Microsoft

Charlie Rose and Bill Gates

Wednesday, March 04, 1998

CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you. Thank you very much. Let me just say a couple of things while they’re shooting away at Bill. (Laughter.) A meeting of the richest man and the poorest man in the world. (Laughter.)

This is a very special place for me, and it's becoming a special place for Bill because of his contributions to this library and we'll talk a little bit about what libraries mean. But this place, since I've been in New York, has meant a lot to me. Members of the Board, like Barry Diller and Brooke Astor have played an important part in the development of our program by underwriting it. Elizabeth. Rohatyn who was here, and Marshall Rose have all been an important part of my program, and so I'm deeply indebted to this place and to an opportunity to launch today a series of conversations that we're going to have at this very place. The next one will be on May 6th with Wei Jingsheng, the Chinese dissident, and we'll talk about his coming to the United States. You have been to China with Warren Buffet, which was an interesting trip in itself, and to have been on that plane.

So, we’ll have an opportunity to do this a lot, I suspect, with not quite as much attention. (Laughter.) And I’ll harbor no illusion as to why you’re here.

So, after they’ve finished taking these photographs, we’ll have an opportunity to talk to Bill about his experiences on the East Coast. I want to talk to him a little bit about last night. There was this extraordinary occasion in New York, and we were talking about it back stage. It’s just amazing, because you couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into somebody that was one of the most famous people that you’d ever known or people you’d ever wanted to meet. For example, I walked down the stage there and I sort of bumped into or ran into Muhammad Ali, Joe DiMaggio, Mikhail Gorbachev, Steve Spielberg, Sophia Loren, and the list goes on, including Bill, who was one of the presenters, talking about it.

Was there a person ever, before we start, that you’ve met that you most wanted to know or meet or have a conversation with?

BILL GATES: Well, it’s tough to pick amongst that field. It was fun to see Steve Jobs, although I am working with him more now that he’s back at Apple quite a bit. I chose to sit at dinner with Dr. Watson, because his book, Molecular Biology of the Gene, which I highly recommend, is the book I read to learn about biotechnology. And he is such a pioneer in terms of helping out young scientists and doing great things himself. And I enjoyed having dinner with him and talking about the human genome projects.

We also had Sharon Stone at the table. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: Let’s not forget Sharon Stone.

BILL GATES: It was quite the group.

CHARLIE ROSE: And Sophia Loren, Dorothy Hamlin. And the list goes on.

You chose to talk about the Wright Brothers. Was that your idea or Time Magazine’s idea, and if it was yours, why?

BILL GATES: No, that was my idea. The assignment that six of us got was to take somebody who had lived in this century, and had had the greatest impact, but was no longer living. And, you know, I think inventions have really defined why this century is different, and the invention of flight, it’s a great story, because the Wright Brothers were incredibly scientific, and incredibly persistent in going out and nobody was paying attention to what they were doing, and they invented all sorts of things. It wasn’t just a fluke. You know, they understood aerodynamics and wind tunnels and things. So it was fun to talk a little bit poetically about how that was sort of the world’s first superhighway and it redefined life.

CHARLIE ROSE: You’ve been to Kitty Hawk?

BILL GATES: That’s right. I actually go down there for vacation a little bit; it’s a great area.

CHARLIE ROSE: I remember that story. There was a time in your life in which you would take a week off and just go stay and walk the beach somewhere trying to get your -- am I right about that, and remember that --

BILL GATES: Yeah, I still do that. Actually, the only thing that’s changed is I used to do a week a year, which I called the "think week," and everybody would give me material, people like Nathan Myhrvold, you know--Ph.D. theses to read and products to play with. So I’d catch up on what’s going on. The only thing that’s different now is I have to take two think weeks a year to keep up, and next year I’m going to try and schedule three.

CHARLIE ROSE: And what happens in these weeks, you take things that people want you to read and you think about where you are and where you want to go, that kind of thing?

BILL GATES: Right. Take something like satellite technology, which is going to have a huge impact on communications technology; it’s going to let us get out to rural areas. You know, in my normal day-to-day job I’m meeting with the product groups and doing a lot of things, so I don’t get to really read a book where I’d get the background on that. So this one-week period all I do is read. I have no interruptions, I don’t do electronic mail. I just sit and read various things, so I can get up to date on the topics like that or what’s going on with chip technology or what’s going on with the regulatory environment. (Laughter.) Mostly I focus on --

CHARLIE ROSE: I noticed how you didn’t want to go there for a moment.

BILL GATES: Mostly technical subjects.

CHARLIE ROSE: Let me -- I brought this prop or these props. This is -- I got up this morning, and I read the New York Times and there is Gates Presents Case for an Unfettered Microsoft; Gates and Detractors Spar at Senate Hearings; Microsoft Chief Concedes Hardball Tactics. Life serves you better (than the third.) Gates takes on Senate.

Probably the last thing you want to do is to engage in more questions, but characterize for you yesterday -- and I want to get at this question at the beginning and then move on to other things -- the issue of a monopoly.

BILL GATES: Okay. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: I mean, you went there and clearly it was because of you, and these Senators had questions and you’ve got state attorneys general and you’ve got Justice Department people vitally concerned about what Microsoft is doing.

BILL GATES: Well, let me talk just about yesterday’s event. I never testified at a congressional hearing before. Actually, when I was growing up I was a page in Congress. I was fascinated by politics. My parents were involved in managing lots of political campaigns, and so it was fun to be back there and kind of, you know, meet senators. I got signatures from every senator when I was a page, and I actually made a lot of money, because I cornered the market on a Senator Eagleton campaign button. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: You cornered the market, did you? (Laughter.)

BILL GATES: That’s right. That was then. (Applause.) I got it out of my system early. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, right.

BILL GATES: Anyway, when I -- four years later I started Microsoft --

CHARLIE ROSE: You started Microsoft.

BILL GATES: -- and I didn’t think about government activity at all. And in some ways you’ve got to say it’s a credit to the American system that somebody can build a company without, you know, thinking, "Well, do I have enough political influence to start this company or to build this technology." In retrospect, we probably got big enough three or four years ago to get involved in issues related to communications, we should have stepped up our activities there a little bit sooner, particularly in light of the fact that our competitors were giving a lot of political donations and spending a lot of time back there.

So I decided the way the hearing got started is the press was calling up saying, "Are you going to this hearing?" So I was never invited. There was a press release put out saying that I had been invited, and so it was a little bit tough because I’ve never missed a speech ever, and I had a speech Monday afternoon that I was going to give to a bunch of educators in San Diego, and so that would have prevented me from being able to go out and meet with the Senators in advance. You know, I just couldn’t have done it that way.

So we talked quite a bit, saying, you know, what should I do. And so I told the educational association that I wouldn’t be able to speak, which I felt very badly about, and then did go out to Washington, D.C., on Sunday.

It was kind of a neat thing because the story of the PC industry and the software industry, it’s an amazing story that people kind of take for granted. Now, why is this the industry that America focuses on more than any other industry? Why is it creating more jobs than any other area? Why is it changing the world of business more than anything else? And I think the Senate and all politicians are going to need to become users, get out on the Internet, use electronic mail in order to be able to make decisions about political issues that definitely will come up. And so I thought it would be a good chance to go out there.

Now, there were two people already invited to the panel, which was great. We had Sun and Netscape, because the senators wanted to make sure nobody was confused that I had competitors. And so two of them were sitting there. Not my biggest competitors, not IBM--ten times my size--but at least two of the feistiest of my competitors.

A little strange. In the hearing they tried to pretend they weren’t my competitors. Somebody said, "Will Windows be around forever?" And, you know, Mr. McNealy was like, "Oh, of course, it’ll be around forever." But what he really meant is a few dusty old copies will be around.

And then I had Michael Dell from Dell Computer and Doug Burgum from a smaller software company, and then Stewart Alsop, who’s an industry commentator. And it was kind of fun.

CHARLIE ROSE: So your reaction to it was that you enjoyed it?

BILL GATES: Uh, yes. (Laughter.) I’m not going to go every day. (Laughter.) I’ve told the story of the software industry. Now I’ve got to get back to competing and trying to keep our products up to date and effective.

CHARLIE ROSE: Why don’t you acknowledge that there is a monopoly, as Senator Hatch said, but that it is not illegal and that it could change in a day, because of the nature of technology and the nature of how fast obsolescence kicks in?

BILL GATES: Well, when you say it could change in a day, that contradicts the definition of what a monopoly is. A monopoly doesn’t just mean a popular product. You know, we’re in a market where the amount of investments, the amount of change is greater than any other market. Take the products we know and love, products like Coke. Well, that will be a leading product twenty years from now. They don’t have to reinvent it fifty-nine times between now and twenty years from now. That will be a leading product. In operating systems, I guarantee you not a single line of code of what I ship today will be in an operating system six years from now. There’s nothing in common in -- except maybe that it comes from Microsoft -- if we do a good job, nothing in common between what people want in the future and what they want now.

And so when people think about this, they should understand, you know, why do we keep the price of Windows so low. Because somebody could create a clone of Windows and sell it for a lower price. Because somebody can create a better system and sell it for a lower price. And so we’ve kept it -- you know, it is the least expensive commercial operating system you are going to find, and yet we do find because we’re able to attract the volume, and that lets us increase the R&D.

So it’s a little bit tricky when people are using legal terms in a semi-legal setting. For example, they quoted from a piece of e-mail from one of our great engineers, a guy named Jim Allchin, an incredible guy, and he actually used this word "leverage." Well, he’s not a lawyer, he’s not using that in a legal sense. If you read the full e-mail, which is hard but you can -- you can read the whole thing, it’s clear he’s talking about very innovative product ideas that have to do with how the browser and the operating system work together. And, he filed the statement with the courts to explain the background, and so that’s all clarified, you know, that is a total non-issue. But in this type of theater a competitor can say, "Jim Allchin says leverage," and there can be a question that involves that terms, and it’s not, it’s not being used in that sense.

CHARLIE ROSE: This is interesting to me, among other things, as a sidelight, where did they get that quote, the Senate Committee? Was it provided by Netscape to the Senate?

BILL GATES: Yeah. Most of those quotes are in a magazine somewhere, then Netscape creates a briefing book which is to be handed over to staff people, and then eventually posed as a question. In the case of that particular quote, it probably was put in the Netscape notebook because of being one of the filings in the DOJ proceedings.

CHARLIE ROSE: You’ve heard all this before, and clearly I don’t want to replay what happened to you yesterday, that conversation. I expect you don’t either. And there are other questions to go to. But let me just stay with the idea of monopoly in terms of this audience, who might not have been watching television yesterday. The argument made goes along the following is that there’s a certain wall within your operating system, and that you don’t provide other software operators and developers to have access to, and that limits them. The argument goes that whenever there is a company, a start-up company that may be developing some kind of technology that may be important, that they can’t raise money if they know that Microsoft might enter that business, because they’re fearful that it won’t get started.

And the argument also goes that in a sense you frequently, when you see something that has great promise, like WebTV, you’re there with $400 million to buy it, and that what you are doing is essentially continuing to build this great company that will control access to the Internet, and have an influence on the development of innovation that is counterproductive to full competition.

BILL GATES: That’s a long sentence. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: I thought I’d get it all in at one time. (Laughter.)

BILL GATES: Well, innovation in the software industry is at an all-time high. Investments in new companies -- including lots and lots of companies that compete with Microsoft. And we do a very broad set of things. And people have no problem raising money. In fact, anything related to the Internet, the valuations are rather astronomical. So there is no shortage of capital. Anybody who wants their idea funded can do it.

In terms of encouraging software developers, no one does more to help with that than Microsoft does. And this WebTV thing is the perfect example of how people have to really think about what’s going on. Scott McNealy said he wanted to invest in WebTV, and he wanted to own part of WebTV, but he only wanted to do it at less than half the price of what I wanted to do it at. So is there something wrong with my going to the entrepreneurs at WebTV and saying, "Hey, I think your ideas are even better than he does?--"

CHARLIE ROSE: Put a higher value on it than he was.

BILL GATES: " -- and I think we can combine what you’ve done with some things that we’ve done. We can take Windows CE and put it in there. We can offer this on a global basis. Let’s join your team and our team together and create a product that’s very inexpensive, you can buy it for one new classic version for $99, and the Plus version for $199. Let’s make that even better, and let’s take some of those good ideas and use those to actually make the TV even easier, because the interface that’s been done on WebTV is very good."

And so those entrepreneurs at WebTV, they decided, did they want to join up with Microsoft, did they want to stay independent, did they want to join up with somebody else, and they made that decision. And the result, you know, has been fantastic. Our people work very well with them. We’ve been able to advance that product. We’ve got a lot of things going on.

To me, that’s capitalism at work. And it’s pretty unusual if somebody can turn that into something negative. It’s great that those entrepreneurs have many, many choices, in this case one that brought them some work together that if they’d been separate we wouldn’t have been able to create great products.

CHARLIE ROSE: Those who wanted to make the point would argue, for example, they’d take a look at it in terms of practices that might impede competition, they would take a look at the point raised yesterday about Internet Service Providers and who’s listed in terms of, I think it’s called Active Channels, and whether there was contractual limitation. And my understanding is at some point last night you eliminated that contractual provision. Am I -- I read that this morning. I don’t know whether that’s true.

BILL GATES: Okay. Well there are two of what I call side shows.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

BILL GATES: They have nothing to do with anything, but -- (laughter) -- no, seriously. I’ll go through why. We’ve put in Windows the ability to sign up to the Internet. If you’re not already signed up, you can click, get a dialog box and get a list of people to choose. We’ve said for those companies that when we refer the customer, that we didn’t want them to say, "Hey, you should use Netscape instead of Internet Explorer." We said, for those referred customers, we’d like them to say, "Hey, here’s Internet Explorer." Now, that doesn’t mean that customer can’t at any time take the five seconds it takes to go and switch their browser. But just on that one initial thing, that marketing agreement which had that provision and some other ones in it, became a focus of controversy. This is 3 percent of the people signing up to the Internet. Why is it a big deal? Netscape has a very similar agreement with the ISPs; they do their equivalent referral service --

CHARLIE ROSE: So you cannot do anything to --

BILL GATES: Immediately switch as part of that --

CHARLIE ROSE: To the Explorer?

BILL GATES: -- initial sign-up. But we’ve said this is a side show. We are dropping that restriction. So now when we refer somebody over, they can say, "Yeah, it’s nice of Microsoft to refer you, would you like to use Netscape?" Okay, that’s 3 percent, that’s different.

Let’s take this channel guide. We don’t restrict it. Anybody who’s in that channel guide can develop content that makes Netscape look good, they can promote Netscape. The only thing they can’t do is during the time those people, at the time they’re on our channel guide, they can’t also choose to be a Netscape channel guide. Now, Netscape has more people in their channel guide, which also has the same restriction against our channel guide. You know, big deal. That channel guide is not a major thing. We don’t charge people to be in that channel guide. The people who navigate on the Internet, less than .001 percent of navigation has taken place through that channel guide. And so why is that a big issue?

Well, this is good news. If that’s all they can spend talking about, we are golden. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: I want to come to how golden you are, in a sense. (Laughter.) No, not that way, come on! (Laughter.) It’s big-time golden, more than anybody knows. Here’s the question: Do you feel under siege? State attorneys general, the Department of Justice, just tired of criticism of Microsoft, scrutiny of Microsoft?

BILL GATES: No, it’s certainly not under siege. There is a phenomenon that when the Department of Justice sues a company, that a lot of people think, "Hey, can we pile on?" It’s just like a wounded animal out in the middle of the field. And, you know, state attorneys general, hey, let’s pile on these guys. Hey, foreign governments, let’s pile on these guys. But at the end of the day there’s only one issue of any significance, and we’re going to make sure people don’t get distracted by any other issues, and that is, are we allowed, even in a product that is very, very popular, are we allowed to innovate by adding new functionality, even if that new functionality is open standards of the Internet or it’s products that initially were available separately, but by integrating them in we can create a better experience for customers, do we have the freedom to do that. And the law in this country, every case in this country totally supports that. And that’s what the Department of Justice is contesting. And we’ll make sure that this thing just boils down to that one simple thing.

CHARLIE ROSE: You’ll make sure that that’s the only issue about antitrust that is in the consent decree of ’95 is whether you can integrate new functionality then through Windows 98?

BILL GATES: That’s right. They’ve sued to say that we can’t have the Internet Explorer capability as part of Windows.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you worry, though, that when you listen to those senators questions and you listen to what Senator Hatch said that the Department of Justice may very well have a larger scope in mind, and that there may be some concerted effort to go beyond the integration of Explorer into your operating system, that this may be -- may be an effort to say they’re too big and we’re going to find a way to show they’re violating antitrust laws and somehow break them up?

BILL GATES: Well, that’s a "what if" kind of question.

CHARLIE ROSE: It is. But it’s not -- I mean, you think about that. I mean, I remember somebody walking along the beach with you told me the story about you saying that you had squeezed every bit you could out of Microsoft revenue. At that time I think they were at $500 million or about that. And you were just wracking your brain, and you couldn’t figure out how to generate more revenue. So I think you think about these kinds of issues, and you’ve got to be worried if you read all this stuff, and you hear that they may expand the investigation.

BILL GATES: They could -- it’s kind of complicated, because they’re actually sort of reading in the antitrust laws into the consent decree the way they’re interpreting it right now. They could also file a separate action that was just purely an antitrust action. But it would be the same --

CHARLIE ROSE: The Sherman Act.

BILL GATES: Yeah, the Sherman Act. It would be exactly the same issues, you know -- what functionality are we allowed to put into the product, are we allowed to put in a function without charging extra for that function. Those are exactly the same issues.

CHARLIE ROSE: This is another "what if" question. Suppose they win, what happens to Microsoft?

BILL GATES: Well, in this area of the ability to innovate in Windows, there’s really no middle ground. Either I can put speech recognition in or I can’t. Either I can put new artificial intelligence ideas or I can’t. Either I can support the ongoing Internet standards or I can’t. And so it’s a lot like when we had a lawsuit from Apple. In fact, Microsoft, since the Apple lawsuit, we had that Apple lawsuit that was about, oh, five and a half years. Then we had the FCC coming in and looking at every e-mail I send, getting, you know, over 10 million documents. Then we had the DOJ coming in. So we’ve been under some type of microscope for a long time.

And every competitor who has any unfriendly thing to say, they know exactly who to call and, you know, get taxpayer money at work digging into their thing. And there’s been hundreds of these where they’ll look into them and they’ll find out how false the accusations are.

At the end of the day, this one is about our ability to innovate. And we’re very confident, just like we were in the Apple case, we’re very confident that the facts are on our side and the law is on our side.

And you can’t have a contingency plan about innovation. I do find it kind of ironic that clearly the stock market and our shareholders must not be too worried about this, you know, or else, you know, why aren’t they driving the price down.

CHARLIE ROSE: Last time I looked the market cap was about $206 billion.

BILL GATES: Yeah, I think we do it on a fully diluted basis, which is an even more ridiculous number. (Laughter.)

Yeah, but understand in terms of how I think about these things, I am very, very conservative. You know, I’ve always viewed the stock price as being very high, even when it was a tenth of what it is today. I’ve always had a very conservative view of, you know, what kind of growth prospects the company had. That’s just my mindset. When we go out and do an executive retreat, we always have people fill out forecasts for the future. And Steve Ballmer and I, in every case we take just the lowest number. And you know, then every year we’re wrong, and people say, "How can you guys keep guessing wrong?" Well, we say, "One of these days we’re going to be right."

(Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you have some sympathy then for Larry Ellison (?) when his stock declined like 23 percent and he lost a couple billion dollars in the market?

BILL GATES: I don’t think any decent company doesn’t get fixated on its stock price, because these stock prices can get very high, they can be very volatile. You’ve got to pay attention to are you hiring great people, are you building great products, are the customers enthused about what you’re doing. And you can go through a lot of volatility, and certainly we’re going to see in the technology sector again and again and again if you just keep your eye on what counts.

CHARLIE ROSE: Let me move to where the future is, and you mention voice technology. Where is that and how fast is it coming on? And explain to this audience what it means in terms of the world we know today.

BILL GATES: I think people have a little bit of skepticism about some of these new things, because they’ve heard before that it’s just around the corner. Interactive TV was just around the corner. Handwriting computers, and we dabbled in that, along with some other companies, and that was kind of a bust. So you’ve got to be a little cautionary predicting how these new things come in. Even if we get the recognition rate to be better and better, there’s always a question, just a sociological question of people sitting in their office cubicle and talking to their computer and having people overhear them talking to their computer, or is that going to be considered kind of a strange thing. But we’re going to find out. (Laughter.) And maybe we’ll be the only ones who want to talk to our computer.

There are a few environments where speech recognition makes sense. If you’re driving a car, we have this Auto PC -- you know, we don’t want you to look down and then have a wreck. So the basic thing is that you can just say to the radio to turn on, or ask the phone to dial, or ask for the route that you’d like to take. And so that’ll be the first product we come out with that’s totally reliant on the speech interface as a way of interacting.

CHARLIE ROSE: Will that be integrated into the Windows 98 --

BILL GATES: Well, no, initially it’s people like Clarion to be add-on equipment to your cars, and so you’ll put it into the car. Then eventually we hope to get some car manufacturers to build it in.

CHARLIE ROSE: How about in terms of, say, technology in terms of your computer at home?

BILL GATES: We’re looking at speech is an add-on today, but we’re looking in this two to three year timeframe, whether we could put it in. Speech synthesis has gotten quite good, and our work has really put us out in the forefront of that. But we have not gone and put the speech recognition in.

CHARLIE ROSE: When you look at -- look at your own sort of suggestions of where Microsoft is going, where do you see a dramatic change in what contributes to your revenue flow over the next ten years in terms of operating systems, in terms of Office, in terms of other kinds of software you’ve done?

BILL GATES: I don’t really see a dramatic change coming. We have three areas basically: Windows, server software, Office, and then all the other things we do. And that’s just our Internet related things, and the games. If you look at those four, 90 percent of it is in the first three. And those are all great businesses, where we know our customers want new things. We’re hard at work on those things. You know, we understand the business models for those few businesses very well, and lots of opportunities in each one of them.

In that last category I don’t think anyone can say that they’ve got a fantastic business model. Can you collect subscription fees? Well, our Slate Magazine finally, after threatening to take the plunge and do subscriptions, finally in a few days will take that plunge. And so only people who give us a credit card number and pay money will be able to see the whole thing. We’ll see how that goes. I love Slate Magazine, but everybody else who’s gone on a subscription basis has had a very tough time in getting the right number of people signed up.

We’ve got a travel site, Expedia, which is one of the top three or four. And then we get part of the airline’s commission fees for the ticket. So that’s actually from a business model point of view one of the best.

CHARLIE ROSE: That’s what I wanted to get at, this notion of where those income streams come from. Windows, for example, does it provide more of a revenue stream or less of a revenue stream than it does today?

BILL GATES: Oh, absolutely more.

CHARLIE ROSE: Well, no, in terms of percentage of your overall?

BILL GATES: That's tougher to say. All we can say for sure is server software is doing a higher percentage, so that's a very high growth business. … Windows would be about the same. Office may be a little bit less. And then that fourth area is just a wild card. It could be zero or it could be very large.

CHARLIE ROSE: And what's in that, voice?

BILL GATES: No, no, no. That wild card area is Internet sites that Microsoft is involved in promoting. So everything related to CarPoint, Expedia, Sidewalk, MSN, Investor -- I hope I don't miss one of the most important ones.

CHARLIE ROSE: Has MSN been disappointing to you?

BILL GATES: Oh, GameZone, Internet GameZone.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you play games?

BILL GATES: On the GameZone? We don't have the -- (inaudible) -- up yet. (Laughter.) That's the computer game I play. And as soon as they get it up, if it's more reliable than the other one that I use, then I will -- (laughter) -- I will use that.

CHARLIE ROSE: And the other one is?

BILL GATES: No, I can't say. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: Looking at the future, what scares you the most, what worries you the most? Where might there be, even though you've fixed in time the Internet situation?

BILL GATES: Creating a computer more natural to work with, that is the frontier that's ahead of us. And if we don't get out in front on that, then certainly somebody will take our place. And for me -- I think there are two things that always scare me. One is that we don't get complacent as a company, and by hiring smart people, looking carefully -- you know, the larger a company is, the tougher it is. And the longer a company is successful, the more likely it is to get lazy. You know, the lesson of IBM is always to stay focused. Although they enlarged part of the market, they are not the leader that they were, and it's because they lost focus on a lot of the key technologies, a lot of the important things.

Under IBM's founder they did well during his whole time.

CHARLIE ROSE: The Watsons.

BILL GATES: Yeah, actually I'd say both of them. And I'd like to be able to say that under my management Microsoft continues to thrive.

CHARLIE ROSE: The reason I'm asking some of these questions is … Andy Grove was just on the program with me, and we talked about sort of not just the microprocessor related to your operating systems, but also all these other microchips and what they might be doing, and where that is for you.

BILL GATES: Yeah, let me talk about that, because within that Windows category I should have explained there's quite a wide range of devices that are very different from what we think of as the PC today. The future of the PC is to be a tablet-sized device that's perhaps larger than a tablet that you have on the surface of your desk or that you carry around, and that has both wired and wireless connections, it's a nice polished screen, that's the device where a knowledge worker would be able to get business information, would be able to collaborate with other people. And so it's a flat screen that's portable and the user interface is dramatically better than what we have today.

So in a sense you can call that the mainstream device; that's what the PC most directly evolves into. But then you also have a lot of other devices, things like -- I've got one in my pocket.

CHARLIE ROSE: A Pilot is in his pocket.

BILL GATES: No, no, no, no. This is a competitor's -- don't say "Pilot." Geez. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: Does that look like a Pilot? I rest my case.

BILL GATES: It's a palm device. (Laughter.) This one is called Palm PC. It's actually got Windows CE in it. And so as it gets easy to replicate your information, this is where your schedule, address book, messages would come in. We see this one factor and other form factors in between as being important. We see the car being important. We see the intelligent TV with an advanced set-top box as being important.

CHARLIE ROSE: Okay, stop there.

BILL GATES: Okay.

CHARLIE ROSE: Just in terms of the software for that. Who's going to write the software for the set-top box?

BILL GATES: Well, right now there are about thirty companies. So there are many companies that can do that. You've got consumer electronics companies, you've got people who've done embedded operating systems in the past. You've got lots of people, including the people who have done set-top boxes. We have created a product called Windows CE, and I put that revenue into the Windows category. In fact, we've got a major design win with TCI -- Microsoft and General Instruments -- General Instruments on the hardware and us for the software, to provide over ten million boxes for them to roll out their digital initiative.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, but I thought that they also, I mean, TCI made some kind of deal with Sun and Java as well, because they were scared just to have a relationship with you, because they somehow feared that -- and I know it's an amazing concept for you to think -- they might fear you, but -- (laughter.)

BILL GATES: Seriously, this is a strange concept. (Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: Because they feared they'd given you the whole ballgame in terms of writing the software for the desktop box might be locking them into a position that would give them no leverage and no flexibility.

BILL GATES: No, just so you have the facts -- they did a deal where they put Windows CE into every set-top box --

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

BILL GATES: And so it is the operating system, it is the browser technology that's in that set-top box. They got a very inexpensive deal to have an option to also put a subset of Java -- what's it called, I forget if it's embedded Java or Personal Java; they've switched that around a bit. But it's a subset of Java into the boxes that have a lot of memory. And so when people write software for this box, they'll have a choice. They can write either directly to Windows CE or they can write through the layer that Sun provides.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is the goal in the end though, just to understand the world of the future, boy, you'd love to be able to write the software that controls the appliances that work in our houses, that would be one great plan.

BILL GATES: Well, we are working in competition with many other companies to succeed in that area. And if you take things like intelligent telephones, it's an area that we're kind of new to, and there are other devices we're new to, but yes we want to contribute to those areas, because there will be a lot more microprocessors used in these small devices. And our whole view is that all your information should be easy to get. And so we can let you look at your messages here and your address book here without your having to ever think about it appears differently here than it does in the other places.

CHARLIE ROSE: Simplicity is the key word for Microsoft in the future when you look at all these devices?

BILL GATES: Yeah, that's really our mantra right now, because today on the PC you have to learn too much. You've got the way you learn mail -- you know, take the help system. Why does the help system have a different user interface than browsing? Why do you have a different proprietary format for the help system? Why isn't that just advanced HTML? Well, our dream is to simplify the system so there is no more WinHelp or help format, it's just a browser technology that's there to do that.

CHARLIE ROSE: Before I go to sort of payback time in terms of what you're giving back to libraries and a lot of other things, let me ask about the investment in cable. It seems you have in the marketplace an impact on the appreciation of cable stock. What's that about?

BILL GATES: When we were meeting with the cable industry, which was back last June, and they were really depressed at the time -- they thought Rupert was going to come in with the satellite system and undercut them. On the whole interactive CD thing, they had gotten far out in front of themselves on that. And they were just wondering what's going to happen to the cable industry. And their evaluations were way down because people were sort of impatient with the promises they'd made and they'd gotten themselves under the gun in a lot of ways. And we said we can take a lot of these pieces of software, what we've done in WebTV is put them together and build a set-top box that your customers will find exciting.

And so they -- they thought, wow, this is great and we kept telling them about how they could get some new revenue from this and do new things with it, and they kept saying, "Well you at Microsoft are so clever, do you really, really think the cable industry has a great future?" And we said, "Yes."

CHARLIE ROSE: And they said prove it.

BILL GATES: Yes, absolutely. (Laughter.) And we were at dinner, and Brian Roberts sat at the table --

CHARLIE ROSE: Comcast.

BILL GATES: From Comcast. And he said, "Come on, are you really serious about that?" And I said, "Look, if I need to take some of the cash we generate and invest it in a passive way, and wanted to prove we believe in cable, I will do that."

And so Brian, when these cable deals came out, it was about three weeks later, he met with me for breakfast with an investment banker, and by the end of the day I'd agreed to make a passive investment in Comcast, which is primarily a cable company.

And so it's a great thing for Comcast to be able to invest and updating their infrastructure for high-speed connections. It's a great way for us to show our seriousness about working with the cable companies. We're not only going to work with the cable companies, we're going to work with anybody who can provide high-speed productivity. But we think the cable companies have a very important role to play.

CHARLIE ROSE: Payback. One quick question I've always wanted to know is that you bought Leonardo DaVinci's Codex, and where do you keep it?

(Laughter.)

BILL GATES: Actually, most of the time the Codex is on tour. When I bought it, I bid against a bank in Italy and so I agreed to loan it to them for the first six months. In fact, it was in New York. I didn't even see it. It went to Italy. It toured around Europe quite a bit. It was at the Seattle Art Museum. It'll be touring, and then when it's not touring there's a library in my house and there's a room that's been specially designed so that there's no normal lights or anything, it's in the dark almost all the time, and there it's very easy to call up individual pages.

CHARLIE ROSE: Someone told me that Leonardo and Machiavelli knew each other. Do you know anything about that?

BILL GATES: No. Leonardo and Michaelangelo knew each other.

CHARLIE ROSE: I knew that. (Laughter.)

Payback under the general category. But I thought in terms of when Machiavelli wrote The Prince. I stand corrected then.

Payback. You're here in this library. You're giving them a million dollars. You were in Alabama, the Library Foundation you're giving over, what, $2.5 million down there? What are you giving and why -- and what do you expect to get out of it?

BILL GATES: Well, the basic idea is that books became very important in this country, and particularly got to a point where we decided it was worthwhile for communities around the nation to get together and make sure that everybody can have access to books, to come to a public library and see the same neat things that even the most privileged kids were having access to. And I'm enthusiastic about PCs connected to the Internet. I believe it's beginning to become the same thing. Not as a substitute in any way. Books are still the top priority. But as an additional element, I think it would be great if kids, if anybody who can get to a library can get to the Internet. And so my wife and I looked into that. There are a lot of libraries in this country, and a lot of them are in rural areas, a lot of them are in poor communities where they just don't have the money, they don't have the training, the support to actually make this happen. And so we created a foundation that will make sure that vision comes true.

We started it about six months ago, and the first thing we did was take Alabama and go to all 260 libraries and do this. And so we got a lot of students at the University of Alabama involved and put our full-time people down there. We do 24-hour support for them. And we've got lots of computer software. And it's amazing how those librarians are responding to that.

So now that's been extended to the rest of the country, with a priority on the least advantaged areas.

CHARLIE ROSE: Every library in America, every public library in America is going to have access to, one way or the other --

BILL GATES: That's right. Some libraries in the more well off areas are going to end up doing this without needing any outside help, but the goal of the foundation is to take every library that needs outside help and make sure they've got the support and the training and the grants to go in there, get the computer. And actually Microsoft gives the software for free. The foundation is giving them grants that let them pay for the other elements.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you worry about what some have called the digital divide, that we will have in the future every -- close to the end of this century, people who are computer friendly, especially young people, and those who are not, because of financial resources, because of whatever else there is, and they will lose out in being competitive young people and getting on a (process ?) that goes from high school to college to being a productive member of society?

BILL GATES: I think that's got to be a real concern. I mean, the divide can come in many forms. Rich and poor is probably the most important. Libraries and schools are the two institutions that I think have the greatest role to play in terms of avoiding that.

You've also got rural versus urban, because connecting up these rural areas is very tough. We found that in Alabama, going out to connect up these communities, even to get a 64-cable line was going to cost $1,000 a month for them to get that connection. And between what we're doing and the E-Rate program the government has, it looks like we'll be able to provide that. But it's a real challenge.

We've also got old versus young where when young people get a chance to use it, somehow statistically more of them dive in and are willing to look foolish, try it out, just to get very involved. And I think that's another one that's worth thinking about how we could draw in people of all ages.

CHARLIE ROSE: How many computers, PCs are in use today, do you know? I mean, 150 million?

BILL GATES: Oh, 200 million maybe.

CHARLIE ROSE: And when will there be a billion?

BILL GATES: Andy Grove, I think, talks about five years from now having over a billion, and that's a pretty safe bet.

CHARLIE ROSE: That's a lot of operating systems, isn't it? (Laughter.) If you were going to challenge Microsoft, you're on the outside, it's not Gates and others, you want to mount a challenge to Microsoft, how would you go about it? (Laughter.)

BILL GATES: Yeah, you really shouldn't ask me that question. For me it would be easy. (Laughter, applause.) But one thing to understand, my professional career is devoted to Microsoft. That is the one thing I'm doing, I'm totally dedicated to that.

CHARLIE ROSE: How do you give back, beyond the library thing, beyond the fact that I think you're the second-largest philanthropic person in the country, I'm told. How do you give back? How do you say, I've been really, really lucky. I've worked my butt off, I've done well, whatever it is that makes me the richest person in the world, I'd live to give back; how do I make a difference, how do I say this has been a great country.

BILL GATES: Well, I'll tell you that you've got to make sure you still have something to give back, that the government doesn't mess things up for you totally. (Laughter.) But, putting that aside -- you know, in many people's cases, they decide they want to pass most of their wealth on to their children, and that's a perfectly legitimate choice. In my case, I think it's better for society and better for my children if the vast bulk of the wealth that I'm lucky enough to be shepherding at this point, if that goes back to causes that are important, things like access to technology, education, medical research, social services and a variety of things.

Now, at age 42 I have not figured out exactly how to do that with all of those resources. You know, even somebody in my position, the government spends more in a week than the total amount of money that I might be able to give. So you want to give it in a very clever way.

CHARLIE ROSE: So you haven't figured that out yet?

BILL GATES: I've figured out parts of it. A hundred million here, a hundred million there.

(Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, I know, but that's the interesting thing about it.

Is the goal that drives you enhancing stockholder value or something else?

BILL GATES: It's very ironic. I wouldn't say that it's enhancing stockholder value, even though if you look historically and you can say I've done a good job of that, I never thought about that for one second.

CHARLIE ROSE: Then what is --

BILL GATES: I don't know the value of my stock. I picked up the paper a few days ago and somebody said my company was over $200 billion. That scared the hell out of me. (Laughter.) You know, think of the expectations that are involved there.

I had a vision about what software could become, and along with Paul Allen we decided that we would dive in, hire our friends and really pursue that vision. And every year it's gotten more interesting. I've had to learn new things. We've been able to hire new smart people. It's kind of amazing to me, you know, it's pretty much along the lines that we thought about back when we were very, very young.

But having something that I like doing, having something where I can go out and see kids in school taking advantage of this, I can go see some businesses, how it's changing people's jobs. You know, it's just a very fun thing to work in this environment, which is a fast-moving environment. And, you know, that's the kind of dedication which actually I think leads to many of the great successes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Let me take some questions. I understand somebody -- where is -- you've got a camera. Here's -- raise your hand. We'll try to get to as many people as possible in the next few minutes. Yes, sir?

QUESTIONER: Yeah. Hi, Bill. Dave Readerman, Wall Street analyst, Nations Bank, Montgomery Securities. Bill, a question maybe not as intense as yesterday's from Senators Hatch and Leahy, but where do you think you've succeeded and maybe where do you think you didn't succeed in sort of convincing the Judiciary Committee on just, you know, how important it is to not have a regulated software industry, and that you are free to innovate, as you said here.

BILL GATES: Well, the great thing -- one of the great things about yesterday's hearing is that none of the representatives from the industry suggested that in any way there should be a new law or a new regulation. Even my competitors who could have said, "Hey, write the anti-Microsoft bill, because that would be fun." They did not do that. And you have to give them, even though they were whining quite a bit -- (laughter) -- you have to give them credit for not trying to, in such a naked way, use this political process.

So what their mantra was, yes, the current law is fine. Well, what does Microsoft say? We say the current law is fine. We're not trying to get the current law relaxed or changed in any way. We have been very careful to stay within that, and we've got a court case that will allow us to prove that in a very definitive fashion.

So anybody in the Senate or the Congress who is thinking is this something somebody's asking for legislation, that was clearly put to rest. And in terms of meeting with Congress, that has got to be the most important issue.

Beyond that, you know, we raised the ratings for C-SPAN, based on the number of people I've talked to who watched this thing. (Laughter.) Come on, that wasn't that thrilling. Geez. Watch something else. (Laughter.)

But, you know, we gave Scott McNealy a chance to tell some of his jokes. You know, they used all their ammunition.

CHARLIE ROSE: So you think you came away unscathed in that session yesterday?

BILL GATES: Well, I feel unscathed. --

CHARLIE ROSE: Nothing's changed, nobody has sort of mounted a bandwagon to say, you know, I've learned some new things about Microsoft and it bothers me and I might want to do this or that or the other?

BILL GATES: Well, nothing -- nothing they said yesterday hasn't been said many times before. You know, you have -- that's an environment where politeness is at a premium, so you don't turn and say, "God, how many times have you given that speech." (Laughter.)

QUESTIONER: I almost fell out of my chair yesterday when Scott McNealy told Hatch that he didn't know why he was there in Washington, and only that he had been asked to come. What did you think when he answered Orrin Hatch in that way?

CHARLIE ROSE: For those of you who don't know Scott McNealy -- I assume everybody does -- is the chairman of Sun Microsystems and a competitor in some ways to Microsoft.

BILL GATES: Scott on most days, you know, he feels like what he's doing with network computers or Java or Solaris, for all those other things, is very exciting. And, you know, he wants to go out and compete in the marketplace and not use the government or even attacks in the press as a primary competition thing. Scott, you know, Scott's a good guy. Scott went to business school with Doug Burgum who was there on that panel, and with Steve Ballmer, and they know each other and we've done some things together.

So, you know, Scott wasn't agitating to be on a Senate panel, and he was in the same situation I was in, that, you know, the invitations got issued and Senator Hatch is a very important person, that Committee's a very important Committee, and when they issue an invitation I think it's very appropriate to change your schedule in any way you can and appear.

CHARLIE ROSE: It is agitating, though, that he thinks they ought to enforce the existing law, and that he believes that Microsoft has a monopoly and that therefore it is, in his judgment, stifling competition.

BILL GATES: Okay, but it's important to understand the way the judicial process works. They don't call Scott McNealy and take a popularity vote. Everybody agrees that the existing law should be enforced. There's no disagreement about that whatsoever.

CHARLIE ROSE: But he wants to enforce it in a specific way that you don't want to see it enforced, because you have a difference on its application.

BILL GATES: But that's all in front of the court. And yesterday doesn't change that at all.

QUESTIONER: Yeah, I'm Heather Greene with Business Week. Just one question, with what we're talking about a digital economy, with the rise of that, where do you think Microsoft's role and companies like Microsoft can play a part in forming and shaping that digital economy and policy that goes on in there?

BILL GATES: Well, our commercial role is to provide software that makes it very easy for businesses to go on-line and share information, as well as transact business. You know, the things people said a long time ago about the paperless office, we actually believe that will happen, and that will happen first where you'll get rid of purchase orders and any forms that you fill out.

In terms of policy issues that affect this, one of the big issues is encryption. I don't want to go off on that, because it's a long complex thing where you have various national security and law enforcement issues arrayed against industry and privacy issues, and so far nobody's convinced the other side they should compromise in some way that could bring those two things together. That is probably the hottest one, but there are a few other things about can you buy insurance without getting the paperwork, and is it a valid transaction. There are more issues as you get outside the US.

Electronic commerce wasn't meaningful five or ten years ago. Now the economy is moving to be on the Internet, and so there's a great business opportunity for us and others to create software that makes that easy, and there's a necessity to have the laws accommodate electronic commerce.

QUESTIONER: Hi. Robin Raskin from Family PC. I'll ask a library question. One of the issues facing libraries today is whether they should give free unblocked internet access or whether they should use some sort of controls and filtering. Is the Gates Foundation planning on influencing that decision or getting involved in some way?

BILL GATES: Basically no. We make sure that the librarians understand there is this issue, and, you know, one of the browsers that is available to these libraries is Internet Explorer, which includes this PICS, P-I-C-S filtering capability, where you can decide whether to block sites that have a violent or pornographic nature. I think it's very logical here. We are giving tools to these libraries, just like somebody who gives the money to buy books. They decide what books they want to buy, and they're already exercising some very tough judgments about what books make sense in their community, what's the right thing to do there. And if they can just apply those same principles over to the Internet, you'll see some communities do it one way and some do it the other way. And certainly as just somebody who wants to empower them, we'll stay out of those trade-offs.

QUESTIONER: Hi. I'm Elizabeth Gerth with New York One News. I wanted to know what your assessment was of the growth of New York's Silicon Alley, and whether you were eyeing any of the firms there?

CHARLIE ROSE: The growth of Silicon Alley. All the Bill Gates wannabes who work down about 20^th and 5^th.

BILL GATES: Actually, in that community you see a coming together of the very creative world, and the technology world. And there's a lot of neat things going on. A lot of those companies face the basic dilemma I talked about earlier, which is, hey, the Internet's cool, there's a lot happening, but how do you make any money. The number of business plans around that are funded by Internet advertising is very, very large. Even inside Microsoft, you know, somebody can go, "Oh, what's your business model?" "Internet advertising." "Oh, another one of those." And yet, you know, we are going to sort through this, and the people who really know how to do things creatively are going to have great opportunities that come out of it.

There are no specific firms in New York that we're looking at buying. We're doing a lot to provide them tools, to work with them and partner with them. We do have a group there that does our Sidewalk, which is our sort of arts and entertainment site. New York is blessed with a number of people competing in that category, including our Sidewalk.

QUESTIONER: Going back to the disparity question, I'm (inaudible). We're a recipient of two very generous grants of software from Microsoft, and I wondered if you've given any thought to linking some of the other grantees perhaps in this state or across states so that we could share the lessons learned of how you bring technology to the urban inner city or even to rural areas, and how do you train people for the jobs that you mentioned that are coming down the line, how you educate people. You've given us some of the tools, but some people are already ahead of us or ahead of the libraries, and using them in neighborhood settings. Have you thought about ways that you could provide some kind of linkages to that knowledge?

BILL GATES: Well, I think that's a very important question. Microsoft got involved in helping what you're doing, because we think community-center type organizations can play a very important role, both for kids and adults to have access there. We've learned a lot through the library program about what kind of support and the answers we can give, and there are some training programs for people who are building up on the Internet, that it should be easy for you to access. And so the Internet becomes a medium not only for the people who come in to use the computers, but also to help the centers themselves know how to take advantage of that computer to get the latest information, get their questions answered.

And, you know, I see that very much as part of the ongoing relationship. Giving the initial software grant gets things going, but we want to make sure you've got our expertise in and applying it in the right way.

QUESTIONER: Dan Roads. Sir, this morning at the Mott Hall School in the Bronx you saw inner city minority children coming to grips with the world of high technology, and I was wondering what thoughts were running through your mind as you saw these youngsters working with your equipment?

BILL GATES: The coolest thing you can do for a classroom, and I wish we could do it for every classroom, is to have each child have their own laptop computer. And there are some amazing people out in that district and at Mott schools who have made that a reality in the school. What happens is that parents are paying $35 a month to fund half of it, and the school works with the city and the federal government to be able to fund the other half. And it is phenomenal. I mean, you have to see it to believe it, and maybe somebody will make a film so a lot of people can experience it. The way this classroom has come to life, the way these kids are sharing with each other. I mean, they're using -- I haven't even thought of this -- they're using PowerPoint to do their presentations. And these kids, these are sixth graders, they know PowerPoint as well as anybody I've ever met. You know, they want more features, they'd like something to be faster. (Laughter.) And they've got these Toshiba laptops that they take home with them every day, and they feel a personal pride, so they take care of it. And that's been very successful.

There's now about, oh, 300 schools that are doing this, so it is catching on. But it's still pretty small numbers, and it requires a lot of community energy to pull that together.

It's fantastic if we can focus the initial projects like that in these communities, because it just reminds you that these kids have amazing potential that we ought to let them fulfill.

QUESTIONER: Bill -- (name inaudible) -- from Bloomberg News. You said a minute ago that you found it astounding to see that the market cap of Microsoft exceeded $200 billion, but, you know, you're in business and you're talking about new products. Have you ever thought that perhaps you might lower the cost of new products that come out to people so that instead of making ninety cents on every dollar, maybe you'd become a little bit more modest?

(Laughter.)

CHARLIE ROSE: I think I've got it. Lower your price, increase your revenue.

BILL GATES: Well, on the valuation, I mean, just to be clear, I was astounded when our valuation was $10 billion, I was astounded when it was $20 billion, I was astounded when it was $30 billion. When it comes to Microsoft and valuation, any number, I'm astounded. So there's nothing new here. It's particularly poignant when you just round numbers. (Laughter.)

In terms of, you know, our profitability, I guess you'd have to ask our shareholders, you know, what they think about the way we're running things. We certainly are lowering prices on a constant basis. The darn thing is, you lower these prices and then we just sell more, and so, you know -- (laughter) -- in the world of intellectual property, it's a little bit different -- difficult to talk about a margin. I mean, what is the margin of an author? What's your margin? We're in the intellectual property business, and so it's kind of absurd to compare margins there to margins in other businesses. It's a pure thinking business. And we more than any other software company have believed in low prices that have driven the volume of the PC industry.

QUESTIONER: I'm George Mannis with (inaudible). You talked about a subscription website. You talk about astounding valuations. You've talked about how easy it is for companies to raise money. Is there any advice you would give to investors about the Internet, who are thinking about investing in Internet related technologies, computer related technologies? Any general or specific advice you would give?

BILL GATES: Well, remember, I wake up every day thinking about great software, not about great stocks. My friend Warren Buffet would certainly be a much better source of sage stock advice. All I would say is that high technology and Internet related companies, you're going to have a lot of volatility. So there's an opportunity to make an incredible amount of money, but you've got to be somebody who's willing to take a huge risk, because even a company that in the long run will do well, you'll see their stock price cycle up and down a lot of times. There's a lot of psychology in terms of are these Internet stocks worth what you think they are. No, they're not; yes, they are. And it's just going to go back and forth. And I don't even follow the gyrations, because to me there are some constant longer-term things that I'm very focused on.

CHARLIE ROSE: We have to close this off, I'm sorry, because he has to go and then we promised this audience, and we're over time.

Before I thank him, I once in another forum had another conversation with Bill and Isaiah Berlin had just died, and I said, "You know, are you a hedgehog or are you a fox?" And he said, "Well, I'm a hedgehog. I had one big idea, but we've had a lot of other ideas too." Is the one big idea understanding the future of software? Is that it? Is that the single-most important thing that you've got?

BILL GATES: The idea that the hardware business and the software business could be separated, and if you coupled that with the miracle of chip technology, you could redefine computing to be for individuals rather than just the large companies. That is the key thing I've said. The founding vision of Microsoft is a computer on every desk and in every home, and that Paul Allen and myself, you know, wrote that down when we started the company. And most of our success arises from that.

CHARLIE ROSE: Has that vision changed?

BILL GATES: Yeah, but now we say in every pocket, every car.

(Laughter, applause.)

CHARLIE ROSE: On behalf of the New York Public Library and Micrsoft and Bill Gates, thank you very much for coming.

(Applause.)