Microsoft chairman Bill Gates appeared on an "ask me anything" (AMA) post on the social news site Reddit on Monday. Gates answered questions from anonymous users that touched on a broad range of topics. Users were given time to prepare questions and write the ones that they wanted to hear the billionaire mogul answer. The post appeared at 10 a.m. PST to let users know that Gates would begin fielding questions beginning at 10:45 a.m. During the interview, Gates gave his response to some interesting unfiltered user questions.
He logged in under the username "thisisbillgates" and to verify his identity, he posted a photo of himself holding up a piece of paper with his newly created Reddit handle.
One user asked Gates to name a Microsoft product that wasn't fully developed when he was CEO that he would have liked to have seen make it to market. Gates responded by recollecting a storage database and management system from 2003 called Windows Future Storage or WinFS.
"We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will re-emerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding," said Gates.
Another user asked Gates what emerging technology today will cause another big stir for the average consumer in the same way that the home computer did years ago.
"Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at "computers". Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways", said Gates.
When asked about his views on the push against the open and free Internet that we have been seeing recently, Gates elaborated on two key points.
"There are two things this could reference. One is the free/pay for software mix. The Internet has benefited from having lots of free stuff and lots of commercial software. It has been interesting see people inventing hybrid models. Even stuff that is pretty commercial often has free versions for some audiences. Even the most open stuff often have services people choose to pay for", he said.
"The second thing is the anonymous versus identified tension. This is another one where both will probably thrive since you want anonymity for some things and full identity for others. I am surprised how little progress has been made in the identity space but it will improve," said Gates.
Although Gates is well known for his entereprenurial contributions to the revolution of personal computers, his philanthropic endeavors are quite generous. Through his foundation established in the year 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he has made large donations to many charitable organizations and scientific research programs.
