Bill Gates stood on the stage at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show 2001 in Las Vegas, his lanky frame hunched slightly forward, holding his hands praying mantis-style, making him look like Mr. Burns, the ruthless nuclear power tycoon in “The Simpsons.” He almost cackled like Burns does as he talked about his future business plans.
America’s richest man plans to get richer still by moving Microsoft from its roots as a creator of software for personal computers into a new role as the leading producer of software and hardware for all of the gadgets that already are worming their ways into our lives.
I caught Gates’ speech over the new Tech TV cable channel, and as he spoke I realized the significance of the many briefings I received over the past 12 months from Microsoft executives who dropped by Chicago selling various aspects of the company’s new strategy.
Let me cut to the chase and describe in just one paragraph Bill’s master plan to again take over the world:
Everybody in the United States will buy a hand-held device that looks like a combination of cell phone and Palm organizer. This object will be linked to the Internet by way of satellite broadcasts. It also will be linked to a conventional PC in the user’s home.
Running Microsoft software, acquiring data from satellite companies owned by Gates and accepting input from human speech, this object will control just about every bit of technological gear in its owner’s life.
To turn on your house’s heating or cooling, you will hold the object near your mouth and say, “House, set temperature at 71 degrees.” To play a song on your stereo or car radio, you will say into the object, “Music, play Nanci Griffith’s `Other Voices Other Rooms.”‘
When you want to write something, you will sit down in front of a computer and speak the words, which will be transformed into computer text and stored on your hard drive for later use at work, as e-mail or just as your own personal diary.
At that trade show in Las Vegas, Gates brought one of his underlings out on stage and had him dictate speech into e-mail using a speech-equipped version of the same Pocket PC device from Compaq Computer Corp. sold in stores and over the computer-maker’s Web site. (See accompanying review.)
Last autumn, Ed Suwanjidar, Microsoft’s project manager for Pocket PC devices, told me how a number of technological developments are coming together to make it possible to build some amazing capabilities into these hand-held computers that quickly are becoming essential tools for millions of Americans.
Suwanjidar provided one example by having an assistant go into the next room with the hand-held and conduct a computer chat over the Internet with a friend in Seattle by making a wireless link to Ed’s laptop.
It became crystal clear that within a few short years our cell phones will have morphed into these multipurpose objects that can communicate with nearby computers as well as reach out to the entire world by way of cell phone and satellite connections.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, Gates showed several examples of how a Pocket PC running software soon to be released by Microsoft can accept data from desktop computers and also communicate with other consumer electronic devices.
The best demonstration came when he had his assistant speak key word commands into the hand-held Compaq Pocket PC to play particular MP3 music files through a home stereo system.
And the future is almost here, as indicated by the new partnership between Microsoft and the Israel-based StarBand Communications satellite service, which provides two-way Internet connections to home computers via satellite dish receivers on the user’s roof.
The trick to it all is to make a wide variety of devices and technologies converge into a single object that becomes a person’s primary means of interacting with the technology that surrounds that person.
As time passes, that object will become ever more important. It can, for example, hold not only all the stuff we need to know about others–names, addresses, phone numbers–but also all the information about us. It can hold our resumes, our health records, our credit card numbers–you name it.
I already carry this stuff in a Hewlett-Packard Jornada Pocket PC that also holds a dozen of my favorite photographs ready for display on its tiny full-color screen.
Gates and I are betting that it won’t be too long until you, too, are carrying about a precious object that runs Microsoft software and serves as your indispensable Pocket Pal.
If we are correct, Bill will be richer still. Your humble correspondent will be rewarded as well, even though my employer’s ethics policy bans employees from owning stock in companies they cover.
I will get something even better than Microsoft stock. I will get the opportunity to say, “I told you so!”
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/go/askjim or e-mail jcoates@rcnchicago.com. Snail mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611.
