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MICROSOFT'S BILL GATES HOLDS STUDENT FORUM AT UCSD

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May 27, 2003 -- The crowd was standing-room-only when Microsoft chairman Bill Gates visited the UCSD campus on May 27 for an event moderated by CSE professor and Cal-(IT)² director Larry Smarr. The Student Forum attracted nearly 2,000 people, but hundreds were turned away after the Price Center Ballroom filled up, as did the nearby Theater where the audience watched Gates via closed circuit television.

Billed as a "conversation" about "the magic of software in the digital decade," Gates made it clear that a major reason for the visit was to speak directly to potential employees from the Jacobs School of Engineering and other parts of campus. "A lot of great graduates have joined Microsoft and we hope that will continue in the future," he said. "We also have strong relations [with the university] on research work that we both care about."

Gates added that UCSD is a perfect place to experiment with new technology, because universities are open-minded and students are prone to thinking of new ways to use technologies. He also predicted that today's students who want tomorrow's jobs, computers and telecommunications are the place to look. "The biggest change factor of the next twenty years, and the most exciting area to be in, is information technology," Gates said, after a brief introduction by UCSD Chancellor Robert Dynes. "The only others area I know that can compete with that, and where this campus is also very strong, involves things going on around biology."

In his brief talk, Microsoft's "chief software architect" said he spends at least half his time working on new products and services that will drive personal computing over the next decade, and predicted that integration of multimedia, including voice-enabled applications, will dramatically change all three of the major reasons why people use computers today: document creation, email, and Web browsing. He elicited a laugh from the crowd when he predicted that in the future, everyone will download digital music -- "in an honest way." "The idea of music being on physical media [e.g. a CD or tape] and the ability to take it with you only if you bring that media along -- that will be a thing of the past," said Gates.

Another revolution that's waiting to happen: making it easy for people to read books on computers. "One of the Holy Grails at Microsoft has been the ability to read," said Gates. "To make this work, you have to be able to hold something in your hands... so that's why about ten years ago we began to ask if there could be a tablet computer." He admitted, though, that Microsoft is "only about 5% the way there" to solving the problem.

Gates predicted that telecommunications will fundamentally change computing. "We will be able to take for granted high bandwidth connectivity, and we should think of applications that will rely on those things," he said. "Another huge sea-change at Microsoft over the past five years has been the way we think about our relationship with people who use our software." Gates noted the company used to be limited, because it would ship a product after testing, then it would take months or years to get a software fixes into a new version. Now, through the Internet, fixes can be disseminated almost instantaneously, and Microsoft can monitor any problems that users are having and let them know immediately what's going wrong. Concluded Gates: "it's a revolution not just for Microsoft, but in how we look at software systems altogether."