Gates still has a long to-do list
SAN FRANCISCO—Bill Gates has some unfinished business. — For years, the Microsoft chairman has been a fiery advocate, inside the company and out, for the notion that computers should be controlled, not just by mouse and keyboard, but also by more natural means …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bill Gates enters this week framed less as oracle than as executor: a May 2007 Software Notebook asked pointedly how Gates shapes up as a seer, and his earlier tenure was defined by defensive fights like Microsoft's battle over computer security. The unfinished business CNET flags is his longest-running advocacy — computers controlled by natural means beyond mouse and keyboard — an idea he has pushed inside and outside the company for years without it becoming mainstream.
The same day's news shows how Microsoft intends to close the gap between vision and shipped product: Steve Ballmer told the Web 2.0 conference the company will acquire 20 companies per year for the next five years, each between $50 million and $1 billion, while Microsoft demoed Popfly, a drag-and-drop Silverlight tool that lets non-coders build web mashups.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's product groups are under direct pressure from their own chairman to ship natural-interface control — touch, speech, recognition — not just iterate the mouse-and-keyboard model.
- Ballmer's stated pace of 20 acquisitions a year gives Microsoft a standing pipeline for buying the capabilities Gates' to-do list implies, rather than waiting to build them.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals are already converging on the same ground: Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are adding social networking features to their web email services to counter fast-growing social networks, forcing each to match the others' feature velocity.
- Popfly's open beta lowers the barrier for non-coders to assemble web mashups, pressuring both developer-tool vendors and the small startups whose assembly work it commoditizes.
Third-order effects
- If natural interfaces displace the mouse-and-keyboard paradigm, the strategic value of an operating system shifts from managing windows and files to owning the recognition and interaction layer — a contest that favors whoever holds the most user data and acquisition capacity.
- A sustained 20-per-year acquisition cadence points toward structural consolidation of Web 2.0-era startups into a handful of large platforms, with independent exits narrowing accordingly.
The trend: Personal computing is moving from graphical mouse-and-keyboard interfaces toward natural input, with platform giants like Microsoft buying innovation at scale to get there first.