Tonight on TV13, Christmas around the world, Friday on the morning news, November 23rd, 1995.
His vision of the future is dazzling. His power in the computer industry is legend. He has Windows and it runs the world. He is the nation's richest man. He's bigger than life in many respects. Some find him disturbing. I think there's definitely a basis for some fear. Others revere him. He is a god. He's our... he's a computer god. Tonight, we sit down with a man known to many as just Bill, and enter the world according to Gates.
This is ABC News Nightline, substituting for Ted Koppel and reporting from New York, Forrest Sawyer.
It's hard to pass a newsstand these days without seeing a headline blaring the latest computer marvel that is certain to transform our lives. And analysts tell us the changes are only just beginning. One company that has helped shape that transformation is called Microsoft, which owns most of the programs that run the world's computers.
Microsoft is so powerful, the government has spent years investigating whether it should be stopped or at least slowed in its relentless push to expand. And its founder, a soft-spoken man who could pass for your insurance agent, is such a creative force. He's not only helped shape the wired world we live in, he's already planning how to turn it into something even more amazing. So when Bill Gates writes a book about the future called The Road Ahead, people listen. What he says may sound a little like science fiction, but so did Microsoft's just a few years ago. We visited with him last week at the giant computer trade show called Comdex in Las Vegas, where the latest technology was on display and where naturally Bill Gates himself was one of the biggest attractions.
About 200,000 people come here. It's a week long and you don't even have time to get to all the booths. The number of new hardware and software products every year is absolutely unbelievable.
This is a product that lets kids make movies, and she's going to pick a scene here, and then so we have this nice scene. Then she's going to pick a couple of actors. So the idea here is that kids can build movies that you used to have to have a $50,000 workstation to do this kind of thing. So we pick the scene, we pick the angle, we're picking the dress of the character here. We got her in a nice green jogging suit there. And so the idea is the computer's not just about reading. It's also about creating. And this is just a normal PC here letting you build realistic 3D movies.
You know, this seems very different from the kinds of games that we watch kids play today because they are actually writing story.
They're creating, and we show them some examples that are built in there. But then they can mail this off to their grandparents or to other kids. Here we've got this guy. He's doing a little greeting. We're going to put him in. And the thing that blows people's minds is even in the computer business, this kind of 3D thing required very, very expensive equipment. And it's only this year that you can bring that kind of power — the kind of power that created Jurassic Park — down onto a kid's computer. And this is a $40 piece of software.
Let's move on to the next one. So, you came here last year. You come here this year. Is it an entirely different world?
Well, nobody's showing the same product now. You have a lot of the same companies, but if you came back and showed the same product a year later, people would think it was kind of funny because that's not the way this business works.
The computer's got to be a lot faster. The storage has got to be bigger. The software has to be easier to use. You know, a lot of things that people demand. And fortunately, with all the competition, it gets delivered. And so you'd almost laugh at the computers of three years ago, even though at the time they were kind of amazing.
Are we where we want to be?
We're very close. This is right where we want to be. This is an example of a great new technology. Here you've got Sony, that's giving you a flat screen with incredible color resolution. This is only just a thick, and they're saying in a few years they'll be able to build them twice as big as this and make them available.
And so, you know, that really makes a big difference having a high quality screen like that. How much of the decisions that you make are driven by the hardware first?
Well, you have to know how fast the hardware is going to be to make things reasonable. For example, if you have screens like this, then you can do photo albums and movies and things that, you know, wouldn't be attractive otherwise.
You've been talking about the communications revolution. This to me looks like just a flatter TV.
When you're competing with paper and you want to put as much information as possible up, the quality and size that you can do that makes a big difference. So an advance like this in screen technology is more important than you might think at first.
As hardware, how remarkable is this? This little screen.
What you've got here is several companies showing the work they're doing on flat screens. It looks like Sony's got a very good approach here. But a lot of people are investing in it since they know there's a huge market there. But I was very impressed. I hadn't seen this before the show.
There's only going to be one or two winners in this.
Well, it's a big enough market that maybe four or five.
One of the things you've been talking about is a wallet-sized personal computer that can do almost anything for you. And we haven't seen anything like that. We've seen these little personal assistants, but they don't seem to come close to what you're talking about.
I think there's still some work to be done to make it really inexpensive, really small, and to have that wireless connection so you can get the news and send messages. And so there's a lot of pieces to be pulled together. We're investing in the software and working with some of the hardware companies. But nobody knows when we'll get that to be a big market. I think everybody will have a wallet PC someday, but it could be a long time.
Okay, can we squeeze in here? Okay, great. What have we got?
So this looks like a camera. You go out and take some photos, and then they have just a little cord. They connect it to your computer, and it's inside the computer, so you can print it out on a color printer. You can mail it to someone. This is an Amson camera, and they've really advanced the quality very dramatically, and they'll have this on the market at under $500.
Pretty soon, if I take pictures, if I want images, they all go into my computer. I want pictures of the kids, I just call them up.
Yeah. And then you can have a little photo album and do annotations. You can put music to it, send it around, and it's easy 20 years later to go back and find things and order them. And so having it on the computer gives you a lot of flexibility. You know, in Hollywood, when they all say, 'What I really want to do is direct.'
You're saying we all get to do that someday.
That's right. The limitation will be your creativity, not the ability to get the tools.
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What lets you learn about the world in a whole new way? The Intel Pentium processor. It has the power to make PC software come alive with the sights and sounds that take you there, wherever there happens to be. The Intel Pentium processor.
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It's a rule of thumb in the computer world that whatever looks truly amazing today is going to seem downright archaic in no time at all. In fact, Bill Gates says the computer revolution we've just lived through is nothing compared to the communications revolution just ahead. At the heart of it, the global network of computers called the Internet. We asked Bill Gates what he sees on the road ahead. For a few years now, we've been hearing about the information highway. And I think that most of us feel that we're in the fast lane somewhere, but we're just being towed. So, give me a sense of when we talk about the information highway in reality, what is that?
Well, the idea is to take these personal computers that keep getting better and connect them together so that you can send messages to people. You can put a bulletin board together with your different ideas. And there'll be search engines out there, so you can find any topic you like or find another person who shares that interest. So basically it's a revolution in communications, and that will affect business. It'll affect learning, and if we do it right, it'll even be something people entertain themselves with.
I think part of the problem that we have now is there's so much hype. We have heard the word revolution so many times. Every six weeks there's another revolution. What you're talking about though is something real, a wave of change.
Right now, the excitement about this is causing almost a gold rush atmosphere. And so companies that are jockeying for a position talk about what they're going to do and how it's going to happen overnight. In fact, this will take more than a decade to play out. But the impact is big enough that it's something we ought to be thinking about and talking about right now, because there are some tough issues that it raises as well as the wonderful benefits that it provides.
