An Interview with Bill Gates (1996)

charlierose.com

2 pointstaphangum4 comments

Remember when he promised the end of spam? Actually, I cannot think of any of his predictions that were accurate.

Did you even watch the video?

Sadly I did, but it did not contain much that was interesting. ActiveDesktop is going to be huge, Netscape will survive, don't need to worry about antitrust issues, and half of it was about how they failed to predict the rise of the internet and had instead backed 'interactive tv' (which I guess is finally here, but was hardly a revolution it was trumpted as). The only thing actually relevant today was his talk about philanthropy along with Buffet.

I found this interview pretty engaging. Particularly, Gates insistance on the fact that technology companies can't become complacent. Despite Charley's focus on Microsoft's successes, Gates never once gives any indication that things will always be that way, and shows that a company could easily come in and change the landscape, just as Microsoft did with IBM.

Looking back at this now, its interesting to note how he never mentioned 'search' as a type of company that could derive significant revenue from an advertising based business model on the internet. In fact, at no point during this interview did he discuss internet search. It was exactly this oversight by Microsoft and the wider technology industry that paved the way for Google.

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