SEATTLE, Washington -- Microsoft chairman Bill Gates on Friday told about 400 of his biggest fans from around the world that wireless networking would become commonplace in the next 10 years.
Addressing a group of Usenet-based volunteers -- which Microsoft calls its "most valuable professionals" -- Gates predicted the coming of the "digital decade."
"Every business, every home, every convention center will be wired up with high capacity 802.11," Gates said, referring to one of the short range wireless networking standards that has gained wide acceptance in the past year.
"That's finally the way that we will have information anywhere we want it. In business, take your portable to a meeting; at home, have your video, your audio, your photos show up on even very inexpensive little screens."
Combined with other advances in hardware development, including higher resolution display screens, ever faster processors and optical networking, which will drive further software development, he predicted productivity gains by 2010 would be twice as large as those of the 1990s.
"I'm very lucky in terms of making these predictions," Gates said. "I've got the $5 billion of Microsoft R and D to not only sit and speculate, but to tell those guys, 'OK, you'd better make these things come true.'"
The only cloud Gates acknowledged in this rosy scenario is the slow acceptance of high-speed broadband connections in most people's homes.
"Even in the next five years there's a question of whether we will get 50-percent penetration," he said.
The key problem in getting people to adopt broadband at home, Gates said, is to bring down the price of the connections. Currently cable modems, satellite Internet connections and DSL lines cost two to three times more than a 56-Kb modem connected over a standard telephone line.
Despite that, he said the home of the future would use the PC to feed audio files, photos, games and interactive television to any number of devices over the ubiquitous wireless local area networks he predicted.
One of the few immediate examples of new developments Gates promised was the release next year of the long-promised Tablet PC. As it has been described over the years, the tablet would function as both a full-size reader for e-books and online information sources, and a scaled-up version of popular handheld devices like the Palm Pilot and Pocket PCs.
Holding up mock-prototypes, he said the tablets will come in two forms: a thin screen device with a detachable or wireless keyboard, and a fold-over version that resembles a present-generation notebook computer with a high-resolution touch-screen to accept handwritten notation.
Both of them will be full-function PCs under the hood, he promised, with wireless connectivity, handwriting recognition and annotation capabilities. Gates said manufacturers like Compaq and other PC makers would introduce the devices late in 2002.
In response to a question, he said one of the biggest pushes for the next version of the Windows operating system, code-named "Longhorn," is to make SQL technology a part of the Windows file server.
"One of the greatest Holy Grails inside Microsoft is the vision of unified file systems," said Gates. "The biggest technical project that I'm spending time on is the idea of simplifying the way that you back things up, the way that you secure things, find things and view things (so) it is not fragmented, the way it is today, where we have five or six mediocre stores instead of one that makes it very simple."
Gates also predicted that voice-recognition and voice-command systems would reach a level of reliability in the next five to six years that would make it acceptable for most uses.
He admitted that voice-command systems were much harder to perfect than handwriting recognition software had been, in large part because people tend to adapt their handwriting to the limitations of the system. In this one case, Gates did hedge his bets, noting that he had made a similar prediction five years ago.
The most valuable professional program, which has been in place for the past seven years, is meant to recognize individuals who spend a substantial amount of time on Usenet newsgroups offering advice and technical support for other users.
Microsoft acknowledges more than 750 most valuable professionals (MVPs) in 40 countries who provide technical advice to end-users and feedback to the developers of Microsoft's software lines.
The MVPs -- who came to the Redmond, Washington, campus for a three-day conference -- specialize in particular programs and range from a 15-year-old dot-NET expert to doctors and other professionals in their mid-60s. The MVPs respond to approximately 7 million postings a year.
