A Month of Gates #3

[Editor's Note: Microsoft's chairman steps down from day-to-day operations on June 30. Throughout the month, Microsoft Watch will look back on his contribution to the company and the tech industry.]

This third installment excerpts from Bill's 1996 Comdex keynote. The November 19 speech covered many topics, with the Internet being one of the most interesting. Microsoft was a latecomer to the Web religion, forcing the company to play brutal catchup with Netscape during the so-called browser wars. A future "A Month of Gates" installment will look at Bill's May 1995 "Internet Tidal Wave" memo.

Bill's statements are in quotations; my commentary intersperses his quotes.

"Personally, I've been using the Internet to buy books, to learn about pregnancy and all the things that go on there to play bridge, to stay up-to-date on the latest in biotechnology. And I've got a very nice display, a 2k by 2k resolution display, where I put up four pages at a time, and it cycles through. I'll see four news pages or four pages from competitors or four Microsoft sites that I'm following, and it'll highlight when those change."

"It's interesting, though, that I'm not yet switching so that I stop reading something in print. I still read The Economist in print, The Wall Street Journal in print, the trade journals. Although I'm up on their Web sites, I'm also reading them in print. So it's just so far there's no substitution effect. I think over time you will see substitution effect.

I'll say this to Bill: The Economist is the only publication I still read in print. I've substituted the Web for all other print publications. I've read the digital edition of The Wall Street Journal since early 1996 (that's when I stopped paying for print and converted to paying for digital). To Microsoft Watch readers, I ask: What about you? What's your print-to-Web reading ratio and when did you start replacing print for Web versions? Please share in the comments.

"Well, the big business story for Microsoft this last year was how we switched to really take the Internet as a top priority and got that into all of our products. And I think that's true for the industry. You know, there's almost no booth you can go to where you're not seeing rich Internet things going on. One element to this, and I think a very straightforward thing is, when you buy a PC, if you get it, you have single-button sign-up. What that means is the browser's there, the electronic mail package is there, the TCP/IP stack is there. You just click, you see the names of all the providers that you can make local phone calls to. Pick one of those, if you have a credit card, boom, you're signed up and you're off using the Internet."

There are lots of people that credit Microsoft for the Web's success. I'm not one of them, although I'll concede the importance of Microsoft putting a TCP/IP stack into Windows 95. The Web succeeded in spite of Microsoft. Bill Gates was looking the wrong way—perceived threat from AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy—when the Web grew from its open and accepted standards roots, thanks to the approach taken by Tim Berners-Lee. The Web would have succeeded regardless of which operating system dominated the desktop. I did my first Web browsing on OS/2, not Windows, in autumn 1994.

"We're also doing Active Desktop .... We should take the most important information, and bring that to the very desktop, and that's what Active Desktop is all about. Every PC will have Web server capability built in, and so this becomes the most democratic publishing medium of all time. You don't have to go out and get a specialized server. If you have a machine you're willing to turn on, leave on, the software is there, or you can transfer it up to somebody who has servers and keeps them running 24 hours a day."

Active Desktop was a much more aggressive Web-controlling tactic than integrating Internet Explorer into Windows. The strategy actually failed, largely because of bandwidth constraints and usability and content issues. The only Web server my computer ever ran was to support FrontPage. Or do I misunderstand what Bill meant?

"The Internet is everywhere. I mean, you just can't get away from it. The URLs, the demand for bandwidth, there's even a social phenomena now where kids sort of compete to see who's got the best connection."

It's more everywhere today. He got that right.

"We have a lot of fun stuff going on with the Internet, but the Internet is also serious business. And I think this is the year that productivity applications and the Internet will really come together. This is very exciting because we take these applications that have been built as components, but more than components, components that were tested together with the unified interface, and bring those onto to the Web. We use the Web to make it so that you can upgrade very easily, and we use the Web metaphors so as you navigate around in compound documents, or even to HTML pages, you've got your favorites, your history list, that linking metaphor works very, very well there."

Microsoft certainly incorporated some Web metaphors into the Windows user interface, but the stuff he predicted is really only happening today. Bill may have stated the concept early, but it took Web 2.0 platform competition for Microsoft to bring together more desktop and Web metaphors. SharePoint Server more than any other product encapsulates what Bill predicted in November 1996.

"A very important change is taking place here. The way that we relate to a productivity customer will be completely different. Instead of thinking about buying a box every two years, instead you'll have a constant connection. If you've given us permission to send you mail, say, once a month, we'll have some profile bits that come up about your use of the application and your hardware, and so the mail we send you will be customized to your usage pattern. We'll tell you about more clip art we've got on our Web site, new templates, usage hints, some updates that we might have available, or even new components that you can just click and have those come down. So there won't be this big one-time event."

"If we notice in your profiles events that you've gotten more hardware, then we will suggest new functionalities, but we'll never suggest things that go beyond what you have available and what you can just automatically go and install and fit with your use. So it's a much more customized connection. And, as I mentioned earlier, we use that for feedback across the product. And so it's ... very different for how productivity applications relate to their suppliers."

Bill really had caught the Web religion. In 1996, the old Internet culture of sharing still dominated. Much changed over the following three years. First, Web commercialism and, later, privacy pundits, spammers and malware writers put the kibosh on the kind of customer relationship envisioned by Microsoft's co-founder.

"There are a lot of challenges with the Internet. ...You have to think out 10 or 20 years when a broad set of people will see using the Internet to get information as part of their daily activity, and they'll expect everything they do, whether it's scheduling a doctor's appointment or negotiating a contract, or trying to decide on a purchase decision, they'll use the Internet as a tool for that."

Bill certainly got that right. But there needed to be a magic elixir: search. Google conquered the math, and Overture established the workable business model.

"The Web does need somewhat richer structure. If you've seen a schedule on the Web, you ought to be able to take something like a concert and just drag it to your local schedule and have it show up. Well, that requires using object technology inside the pages. So, another great place where we can evolve object support in. We also need to take links and give them types, so that if I go to a site and say I want to use this site offline, it can understand based on the link types what pages to bring down."

I've got to laugh. The above paragraph could be marketing material for Live Mesh. You can't fault Bill Gates for vision, even if it takes a dozen or so years to come about.