The Bill
Gates Interview
Copyright (C) Playboy Enterprises, Inc. 1994
Page 2 of 6
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PLAYBOY: Besides finding documents, what will we be able to do?
GATES: Say you want to watch a movie. To choose, you'll want to know what movies others liked and, based on what you thought of other movies you've seen, if this is a movie you'd like. You'll be able to browse that information. Then you select and get video on demand. Afterward, you can even share what you thought of the movie. But thinking of it only in terms of movies on demand trivializes the ultimate impact. The way we find information and make decisions will be changed. Think about how you find people with common interests, how you pick a doctor, how you decide what book to read. Right now, its hard to reach out to a broad range of people. You are tied into the physical community near you. But in the new environment, because of how information is stored and accessed, that community will expand. This tool will be empowering, the infrastructure will be built quickly and the impact will be broad.
PLAYBOY: What about those who say things won't change that much, that it's mostly blue-sky?
GATES: It's as blue-sky as the PC was six or seven years before it became a phenomenon.
PLAYBOY: How will Microsoft participate in the information highway?
GATES: The current interactive user interface doesn't consist of much. It doesn't have the shared information and the reviews, the niceties that will make people want the systems. Microsoft is spending a lot of money to build software that we think is better. It will run in the box in your home that controls your set as you make choices. We're involved in creating the much bigger piece of software at the other end of the fiber-optic cable, the program that runs on the computer, which stores the movie data base, the directory and everything else.
PLAYBOY: The mainframe?
GATES: The successor to the mainframe. But its speed and data capacity go beyond what's now used to do airline reservations or credit card data bases. Watching a movie doesn't require much computer power. You're just picking the information off the magnetic disc, putting it on the wire and sending it. But if you're synthesizing a 3-D scene, kind of a virtual reality thing, with 20 people in a multiplayer game, then you have some computation. Or say the President is making a speech. Everybody in the nation gets to push little buttons to say yea or nay, and gathering all that information so it can be displayed within a second or two is tricky. But it's all within the state of the art. You don't have to be a dreamer to know that the technology will not limit the construction of the information highway.
PLAYBOY: How will being able to respond directly to the president alter our system of government?
GATES: The idea of representative democracy will change. Today, we claim we don't use direct democracy because it would be impractical to poll everybody on every issue. The truth is that we use representative democracy because we want to get an above-average group to think through problems and make choices that, in the short term, might not be obvious, even if they are to everybody's benefit over the long term.
PLAYBOY: Do you agree?
GATES: Yes. When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long-term thinking.
PLAYBOY: You're giving our current elected officials a lot of credit.
GATES: What we have may be less than ideal, but it's still better than direct democracy. Anyway, we'll no longer be able to hide behind the excuse that we don't have the technology to gather the opinions.
PLAYBOY: What else is Microsoft involved in? We've heard about software that can control washing machines, for instance.
GATES: [Laughs] The washing machine example is extreme, but people do sometimes kid us that we see an opportunity to sell our software in broad areas. We are involved in a new generation of fax machines that we think will be better and easier to use. And a generation of screen phones [a standard phone with a minicomputer] in which the typically cryptic buttons are replaced with a graphics interface. We're also working on software that runs in printers. We've worked with people on car navigation systems. And in the home environment, something you can carry in your pocket called the Wallet PC.
PLAYBOY: In your pocket?
GATES: It's a futuristic device unlike today's personal digital assistants. Instead of using keys to enter your house, the Wallet PC identifies that you're allowed to go into a certain door and it happens electronically. Instead of having tickets to the theater, your Wallet PC will digitally prove that you paid. When you want to board a plane, instead of showing your tickets to 29 people, you just use this. You have digital certificates. Digital money. It has a global positioning thing in it, so you can see a map of where you are and where you might want to go. It's our vision of the small, portable PC of, say, five years from now.
PLAYBOY: Do you use a PDA?
GATES: I carry a standard 486 portable machine with me whenever I travel, because I have my e-mail on it. I used one of the original Newton's for a week, and its available if you'd like it.
PLAYBOY: What's your problem with it?
GATES: It was supposed to do handwriting recognition. But, based on the initial product, people are skeptical about whether handwriting recognition really works. They did some nice technical work on the product. Unfortunately, its not a useful device as far as I'm concerned, so it'll probably set the category back.
PLAYBOY: You've been meeting with people such as QVC head Barry Diller, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, agent Mike Ovitz, John Malone of TCI and Gerald Levin of Time Warner to mastermind the future. Who sought out whom?
GATES: Its a good mix. Ovitz called me. He understands the opportunities of the new media. He thought it would be valuable to see how our visions meshed. He wants to make sure that when he's doing deals he's reserving rights for his clients in the best way. He wants us to think about licensing rights as were doing titles.
PLAYBOY: That's what you can do for Ovitz. What can he do for you?
GATES: So many things. He can help us get the word out in Hollywood that we want to team up with people to do multimedia titles. Mike can help us create ways to explain how these new tools are the studio of the future.
PLAYBOY: We hear so much about Ovitz, but never from him. What kind of guy is he?
GATES: It's strange when you read a lot in the press about somebody before you meet him. I don't know that much about Hollywood and its dynamics, so when I read this long piece on Ovitz in The New Yorker, it made me go, Whoa! I better be careful. Actually, he's a pretty personable guy. And, when you think about it, how could he be successful in that business without that kind of skill?
PLAYBOY: One might think he would be intimidated by you.
GATES: Sure. Not that I hoped for that. We've had lots of long dinners, and I went down and saw Creative Artists Agency. Its actually been almost two years since we first started talking with each other. We come from our own domains, where we're clearly hardworking, focused, quite successful. The issue is, what's the opportunity to work together? I've gotten to know a lot of these people over the past 18 months, and they are much more down-to-earth, practical, even humble, than you'd expect.
PLAYBOY: For instance?
GATES: Murdoch's a fairly quiet guy. Clearly brilliant, but quiet. Malone is straightforward in terms of talking about technology and strategy. He and I are damn similar. He worked at Bell Labs and understands both business and technology. We have a lot more in common than some of the other people these joint-venture things have exposed me to. I've met Diller several times. He came up here twice before landing at QVC, when he was just driving around and looking at the possibilities. He spent a lot of time here. He's a very sharp guy. He asked good questions. Not everybody loves him, but they all respect the hell out of him. Apparently he's a tough manager.
PLAYBOY: Meet any movie stars yet?
GATES: No. [Pauses] Actually, I did. I went to this Golden Plate thing where there were quite a few movie stars: Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, Kevin-what's his name?
PLAYBOY: Costner?
GATES: That's a mental lapse, just to completely embarrass myself. I talked to Michael Crichton quite a bit, but he's not a movie star.
PLAYBOY: Did any of the celebrities recognize you?
GATES: I don't think so. But some of the scientists did. And a lot of the kids did, because kids tend to use computers more.
PLAYBOY: They had no idea they were shaking hands with the second richest guy in America?
GATES: No.
PLAYBOY: By the way, how much are you worth at this moment?
GATES: Well, remember, I don't own dollars. I own Microsoft stock. So it's only through multiplication that you convert what I own into some scary number.
PLAYBOY: Are people more intimidated by your brains or your money?
GATES: Not many people are intimidated by either. Here at work we're all just trying to get a job done. My people have the confidence of their convictions and they know their skills. And that occupies most of my time. The people I buy burgers from aren't intimidated, either. [Laughs] We all suffer from being hyped up in the press. These markets are very competitive. When people say things like, Bill Gates controls this or Malone controls this or Ovitz controls that, I hope people don't really believe it. Because every day were saying, How can we keep this customer happy? How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will? If anything, people underestimate how effective capitalism is at keeping even the most successful companies on the edge.
PLAYBOY: Since you and Paul Allen started Microsoft in 1975, the company's capacity for renewal has been unerring and wildly profitable. If you could sum up the corporate ethos in one sentence, what would it be?
GATES: Lets use our heads and think and do better software than anyone else.
PLAYBOY: How soon did it become more business than fun?
GATES: Pretty early, when I hired four guys and one of them didn't come in for a couple days. I said, Damn it, we're not going to get this stuff done. People are going to be upset. I've got salaries to pay. Fun became a serious responsibility. Back then I used to compute how much software we had to sell each day. I was directly involved in everything. I knew at ten in the morning if I'd already sold that days worth of software. If I had, then I wanted to take care of a weeks worth of sales.
PLAYBOY: A true businessman.
GATES: I have to admit that business-type thoughts do sneak into my head: I hope our customers pay us, I hope this stuff is decent, I hope we get it done on time. The little additions and subtractions that one has to do. Take sales, take costs and try to get that big positive number at the bottom.
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