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By Jai Singh, 20 November 2003 11:40

NEWS For two decades, Bill Gates has used his Comdex keynote speech to mark out his vision for technologies, from the internet to XML. This year he used the bully pulpit to make it clear that the industry is at one of its perennial crossroads.

Once considered simple nuisances attending the digital lifestyle, cyberattacks and spam have morphed into disruptions costing millions of dollars in downtime and wasted manpower. Against a backdrop of mounting customer frustration with insecure digital infrastructures, Gates laid out his vision for a new era of technology that removes much of the hassle of being a computer user.

silicon.com sister site CNET News.com caught up with the Microsoft co-founder and chairman earlier this week to talk about the lead-up to his "seamless computing" speech.

Q: You've been talking about seamless computing at this Comdex. Give us an overview of what's on your mind.

A: The key reason I picked the theme of seamless computing was to talk about the frontiers we still need to solve in the next few years. I see the things holding us back as being boundaries between different software systems... Why isn't ecommerce a reality? Why isn't managing your schedule digitally with friends and colleagues not a trivial thing to do? We can look and say that many of the problems are software challenges. Certainly, the solution to lowering operational costs on systems, the solutions to spam, the security challenges, the need to think of all these devices and how they work together - that's largely a software problem.

How can you hope to break down the seams if the vendors still don't really cooperate? Isn't that still a challenge?

Well, yeah. Take for example getting Microsoft Office and SAP to really work super well together. There's a web services architecture that allows us to schematise these things. There's a pure architectural theme. In 2000, we committed ourselves to the .Net strategy. That assumed XML and web services would become mainstream. Looking back, one of the things that was a clear success was the bet on XML (Extensible Markup Language) and web services. People are just beginning to understand how profound they are as industry standards.

At the semantic level, we actually now have standards. That's been a holy grail for over 20 years. People spent a lot of time futzing around getting the bits to flow between machines and now that we have that, you think, "Well I can point a browser at any website. Why can't I do a query about all the sellers?" The reason you can't is because that's at a higher semantic level than just how to put the stuff on the screen. And it's far more complex. Only web services give us a foundation for us to do that, so in a sense, a lot of the dreams of the '90s, like true ecommerce, had to wait for this industry standard infrastructure and the tools to be put in place.

What's your view of this idea of utility computing? And how does it speak to seamlessness if indeed this is a case of "here they go again", putting their twists and turns to what they want to propagate?

You have to be careful with utility computing. That was a rage during the 1990s, that everything would be hosted and moved outside the company. Where are those hosting companies now? Only a few things - like running websites - fit those models. The IT systems are your brain. If you take your brain and outsource it then any adaptability you want [becomes] a contract negotiation.

There's something common between the IBM message, the Sun message and the Microsoft message: Some of the things that you do with personnel to operate these systems today should be done automatically with software. We all agree it's a software breakthrough that will let people free up part of their IT budget that now goes toward operations and apply it toward new things. What's interesting is that everyone admits it's a software problem, not a hardware problem.

What's driving this? Is it marketing?

No. It's the development and operational and personnel costs that are really jumping up to be this huge percentage. You have to go after those to free up the most dollars for [IT] to innovate. We're not pro- or anti-outsourcing but we think people have to be careful because there's certainly been more failures than successes.

Part II: Gates on Linux, patching, anti-trust effects...