Q&A Session with Bill Gates
Malaysia Multimedia University
Malaysia, Sept. 13, 2000

Professor Lee Poh Aun, Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology: No matter how ubiquitous IT has been and how fast the Internet has grown, the prime movers behind the scene are the people, the visionaries. The list of people having great influence in this information revolution will be long, but the name of Bill Gates, I'm sure you'll all agree with me, undoubtedly is at the forefront of this luminaries. The students of MMU are indeed privileged for this rare opportunity to meet face to face with Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft and an acknowledged entrepreneur extraordinaire. The 30 students present here represent a cross-section of the graduate students from the two campuses in Melaka and Cyberjaya in the various disciplines of IT, engineering, creative multimedia and management. It is indeed a pity that our undergraduates are currently sitting for their semester exams and, as such, have to forgo the golden opportunity to participate in this dialogue. From the ensuing Q&A, I hope our students will get great insights and perhaps some useful pointers from a great master in the bewildering and interwoven technology fabrics of e-business and commerce, economy, dotcoms and, now, the latest from Microsoft.Net.

Salehuddin, Faculty of IT: I have great admiration and respect for your leadership in the IT industry. What do you consider as your greatest strength as the entrepreneur of the century?

Bill Gates: Well, the world of technology is a fun place to be, because the expectations of the customers are always rising higher and higher. And Microsoft has had four or five times where we have literally had to obsolete all of our existing work and move to something new -- when we moved from 8-bit computing with BASIC to 16-bit with MS-DOS, when we moved from MS-DOS interface to the Windows user interface, when we moved from Windows to Windows 2000. And as we incorporated the Internet into our products, in fact it was back in 1995, people said, as they had many times, would Microsoft be able to renew itself based on the changes in the marketplace? And many people questioned whether we could, and for that era we did a very good job.

And now, as we enter this new era, it's things like the tablet computer with handwriting, or speech recognition, or the wireless computing that you'll have at home where you can distribute pictures and music through that wireless network. So we're really just finally getting to the original dream of Microsoft which is this tool that can help you with everything that you do. The biggest threat to us is to constantly renew our vision and retain the kind of speed and flexibility that we had as a company. As a large company, spending US$4 billion a year on R&D we can do things that are very ambitious -- like the speech platform's quite ambitious -- and yet we need to have the characteristics of a small company moving very quickly. This is also a market in which there's all sorts of fads and you have to be careful not to allow those fads to influence your thinking about what really is going to be popular, what really is going to matter. You have to pick, pick very carefully and that's a big part of my job. So it's picking the next best, picking the next set of changes and picking only very few things and sticking with that, often for about five years before you can make it a reality. That's the biggest challenge for Microsoft and that's why it's fun to be part of it.

Nazri, Faculty of IT: I would like to hear your views on the Free Software Foundation and the Open Software movement. Do you see these two as a threat to Microsoft at all? My second question is, it's been 25 years since you decided to quit Harvard and I would like to hear your advice on students who feel like quitting college and starting up their own companies.

Bill Gates: There's always been free software and it's always had a role to play in the marketplace. When it comes to creating a platform, you can provide common binary compatibility that's guaranteed across millions of machines with an incredible level of support. The commercial platforms have always done better than free platforms have. So when it comes to something like XML or language recognition, you need the capitalistic incentive to create and do the innovations, the many layers that you need to do all at one time. The free software today doesn't have any features that we don't have in Windows. So we actually have a competitor that's even more difficult than the free software, and that is the installed base of our software. If somebody has a licence to Windows, it's free, they never have to pay us ever again to keep using it. And that's a high percentage of the users. So we have to come up with a new version of software that -- even though they have the previous version for free --that the new features, the new interface, the new capabilities that allow, motivate them not only to go to the trouble to licence it but also to learn it and get the right hardware for it.

And so when I think about the scenarios -- the scenarios are reading, e-book reading -- where today PCs are not good enough for reading, or the scenarios are real-time communication where you have voice and the screen together or the scenario of buying across the Internet using XML, we have so many exciting breakthrough scenarios that we can enable with our software. And that's the kind of thing that only by us working with the commercial sector, with that capitalistic incentive, does that come together.

In terms of school, I'd certainly say that people should graduate from college. In my case I'd been, from a very young age, intensely working with software day and night and really in love with the idea of what software could do. And a friend and I, Paul Allen, had talked about the PC revolution and what it would mean. And when we saw that very first chip computer, which compared to anything anybody knows today was a completely useless computer. When we saw that we realized we wanted to be in at the beginning, so we became the very first software company with a very different vision of what the software industry could become. That it could become a very high-volume, low-cost industry employing literally millions of people. So it's that transformation that made it worthwhile to go on leave from Harvard. I'm still on leave and don't know when I'll get back.

Roslinda, Faculty of Creative Multimedia: I would like to know your opinion regarding the emergence of e-books and how do you foresee the shifting of the learning paradigm?

Bill Gates: Microsoft is a big believer that we'll be able to create a screen-based device, an LCD-based device where the comfort of reading even for hours at a time will be every bit as good as reading off paper. And this is based on a lot of research we've been doing over 10 years and a close collaboration with the hardware industry, particularly the LCD manufacturers. The products that are out today don't achieve this goal. People are very demanding about resolution and about the ease of being able to move around and read in a flexible way. So the CRT will never meet this test and it actually requires very special software. And so, the tablet device and the e-book device will be new forms of the PC. And so, instead of getting the newspaper or magazine or the books on paper, you'll typically get it on the screen. That means the distribution cost will be very low, the ability to follow links or annotate something and share it with a friend will be very high. People are very skeptical about this; it's something I'm looking forward to surprising people. Until you really see the device and think, yeah I would like to use that to read, it's hard for them to believe and so for the next two years those devices will be coming out.

Student (unidentified): What are the personal values needed for young people like me to excel in entrepreneurship?

Bill Gates: It's interesting. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I knew that I loved software and I was excited about what software could do. And I didn’t think in terms of how big the company could be or how profitable it could be. I knew I wanted to hire my friends to come work with me; I knew I wanted to build products I personally wanted to use; and that would be my advice to an entrepreneur. Pick an area because you really think you can contribute something uniquely and because you enjoy working on it every day. And that's where you'll be able to do world-class work, the best work in the world. And it starts with very small beginnings. You know Microsoft never thought of itself as a big company. At any time we always said, well maybe we could double in size. If things went perfectly, when we had 100 employees we thought maybe we could have 200. And so we were very cautious about how we spent money and how we thought about building up our organization, so we find ourselves really surprised as we look back on these 25 years at how far that's come. The world of entrepreneurship is one where a lot of these companies will be challenged. There's only a few of them will emerge that's really making dramatic contributions. I know that many will. So you have to enjoy the experience and bring along other people with you to enjoy it during the process.