Michael: When you look back, what applications did you think would take off by now, but really haven't? Voice recognition, handwriting recognition? What things haven't happened, and why? And do you think that's going to change?

Bill: People are a little skeptical about all the natural-interaction stuff, because there's been predictions that we were on the verge of speech and handwriting recognition many, many times. It's appropriate that people are skeptical. But business is so overwhelmingly nondigital. Even businesses that are heralded as being Internet-centric. Believe me, there's a guy on a phone—somebody with a tablet and a pencil—saying, "Oh, okay, we've got a problem," and trying to deal with it. Videoconferencing is a great example. At the 1962 World's Fair, AT&T showed the wave of the future with the videophone.

The funny thing about me is that I actually believe that all of these things will happen. And I'd go so far as to say that it's really within this decade that we as an industry will finally get every one of these things to work—and work well. And I don't mean just for a few people; I mean on an extremely mainstream basis. Take the idea of recording a meeting digitally so that somebody can go back, search it, and play back snippets. The idea is that if you're in a meeting, you can take your notes there. I think the pieces will come together in this decade, and that's why we think of it as the digital decade.

Michael: How often do you use videoconferencing?

Bill: I do videoconferencing about three or four times a year.

Michael: Why so infrequently? The technology is here, to some extent.

Bill: Well, there're all these style changes that have to come about. You'd have it so that there were, say, three or four hours a week that people would reserve for doing quick videoconferencing. And it would have to be very easy to indicate whom you'd like to talk to, because if the overhead is super high, then you might as well just have a face-to-face meeting. And take electronic scheduling. We are really far away from the day when people will primarily use the computer to do their scheduling, because you've got your family schedule, work schedule, and the whole notion of who should be able to view what. It just hasn't come together and achieved critical mass.

A few things have. E-mail has achieved critical mass. Instant messaging—within a certain age group—has achieved critical mass. The digital camera attached to the PC is very cheap now. The microphone is actually more problematic. PCs don't come with good microphones, and it's not natural yet to use voice with a PC. So take simple things like voice annotation, which doesn't require brilliant recognition. When's the last time you got a document from somebody in which the annotations were done by voice? Because voice annotation is not mainstream, software does not support it as well as it should. Take e-mail: If you're responding with your PDA, wouldn't it be easier to respond with a voice note? But that's not mainstream yet. Part of the wonder of our business is that these things are ridiculous, stupid dreams, and then literally in a period of months, they become common; well, they're common at least among a certain avant-garde set of companies.

Voice messaging, digital scheduling—the software isn't good enough yet. And for us, it's nice to be involved in the element that's one of the key missing pieces. I'd say other than software advances, the only thing that I'm a little worried about in the years ahead is whether the cost of consumer broadband will come down enough so that we can really think of it as mainstream. Recently, the price of cable modems was increased from a level at which a lot of households could afford it, and now it costs somewhat more.

Michael: The speed of communications has been increasing, and the speed of processing has been improving. What else has to get better on the fundamental technology level?

Bill: Lots of things will get better. The size of the disk—those guys do their job very well; disks will get bigger. We actually need this new class of device called MEMS, or microelectromechanical systems. Those things are super cool. There's still some work to be done on them, but they do essentially provide zero boot time, or the size of the tablet PC, or even full PC-like capabilities on a PDA. Anyway, we need something like that. Hopefully it will be MEMS, because they could be out in the next couple of years.

We need network speeds to keep going up. There isn't much doubt about that. We need screen resolutions to be much higher. We need the cost of flat-panel color screens to be dramatically less, no matter which technology is used. Every kid in school should have a color tablet PC connected to a wireless network, and the price of that device should be well under a thousand dollars. What's the biggest thing holding that back? The screen cost is a big part of it. That's the gap between a desktop PC and a portable PC, but it's certainly going to happen.

We need processor speeds to keep going up. We'll also have to go through a transition from 32-bit to 64-bit, which is complex in terms of getting all the pieces together. This transition will start on the server but eventually be relevant even on the desktop.

Michael: How long is that transition going to take?

Bill: On the desktop, 64-bit is not critical for most applications. It's going to be a long time before 64-bit is pervasive on the desktop. AMD has an approach in which they put 64-bit into their mainstream processor, whereas Intel has taken the opportunity to switch to a different instruction set. Nobody would dispute that a very high percentage of servers, say, four years from now, will be 64-bit. But the percentage on the desktop, even four years from now? I'm not certain about that.

We've certainly done all the work for the 64-bit version of Windows, and it's not that hard to recompile the software. In some ways it's easier than 16-bit to 32-bit was, because then the (memory) addressing was different. But that's a long story. There are actually three different ways of doing addressing: the 8088 way of doing the addressing, which is a 4-bit shift and add; the 286 way of addressing, which is an indirect segment register; and then there's the nice 386 way, which is in a linear address base with page tables. Anyway, 64-bit is just an extension of the 386 way. I don't think users will get caught in that much pain on this one. It's not like the 16-bit thing where people really were banging up against the address base, and they got into this whole thing about extended memory and all these different schemes for trying to deal with the limits.

Here we'll get through the transition before a lot of people are sticking 4 gigabytes of physical memory on their PCs. I don't think we're going to be held back by anything except the lack of consumer broadband. It's true that the 3GB wireless networks are going to be more expensive and slower to release than people think. But there is 802.11 for the places you really spend time: home, work, convention centers, hotels, and airports, among other places. There are still some pieces to put together before wireless is really pervasive, and there are even certain interference issues. But I think all that stuff will be solved. And in so-called "hotspots," you'll have very good and extremely inexpensive digital wireless.

I think a lot of the onus sits on Microsoft and other software companies to make it so you're not reluctant to install an additional software application. Your overall experience can be simpler, and if there's ever a problem, the confusion should be greatly reduced. We have to use software technology and the Internet to do those things. One great start is what we do in Windows XP with support, where you can have somebody else connect to your machine, take control, and help you out that way, as opposed to sitting on the phone. That's just one step, but it's a valuable step.