TechEd 2008: Gates' Last Keynote

He spoke to a developer audience at Microsoft's TechEd event.

I've seen Microsoft's chairman give many speeches where he was awkward and delivered the wrong message for the audience; this is particularly true for the Consumer Electronics Show. But this week's TechEd attendees are his people. "I'm a developer," he said. Microsoft couldn't have chosen a better event for Bill to deliver what almost certainly will be his last public speech for the company.

"For me this event is also a milestone," he explained. "It's my last public speech as a full-time chairman of Microsoft." What happened, or didn't happen, next surprised me. Was it too early in the morning for the crowd? I would have expected clapping and cheering for Microsoft's co-founder. There was none.

Bill went on to explain that he would do role reversal: Go from being part time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to part time at Microsoft. "That's the first time I really changed my career since I was 17 years old." He continued: "I don't know what it's going to be like. It will be a bit abrupt—put me in some new territory."

Microsoft announced Bill's departure in 2006. "The whole transition that was announced two years ago is going very well," he said.

Microsoft has expanded TechEd over the years, but nothing like the 2008 event. Microsoft is stretching TechEd over two weeks, with emphasis on developers this week and IT professionals next week.

Bill said that Microsoft expected 4,000 developers. "There are over 6,000 people signed up and attending the events this week," he said.

He extolled the work Microsoft and other companies do to advance the usefulness of technology. "This work is more ambitious every year," he said.

Bill identified six key areas of change—"technology megatrends":

• Hardware performance
• High-fidelity displays
• Mobility and new devices
• Natural user interfaces
• Ubiquitous broadband
• Unlimited storage

Microsoft's co-founder put on his soothsayer's cap, so to speak, and made a startling prediction, with huge implications for chip makers such as Intel: Clock speed increases will stall as performance improvements shift to parallelism, or what some people call parallel computing. This computing shift, if it occurs to the degree Bill suggests, will have a huge impact on the developer audience and how they write code. He spoke about a "multicore revolution."

Surely, the increasing developer emphasis on the Internet and Web services would interest this audience. He explained the significance to developers: "Historically when we thought of the subroutine call, it was always on the same machine. But now, with the pervasiveness of the Internet ... the ability to call out to logic on another system that might be anywhere on the Internet is just like subroutine call of old."

Bill spent some time talking about change: The "most underestimated is the change in interaction"—or the user interface. He spoke about the transition from the keyboard and mouse, brought on by stylus, finger, eye and voice. To my surprise, he spent some time talking about the importance of the camera, which is a vital component on surface computing tables.

The future: "Your desk won't just have a computer on it, it will have a computer in it. And your whiteboard will be intelligent." He spoke about natural user interface in the context of "personal empowerment."

Bill then went on to identify four areas of opportunity for developers:

• Business logic
• Data
• Presentation
• Services

Bill discussed these areas in the context of Microsoft technologies, including new betas of Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 2, among other products. I will cover these in subsequent posts.