Onward into the 21st century
Bill Gates delivers a keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show:
"Five or six years ago, if you'd said to people that software would make photos, music and TV better, they'd have been sceptical," Mr Gates told an audience of technology industry experts. "This really is the symptom of the great progress of the digital decade."
Thanks to the rocketing growth in mobile phones, computers and broadband internet connections, he said the potential to link up the disconnected streams of information in people's lives was greater than ever.
"My preferences, my interests are reflected on those devices," he said. "It's not just software for the PC, software for the phone, software for the video game -- it's software for the user."
Oh, bite me. Software made TV better? It made music better??
Software made software better -- I can blog now. But just because I can play "my music" on a small digital music player doesn't mean the music or even the experience is somehow better. It's just a little more portable. As for the chief purpose I use software for -- word processing -- I would be just as happy using MS Word 4.0 from the year 1989, frankly. There's not a single innovation (unless you couldn't do Word Count back then) they've come up with since then that I really need.
Is this typical of Gates' thinking? Perhaps this explains why Microsoft has had such trouble innovating.
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