to a shop
and pick from thousands of books or hundreds of movies, there are going to be some that
are very popular. So in push we have people like Disney or Time Warner coming up with a
set of things that you can passively just sit there and watch, but it's just a starting
point for then being able to interact, to pick something that you want to see more about.
So although you can think of push as a very popular brand, letting you do something more
than pure interaction, I don't think it changes the character of the Internet, which is to
let anyone publish whatever they want, make it very easy for people to find each other,
and let you explore in the way that you want to. Push is going to be just a layer on top
of the Internet that entices you in around the few brand names. But most of what will go
on is just people following the links that they care about and the variety of interests
that they have.
Question 9 (Maddalena Camera)
Windows 98, the next generation of Windows, is built with an Internet browser
inside. Have you already imagined a Windows 00 for the year 2000? Perhaps with a
television digital decoder inside, because in the meantime you have bought CBS.
Answer
In terms of buying CBS, that was a completely false rumour. There is no basis for that
whatsoever. We did invest in a cable company, Comcast, to help them built out high-speed
infrastructure and we do interactive news and cable news in a joint venture with NBC. But
our focus is purely the platform software and then some interactive content things which
we are doing. We are hard at work on a new version of Windows that will come out early
next year, and we have sent test copies of that out already. The exact schedule and even
some of the features will depend on the user feedback we get. All the phone calls that
come into Microsoft, all the meetings we have with customers, are logged, and that allows
us every couple of years to do a major advance in Windows, to look at what people are
finding confusing or hard, or look at the new things they're doing, for example on the
Internet, and integrate that in so that they don't have to buy extra software but can
figure that up. For example this version of Windows will have the browser built in and
also the ability to make phone calls across the Internet or share the screen across the
Internet, all that will come standard, and so it's just a few clicks away for the user who
wants to do that.
When you get out to the version after this next major one, I'm sure that there will be
advances in the multimedia, the graphics that are there, the simplicity of setting things
up and using things, but we don't know ourselves because it is very customer-driven. With
all the products we have, we take our most advanced research and what the customers are
telling us and bring those together to say what is really practical today. Now, something
like receiving TV on a PC set, that is already a feature that is available in many
personal computers, to have the TV screen up there. It doesn't add much value versus just
doing it with a normal TV set. The interesting thing is if you could have something that's
richer than TV, which you could call up at any time, that you could see from different
angles, and interact with it. That's going to require the high-speed infrastructure which
will take most of the next decade to build out to people's homes. In terms of people at
business, that kind of video capability for video conferencing, along with most of the
people working on information together, will become very practical. So we'll work with the
hardware vendors to get them to be more ambitious in some of these areas and we'll make
sure that Windows exploits that so that hardware advances and software advances will be
very much going together.
Question 10 (Giancarlo Santalmassi)
I wanted to ask you three questions on three different points: what will happen to the
post office if everything is done via electronic mail? How will journalists check their
sources? And what will happen to radio and television news?
Answer
In terms of the post office, I think you're right that over time the number of letters
people send will go down but it's going to take quite some time. If there's more travel
and more international commerce, that of course is driving up the number of phone calls
and messages, and then some of those will shift over to the Internet, and so the actual
balance over the next few years will grow before you start to see the decline;
particularly for people in homes, that's ten to twenty years out before you see a radical
shift there. Your point about the media is very important. When everyone can publish, a
lot of what's out there will just be wrong. It will be people's biases or people not being
careful about what they say, which is why even on the Internet people migrate to get
information from a trusted source, whether it's a magazine brand or a newspaper brand or a
journalist who has personally become famous enough that people seek out what they're
saying. So you won't just pay attention to anybody, since most of the information out
there is not given the same care and review that the very well-branded organisations will
be able to provide. So when people say to me that newspapers are threatened by the
Internet, I say, in fact considering their key skill, their reporting and editorial
richness, the Internet is great for them because they can distribute what they do without
anything like the delay or cost that they have today. The tricky thing for newspapers is
to look at things like the costs of advertising and will there be more variety of ways for
people to get at that information. But in terms of the basic skills-sets that will
continue to be quite important. If I imagine what news will look like on the Internet,
what I'd like to see is today's headlines somewhat customised to your personal interests.
And if you see a headline that's interesting, you not only see the article behind it, you
can see a lot of detail. Let's say there's a budget debate in the Italian parliament. You
might want to look back and see how the government spends its money, how it has changed
over time. You might want to ask how your representatives voted on certain issues, and so
since the system knows your location, it can immediately put into the article how your
representatives voted and what remarks they might have made. So the ability to get beyond
simple sound bites and actually understand what's going on and have in-depth understanding
of the topics you really care about is greatly enhanced by this format. You don't have to
have everybody seeing exactly the same news squeezed into a very short period of time.
People skip over the parts they don't care about and guide in and even see the background
and history of those other parts. When I think today of people reading about Bosnia or
Ethiopia or these topics, they really need more background. Now, that shows a very
optimistic view of people's willingness to get involved and learn things if they're given
a simple way to do that. So I think the news will be a lot richer and a lot more detailed
and personalised but primarily coming from branded sources, people that really put the
effort in to get the facts right and have the depth of material.
Question 11 (Paolo Calcagno)
I will ask the question that my colleague asked, but more directly: is it true that
Microsoft wants to buy CBS? And what is the strategic significance of this acquisition?
Answer
There's no basis at all for that rumour. We have no interest in buying any television
network in any country in any way at any time. Our primary business is providing software,
Windows, Office, and Back Office. And we've been very successful in that and there are a
lot of challenges ahead to make the computer able to respond to voice commands, and that
is the primary thing the company is going after The only media things we're doing are
interactive media. When it came to news, we knew that Microsoft by itself really didn't
have the skills to do that, and so we worked together with another network, NBC, to do
interactive news and cable news. We picked a partner for that and now that could be a very
interesting business for us. But compared to the Windows business or the Office or Back
Office business, these interactive media businesses we're going into are very small today.
We're doing enough of them and trying some interesting new things. Some of them will be
successful, some of them will not. But the very best cases, if the Internet is incredibly
successful, that if you took all those interactive things and put them together, that it
might be a quarter of the company, that is, similar to the big businesses we have today.
So we don't expect to be a significant media business in terms of share. Where Microsoft
is significant is writing software and providing software building blocks to make all of
these things possible. That's a very competitive business so that we've got to make sure
that the majority of what we do is very, very focused in that area.
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