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Remarks by Bill Gates
Blacks at Microsoft - Minority Student Day
Redmond, Washington
February 14, 2003
(Applause.)
BILL GATES: Well, good morning. Welcome to
Microsoft.
It's exciting to have you here and talk about the fun things
we've been able to do at Microsoft, but also talk about the future, talk about
the kind of tools that you'll have in the years ahead and the kind of
opportunities you'll have to help contribute to not only using these tools but
making them even better in the future.
When I was your age computers weren't personal. Computers
were big, big, expensive machines that the government used and companies used.
They used them to print out bills or to keep track of databases, things like
that. But the idea that an individual could have their own computer and sit
down, do their homework, play games, that was basically a crazy idea, but it
was an idea that a friend of mine, Paul Allen, and I dreamed about. We dreamed
about having one of these and trying to figure out how to make it so it could
be cheap enough and fun enough and we decided to pursue that dream. It was an
amazing journey to do that. We got to hire a lot of our friends and we were
betting on the power of the machine getting better and better.
We actually started Microsoft back in 1975, which seems like
a long time ago now, and moved up here to Seattle, which is the city I was born
in and that Paul was born in, so in 1979 we decided we'd come up here.
In 1981 the IBM personal computer came out, again a long,
long time ago, and now PCs are quite amazing compared to what happened then.
So we have made a computer that's very useful and probably
the most fun part of my job is going around and seeing the different ways that
people use them, to see how computers are being used in hospitals around the
world to help with medical care, to see how people with disabilities can use
these computers to stay in touch with people and do work that they wouldn't
have been able to do before, to see how grandparents use the computer to stay in
touch with their children, grandchildren who might be far away whether it's
pictures or talking or chatting, trying different things out, and just making
the world a smaller place.
You know, probably most exciting is to see a kid who's
curious about a topic, where in the past they wouldn't have been able to get
many answers, able to sit down and use the richness of the Internet to go out
and find other kids with similar interests but also to find some of the
answers, find the latest information.
And so no matter what the topic is, whether it's advances in
music or science of history, learning about interesting people who have done
things, you know, now that capability is there. And from my point of view that
takes the great curiosity that everybody has and lets them keep staying
curious, lets them really find out the things they want to know and understand
that all these things are there for them to figure out and it's really their
generation that will reshape things in some exciting ways.
You know, computers are very worldwide. There's about 500
million computers. When I was young I used to say, when we started Microsoft
we said, a computer on every desk and in every home, and there's 6 billion
people and 500 million computers so we're still not there. There's still a lot
to be done in terms of making it easier to use and less expensive and doing new
things.
In fact, we talk about this idea of the fact that we're just
at the beginning of what computers can do, and one of the ways we say that is
we talk about this decade as the Digital Decade. At the start of this decade
in the year 2000 the main things people did with computers were electronic mail
and word processing, and a few people were doing more things than that, but
really not a ton of people.
By the end of this decade, 2009 -- that gives us six years
to see if we're right about this -- people will be doing a lot more things with
computers. Take music today. A lot of kids when they want to work, music, the
computer is the right way to do that. I hope you all license your music
properly -- (laughter) -- when you do that, but it's very convenient on the
computer.
You think about photos; we're just at the beginning of the
transition away from film that takes time to get things developed and all that
to having the computer be the way to do it. Cameras, digital cameras are now
able to take photographs that are as good, high quality as film-based cameras.
The ones that are that good are fairly expensive but those prices will come
down and, of course, the convenience of a digital camera in terms of being able
to touch it up and do an album and make some audio comments and send it around
is just so much better.
We even think that things like reading will be done off of
the computer screen. We have a thing called the Tablet personal computer that
just came out a few months ago. They're a little bigger than a tablet today, a
little heavier than a tablet, but over the next several years with the miracles
of the kind of improvements that take place, they'll be just like a tablet and
people will do reading, note taking and annotations there.
In fact, some day you won't have to have textbooks, because
instead of carrying around the text book, all that information will be like
your music is now, in digital form, and the homework problems will be there,
the text you should read will be there and if there's something you're reading
and you're confused about, you can just write a little note on it, you know,
share it with your friend and say, "Hey, can you figure this out?"
"No." "Hey, what about our other friends, do they know how this
works?"
So the ability to communicate around that kind of
information and not have to carry any books around, you just have that nice
little Tablet machine, that's what classrooms will look like in the future.
Already here at Microsoft we use these Tablets in our
meetings. We've got a wireless network, so if you sit in a meeting here, if
it's allowed to bring your computer, which some meetings we say that's OK, some
meetings we say it's not OK, but for those that it's OK, if the meeting is not
that interesting you can sit down, look up your electronic mail, see what's out
there on the Internet, make sure your schedule for the weekend looks good, you
know, use your time in a much more effective way.
So these are pretty amazing tools and people are really
surprising us with the neat ideas in the way they do these things.
Even the idea of a phone call, we're going to make it so you
can share things on the screen with your friends instead of just talking with
them.
And some of these ideas that are kind of fun for thinking
about to use at home can have a huge impact of making people more effective in
their jobs, making jobs more interesting, making it so you're not wasting a lot
of time trying to call somebody or looking at paperwork or not understanding
what the numbers are.
Jobs today are more interesting than they were 10 years ago,
and the jobs that you'll be taking will be even more interesting because of
this empowerment.
Today's theme is actually the theme of Microsoft at this
point, realizing potential, and we love our jobs because these tools that we
make let people do that.
I really envy you going out into the workplace and being
able to shape all of this and use all of these things. I think one thing we're
saying very clearly here is that your potential is even greater than you may
realize and that you should set high goals.
One of the cool things that we talk about for digital decade
is the idea of not just photos but also videos as well, and so to give you a
little taste of some of this work and show you that it's really coming along
I'd like to ask Marcus Ash, from what's called our Media To Go group, to come
up and show you what is Media To Go all about and how does it fit this dream of
the digital decade. Come on up, Marcus. (Applause.)
MARCUS ASH: Thank you very much, Bill.
So Bill talked about the Digital Decade, and one of the most
interesting things is the fact that computers are getting smaller, more
portable, more powerful and cheaper every single day. If you think about your
own computing experience in a few years from now, every single device you have
will have some type of computer in it -- your cell phone, your wristwatch;
computers are going to be all over the place.
I actually work in a group at Microsoft where we're focused
on looking at these new sets of portable devices and figuring out, hey, what
type of software can we build to really help people enable all kinds of new
scenarios that they never even imagined possible.
The device I'm going to talk about today is called Media To
Go. Think of Media To Go as your personal, portable media entertainment
station. It can be a portable DVD player. It can be a CD player. It can be a
Walkman. It can be a radio. It can be all these things rolled into one
device. And all you have to do is take your Media To Go device, connect it to
your PC; all the content that you might have downloaded from the Internet or
you might have archived your whole CD collection or videos, all that
information can be downloaded and you can basically take this device, put it in
your pocket and experience your content wherever you go whenever you want.
I think back to my own experience in high school, and I can
think of one particular scenario where I would loved to have had a device like
this. Every single year when I was in high school we would make a trip from
Detroit, Michigan all the way down to Miami, Florida in the middle of winter
for a marching band camp competition, and that was good for me for two
reasons. One, I got to get away from my parents for a whole week, and, two, it
is freezing in Michigan in the winter, so spend the week on the beach, do a
little marching; a great time.
The problem is it's a 30-hour bus ride from Detroit to
Miami, so I'd spend the whole week getting all kinds of tapes together and
recording tapes and recording the radio and borrowing things from friends. I'd
have to borrow a camera from my friends, I'd have to borrow my mother's -- all
kinds of stuff from here. I'd have to borrow my brother's GameBoy just to
entertain me for that 30-hour bus ride.
If I would have had Media To Go, all I would have had to do
is plug it into my PC, my PC knows who I am, it knows the content that I like;
all of my content would have been transferred in about two minutes. I'm ready
to go on my trip.
I don't have to argue with my brother about using his
GameBoy. I don't have to beg my mother for a camera and I don't have to fight
with everybody on the bus about which video we're going to watch because
there's only one TV for all of us on the bus.
So I think another way to illustrate this is with a
demonstration. So what I have here is a prototype of a Media To Go device.
You can see that all of my content is archived -- my music, my videos, TV shows
and pictures.
The first thing we have is my music, all my digital music.
This could be CDs that I've ripped to my PC. This could be content that I've
downloaded from the Internet, would live under the My Music directory. My
videos, these could be music videos I've downloaded from the Internet. It
could be maybe home movies that I have on this device.
And then My TV Shows, this is a really, really cool
scenario. Late last year Microsoft released a Windows Media Center Edition
PC. You can think of this as the father of this device. This is like the son
of the Windows Media Center Edition PC. And what the Windows Media Center
Edition PC is, it's this fantastic new PC that now it's a regular PC, you can
play games, you can run your normal office applications but it also has some
really advanced entertainment functionality. And one of the coolest things
about it is it allows you to record live television right on your PC.
So if you had your Media To Go device, and let's say you're
a big fan of "American Idol" because you love to watch people get
laughed at that can't sing -- (laughter) -- you could actually -- but, you
know, let's say you record "American Idol" every day but you just
don't have a chance to watch it because you're busy, you've got school, you've
got all these other things going on, but you really want to catch last night's
episode. All you would do is record "American Idol" on your Media
Center Edition PC, hook up your Media To Go device, that episode would be on
this device and then maybe when you're coming home from school on a long bus
ride you could catch up on the latest episode of "American Idol."
The other thing that Bill mentioned is digital photos. This
device can store about 30,000 digital photos and there's also a connector on
the side so you could have simple connection to a TV display so if you wanted
to share your photos or videos with friends or family it's really easy for you
to do that.
So let's go ahead and take a look at a video. I've actually
got three video clips here and I'm going to let you guys tell us which one we
should watch. (Audience chatter.) Hold on, hold on. Give me a second.
So the first clip here is just a stimulating lecture on a
bunch of code optimization tools from a professor here at Microsoft, absolutely
fascinating.
The second clip is the latest music video from JayZee.
And this clip -- Bill doesn't know about this -- I snuck
into his personal archives and I was able to get a hold of his audition tape
for the lead role in "Austin Powers. " (Laughter.)
So what's it going to be? How about the code optimization
lecture?
AUDIENCE: No.
MARCUS ASH: No. JayZee?
AUDIENCE: No.
MARCUS ASH: Bill Gates as Austin Powers? (Cheers,
applause.)
BILL GATES: JayZee was a close second there.
MARCUS ASH: I think it's official, Bill. You are
cooler than Bill Gates. How about that? (Laughter.) So let's take a look.
(Video segment.)
(Laughter, applause.)
MARCUS ASH: So I hope this gives you a really good
idea of some of the cool software scenarios that we're planning for the digital
decade. I really appreciate your time. I hope you guys have a fantastic
afternoon with us here at Microsoft.
Bill is going to come back up. Thanks a lot for your time.
(Applause.)
BILL GATES: Good job. That was a fun one. It's his
job to get to do a lot of different things.
One of the cool devices I just wanted to hold up and show
you is a thing called the SPOT watch. This is the idea of putting chips, these
advanced chips even into a watch. You have to make them really small, low
power, and these watches will be out later this year.
The nice thing about them is they don't just tell the time;
you can look and see the sports scores you're interested in, look at your
schedule, get messages from your friends. If you own any stocks, you can see
the stock prices on here. Whatever kind of information you're interested in is
on the watch.
So what's in this watch is actually five times more powerful
than the original personal computer that we had about 20 years ago, so it just
shows how these chips are letting us do some cool things with software.
You know, Microsoft started as just a dream that Paul Allen
and I had, and even for me as I drive around this campus, I think, wow, that
really turned into something. We stuck to it. We love doing it. We didn't do
it because we knew it would be such a big success; we did it because it was
what we cared about, it was what we had fun doing. We talked our friends into
coming and doing some of it with us. And I hope that's example of how wide
open the opportunities are to invent something new, to see things that people
before didn't see and it's a great time to be pursuing your dream.
One thing I've been very lucky to be able to do is to take
some of my success and give it back in some ways through a foundation I've
created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and one of the coolest things
we've been able to do is what we call the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program.
I've actually got two people here who are Gates Millennium Scholars and I'm
going to introduce them. Jonathan Lott
is here and go ahead and stand up, Jonathan. (Applause.)
And Mathios Dejene. (Applause.)
Now, these guys are at Seattle University in the computer
engineering department and they're going to hang around so I'd love to have you
talk to them about what it's like to be working in that area, what are the
opportunities like.
Jonathan is from a small town in Texas and Mathios is from
Ethiopia. (Applause.) So I think you'll find it a lot of fun to talk with
them and it's great to have people like this able to benefit from the
scholarship program. Super.
You know, also as you're seniors in high school that's a
program I encourage you to take a look at because it can help out in terms of
pursuing your studies.
Now for something that's really fun that a local high school
is doing, I'd like to ask the Xbot team from Franklin High School to join me on
stage and talk to me about what they're up to. (Cheers, applause.)
SAKYROH ABDOROHMAN: Hi. I'm Sakyroh Abdorohman.
I'm from Franklin High School. I'm the captain of the Robotics Team Xbot.
First it's a program that helps high school students who
want to get involved in science and technology. How it works is a high school
and a corporation gets together and builds a robot. We get exactly six weeks
to build that robot. On January 3rd each of the teams got this set of rules
and their kit to build. We're currently in our fifth week right now of
building the robot. Our team meets about three nights a week and every
Saturday.
It's a nationwide program involving around 1,200 schools.
It's a really good program. If you go to Franklin, I encourage you guys to
join next year the program and if you guys don't go to Franklin I encourage
your schools to start a robotics team of your own.
JAMAL BOMANI: My name is Jamal and I'm a senior at
Franklin, and I was playing a game that we play with the robot. There's a
playing ground and there's side A and side B and in the middle there's a ramp
with boxes that are stacked up. And the object of the game is to get your
robot, and your robot will be teamed up with another robot from a different
school but you won't know what school it's from. So you guys will be partnered
up as a team going against another two robots. And the object of the game is
to get your robot to knock the boxes off of the ramp and then get them stacked
up on your side within a certain time limit.
NICK NORTON: Hi. I'm Nick and I'm going to explain
what the robot does. It has these arms up here that will fold out at the
beginning of the competition and knock the boxes onto our scoring zone and then
there's this right here that will stack them up, because you get points for
stacking the boxes and that's our robot. (Laughter.)
BILL GATES: It looks pretty complicated. Have you
guys been working hard on this?
NICK NORTON: Yeah, yeah.
BILL GATES: Is it fun?
NICK NORTON: It's been lots of fun.
BILL GATES: And when's the first competition?
NICK NORTON: I think April 3rd I think.
BILL GATES: Is the regional competition.
NICK NORTON: Yeah, the regional competition.
BILL GATES: Well, good luck with that.
NICK NORTON: Thank you.
BILL GATES: Super. (Applause.) It should be fun to
watch those robots do that. A neat contest.
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