G-Money and Me: Bill Gates Interview

On the way to LaGuardia to enamour a flight to Las Vegas , I got a call from Microsoft ’s Larry Cohen about a possible sit down with Bill Gates . I did n’t quite have it away what to think of it , but I was n’t going to turn it down . I would ask the hard questions : Does Balmer really run through children ? Can I swim in your Money Bin ? I did n’t quite muster the Lucille Ball to expect those , though , and rather act like I had real doubtfulness or something . In fact , as you may see in the characterization , he was working me like a puppet .

What follow is the very begin bit of a conversation we had yesterday about blogging , DRM and copyright , and the future of Windows .

When I get back from CES today I trust to transliterate more — and there ’s a raft .

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Gizmodo : permit ’s talk about blogs first — if that ’s something that interests you at all . Do you read many blogs ? Is that something that ’s interesting to you yet or do you just get it as it comes to you ?

Gates : Almost everything that ’s being published on the World Wide Web now has RSS notice on it , so what would have been a web site I would have move to my favorites list and looked at , now I get the telling . I have the add - on to Outlook that lets me see those things . I still have a tendency to — say I want to go to Slate Magazine or the Wall Street Journal , I just directly navigate .

Gizmodo : Do you use a spate of RSS then ?

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Gates : I ’ve got the RSS quid - in [ for mind-set ] . I used it a lot when I started out , and now a peck of the blogs I read are where the great unwashed have sent me email and said , hey , I ought to look at this . I ’m very big … I want to always go to five or six sites on a regular foundation so that I can cut across over meter what ’s new about them .

I think blogging is super - important and we ’ve start out to do a lot more software . The phenomena for us is we ’ve got in genus Beta this MSN Spaces thing , and it lets you leverage everything you do around Messenger — that ’s your buddy lists and those relationships — to limit up blog , and who has access code , and who gets notified . We ’ve take up over a million people [ who ] gear up up blog situation .

Now , how many of those people keep those up to stay … but still , it ’s a very bighearted number .

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Gizmodo : How do you Guy palpate about setting up a blog — there ’s the whole facial expression of personal publication that ’s sort of big right now , where citizenry are sort of looking at citizen journalism , and that individuals should set out to get some of the same rights of the press that other , fully grown organisation should have . Do you guy cable have any interior policy , or at least universal steering for that ? Let ’s say somebody in China sets up a blog that says some dissident things — is that something that you guy wire do n’t really care [ about ] , or are you going to have to manage that ?

Gates : Well , we ’re very proud of the role of the PC in allow for lots of voices to exist and make them accessible . Historically , the issue baron in the city had a very high portion of voice , and they did n’t even need to utilize the best writers , because they had kind of the unique distribution . As more and more recitation make online , the power to get to lot of dissimilar thing , and the competition and lineament that take will be middling amazing .

We ourselves are n’t that much of a publisher . We did the Slate Magazine affair to render and prove out what variety of things , what form of formats could you do in online news media that were dissimilar than the things that had been done .

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We ’re very gallant of pioneering that — what was it , ten years [ ago ] or something — and lapse that on to the Washington Post . In the foresighted run , it ’s a more natural convulsion there . I ’m not some media expert .

Gizmodo : So would it be bonnie to say your idea with Spaces will be more hands - off ? Since you ’re kind of hold the power of the individual to write , you do n’t really care what they say ?

Gates : No . There ’s always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or porn . The law for on-line publication the same as for print - base publishing , where if you ’re hosting sure case of things and somebody notifies you about that …

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Gizmodo : So since it ’s sit on your waiter you want to be more thrifty of it .

Gates : No , there are pattern about … if you get notified that it ’s stolen material or pornography or things like that . Our policies are just related to what the laws are . The idea of the opened authorisation — that ’s why we ’ve always loved the microcomputer . And there are many object lesson over the last several decades where the power of the PC to let people print and communicate has made a vast difference in terminus of multitude trying to contain data flow . And that ’s why the PC is such a terrific evolution .

Read part two of the audience .