Rather than even try to pull highlights from this talk, I’ll just point to it.
Amazing stuff… Be sure to keep the audience in mind — CEOs of major companies. They are not as focused on tech gadgetry and services as some of us, and Bill is able to distill things into simple bits for people to get very excited about. Windows fan or not, this is a must read!
Bill Gates’ Web Site – Speech Transcript: Microsoft CEO Summit 2004
Let me state clearly: these are not things that will happen in one or two years. These are things that over the rest of this decade, through the technical advances that have taken place this last year and will take place in the next couple of years, these things will move into the mainstream, and you’ll really see the impact there that we’re talking about. Very ambitious things, but if you think about it, over the course of the next six years we’ll spend over $40 billion in R&D, so that’s $10 billion per pillar. It seems like for $10 billion we ought to be able to achieve those things. At least that’s what I tell our programmers.