Gates: Software tycoon to ambassador?
631604
PARIS - Is Bill Gates preparing to switch careers, from software architect to ambassador?
417454
InfoWorld - Forty students from around the world got to pitch their software projects to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday as part of a worldwide software development challenge.
611416
Speaking to technologists during an appearance at the Computer History Museum, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates touched on a number of topics, including Linux, Web services, grid computing and digital rights management.
47519
A venture led by the Microsoft co-founder has applied to bid in an upcoming U.S. auction of wireless airwaves, along with Google, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Qualcomm.
707060
A European Commission official due to take charge next month of theÂ antitrust case against MicrosoftÂ has been offered a job by a Brussels-based consultancy that lists the software vendor among its clients, the Commission and Microsoft said Thursday.
576846
Bill Gates&#039; decision to give up day-to-day duties at Microsoft Corp. puts more pressure on Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and other executives to figure out the company&#039;s place in an industry increasingly focused on Internet-based services championed by Google Inc. and others.
579281
What struck Microsoft executive Marshall Phelps at a recent series of conferences in developing nations was that government, business and academic leaders often asked him, "How can we invent the next Google?"
571712
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
122142
By Terry Wade SAO PAULO, Brazil  - Microsoft Corp.  islobbying Brazil's government to agree to a meeting between thecompany's chairman, Bill Gates, and President Luiz Inacio Lulada Silva at the World Economic Forum next week, a Brazilianofficial said.
214639
BusinessWeek Online - The saga of the computing industry is rich with outsize characters and surprising plot turns, but there's one story that has risen over time to mythic proportions. It's the tale of how software pioneer Gary Kildall missed out on the opportunity to supply IBM  with the operating system for its first PC -- essentially handing the chance of a lifetime, and control of tech's future, to rival Bill Gates and Microsoft Corp. . In the process, he may have missed out on becoming the world's richest man.
433339
BERKELEY, Calif. (CBS.MW) -- The computing problems to be solved in the next two decades will be more exciting than those that already have been solved, according to Microsoft&#39;s Bill Gates.
555352
One of the country's most well-known tech analysts has a new gig: evangelizing Microsoft. Michael Gartenberg, who for the past five years worked for JupiterResearch, and prior to that had a seven year stint with Gartner, will join the Redmond company as an "enthusiast evangelist."
61039
Blog: Why did a collection of tech publishers and venture capitalists lend their voices to a Microsoft advertorial?
525291
update MOJAVE, Calif.--A venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen got a jump Wednesday on rivals eyeing a $10 million prize for the first privately funded junkets into space and back.
142721
Bill Gates gets 4 million emails a day according to Microsoft&#39;s CEO Steve Ballmer. `There are two people who probably are the number one spam recipients in the world,` Ballmer said at a Microsoft event in Singapore `Bill Gates because he is Bill Gates.
471967
While observers believe that Microsoft is willing to pay Yahoo $44 billion primarily for its users and advertising base, Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, wants to grow its developer community as well."We respect the work Yahoo has done in the realm of creating an open development platform through its Yahoo Developer network and look forward to extending this great work to an even broader base of developers," he said during a press conference discussing Microsoft's offer on Friday.The question now is how that process would unfold. Yahoo's approach to development has indeed emphasized open source. In contrast, Microsoft has a deep investment in its proprietary .NET programming framework and Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment). It only recently began making some overtures to the open-source community.But Microsoft also boasts a vast army of loyal developers -- something that Yahoo can't necessarily claim, although it does maintain the Yahoo Developer Network. And a Yahoo purchase clearly ties into its emerging "software-plus-services" strategy for distributing online applications.This may be a case where the pieces fit to form a serendipitous whole, according to one observer."Yahoo has the most beautiful set of [APIs] in its properties," such as for the Flickr photo-sharing site, said James Governor, an analyst with Redmonk. "But frankly, it just has not done a great job of building an ecosystem. ... there's no such thing as a 'Yahoo developer.'"Yahoo's tools hold promise but really need a high-profile evangelist pushing hard behind them, Governor argued. "The first thing I would do in taking over the company would be to get someone who really understands APIs ... to me, Jon Udell -- who is now at Microsoft -- would be ideal in this role. He would be someone I would be thinking of right away," he said.While Yahoo's APIs arguably are more consumer-oriented, they could still hold value within the average corporate shop, Governor said. "There's no reason why Flickr can't have some enterprise applicability.... For the enterprise developer, it's probably not the biggest thing in the world, but it definitely offers some cool new things."But other observers said there are obstacles as well as opportunities.John Gruber, who writes about the Web and Apple at his site, daringfireball.net, sees a major architectural clash between Microsoft and Yahoo, which has an infrastructure that incorporates Linux."I don't think Microsoft has ever bought -- and maintained -- a significant software product that wasn't written against Microsoft technology," he wrote on his blog. "So there's a paradox: Technically, I can't see how Microsoft would migrate all of Yahoo to Windows servers and software. But culturally, it just isn't in Microsoft's DNA to accept and maintain all of these PHP/FreeBSD/Linux products."Robert McLaws, a .NET developer and blogger at windows-now.com, questioned the overall wisdom of the acquisition attempt, given this inconsistency. "If one of the points in buying them is their infrastructure, but their infrastructure isn't Windows, what are they buying?" he said in an interview on Monday.Yet there's no doubt that Microsoft would move to merge its tools and assets with Yahoo's, according to Greg DeMichillie, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft and a contributor to the initial design of the .NET Framework. "Anything Microsoft does, they think about it from a platform perspective," he said.The final shape of that platform is far from clear as there are substantial redundancies between the companies' services offerings. (Purely on the development front, Yahoo and Microsoft are competing within the mashup market with their Pipes and Popfly toolsets, respectively.)For developers already wedded to the Microsoft platform, the major pitfall is the "corporate indigestion" that could follow a deal, according to DeMichillie."The biggest risk to developers is that it defocuses executives from the important job of getting a Vista successor out," he said.A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company would not comment beyond materials on its Web site announcing the proposed deal.
732303
InfoWorld - Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates has been giving keynote speeches at Las Vegas conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show and the now-defunct Comdex, for decades.