BILL
GATES:
Well, good evening. It's a great honor
for me to speak at this jubilee celebration. After all, I'm not
50-years old yet, pretty close, I never graduated from college,
yet, although I'm not sure I'll be changing that because I'm a
little busy right now, but I get a chance to talk with you about an
incredible institution that has really changed the world and has
the potential to do even more in the years ahead than it's already
done.
Rajat asked me to speak and at first my
reaction, "Well, I don't speak at many college events. There's more
opportunity than there is time." But when I thought about it and I
thought about the great things that people from IIT have done at
Microsoft, the role that I think IIT can play inside India in
tapping into its potential I decided I'd make a very special
exception and come here tonight. (Applause.)
I was careful to do research for this speech
so I went up to the Web site -- the IIT Web site -- and sort of
browsed around, and after I did that I thought, well, I'll go to
the MIT Web site and browse around just to see, you know, these
things seem very similar. And on the MIT Web site the hot news was
that the coffee house was closing down because people weren't
spending enough money there. (Laughter.) On the IIT Bombay site,
though, things were far more interesting. They said that they had
caught a leopard on the campus recently. (Laughter,
applause.) And that's something these U.S. universities just can't
offer in terms of an experience. (Laughter.)
Well, it is quite phenomenal to look back at
the start of IIT and realize that a young nation was willing to
pour very precious resources into creating this institution. Most
people back then didn't understand how important science and
engineering would be and yet the early leaders who got behind IIT
obviously saw through and knew that the long-term investment would
have a huge payout.
Prime Minister Nehru described IIT as
representing India's urges, India's future in the making and the
people here and the other graduates of IIT have made that come
true.
The
impact, of course, has been worldwide, not just on India and the
seven campuses but the research and the incredible talent is having
a huge impact.
Just one example of that is the incredible
revolution taking place in India where literally hundreds of
thousands and in the future millions of jobs will be created by
taking the educational focus of the country and applying that
computer science and high value service type activities and
connecting up with the needs for those capabilities not only in
India but around the world. It's amazing to see that happening and
I think IIT has had a huge role in providing the education and the
vision that's led to that wonderful result.
IIT and Microsoft do have a lot in common,
an optimism about the future, a belief that fundamental science
will lead to breakthroughs that will let us solve some of the
toughest problems that mankind faces, a belief that we can provide
better tools than ever before and that we've really just scratched
the surface.
Sometimes people say to me, you know,
"Haven't you achieved a lot; why don't you retire?" And my simple
answer is that the original vision that I had for the personal
computer, along with Paul Allen, was a machine that was far more
capable, far more straightforward, far more in use by more people
than what we have today. And so in some sense if you take a big
enough vision, as Microsoft did, you never in your lifetime run out
of work to be done to achieve that vision.
IIT has certainly taken on a grand vision.
Even as an incredibly world-class institution, it keeps challenging
itself to renew itself to move to the forefront. And it's hard to
think of anything like IIT anywhere in the world. It is a very
unique institution.
Microsoft has given over US$7.5 million of
its grants (to IIT), more to any organization except some in the
U.S. or in the UK because of what we see going on there. We've
hired literally hundreds and hundreds of graduates just in the last
two years. Over 50 people have come to Microsoft and we're doing
our best to increase the number. (Applause.)
We've also decided one way to increase that
number is to have a development center in India, and so we've
kicked that off and we're expanding that quite rapidly and that's
also become a great thing for our employees who come from India.
Many of them have chosen now to go back to India and they can keep
their career at Microsoft. In fact, that was a key element in our
decision to locate a development center there is that it was a way
of retaining incredible talent that wanted to be in
India.
We have graduates from all the different IIT
schools. I have to say that before tonight's cocktail event I
didn't understand there's even competition between the campuses of
IIT. (Laughter, applause.) Various ones were saying that they had
this person who graduated who worked at Microsoft and this one and
so I can say that every single campus, even the newer campuses are
well represented.
We are very anxious to see the tradition of
academic research that IIT believes in brought to a whole new
level. After all, the computer industry is a beneficiary of the
kind of partnership that can take place between academia and
commercial organizations. Most of the interesting advances in
computer science have elements of academic research and elements of
commercialization that have come together to build great products.
And there's no doubt in our minds that IIT will do more than its
share to contribute to this, which is why we sponsor research there
and we're very impressed with the things going on.
Despite the distance, we do a lot to host
people, have people on sabbaticals at Microsoft, have competitions
and encourage our employees also through our matching program to
support IIT and all of its different activities.
At one time, people thought the boundary
between academia and commercial companies was one that was
sacrosanct in a way, that you couldn't collaborate across that
boundary and many fields I think have been held back by that
belief. The two that have really shown that there is another
approach that is far better, the field of computer science and the
field of biology, and it's maybe no coincidence that those are the
two areas that are changing the world the most, that we can speak
about outrageous dreams of how computers will be better and they'll
improve life 20 years from now or how medicine through biology will
deal with the tough diseases that exist around the world, and it's
phenomenal to see the energy, the talent, that's being applied in
these areas.
Two of our IIT graduates are now vice
presidential level people at Microsoft, which is a group of less
than a hundred people, and are making huge contributions. I'll just
mention those two by name: Amitabh Srivastava is doing our
programming tool work as a distinguished engineer and really
incredible breakthroughs. They're helping us in things like
security that are so important. Anoop Gupta has
worked directly for me for a few years now, is just being promoted
to be a vice president to drive our real time communications
efforts and, of course, was a professor at Stanford before that and
really has a vision that's changing what we're doing in that area.
(Applause.)
So the aspirations of Microsoft and IIT are
very, very compatible and we think that more collaboration in the
future is very, very important.
The vision that we have we've described as
the digital decade. What do we mean by that? Well, we mean that in
the year 2000 the number of people who really used digital
approaches for lots of everyday things was quite small. For word
processing or e-mail you could say there was some penetration there
but for most tasks -- buying things, taking notes, organizing
schedules, dealing with music, dealing with photos, really going
through budgeting processes -- most things were not done on a
digital basis.
And our belief is that by the end of this
decade that will have changed; in fact, they will have changed
enough that it will almost be common sense. People will think back
and say, "Well, why did we have records that we had to take out of
the case and put on the phonograph and treat in this really careful
way?" In fact, records, that term itself is obsolete. My daughter,
who's six asked me why do they call it the record store. Well, they
should call it the CD store. Well, a child born six or seven years
from now they won't even have to learn about CDs because things
will be done in that purely digital way.
And so this
idea that this is a transforming decade in terms of these tools
moving into the mainstream it runs a little bit in contrast to a
view that there was a lot of promises and those have proven out to
be empty hype and empty promises. Certainly in terms of valuations,
in terms of time-frames, in terms of the simplicity to get there
there was some deep oversimplification. Some people who owned the
shares in those companies now appreciate where oversimplification
can lead, but, in fact, in terms of what the dreams and aspirations
were there most of them were entirely right on.
The idea of being able to buy and sell
between any two companies anyplace in the world, you know, that
dream is a very interesting dream because it means that the
opportunity for someone is more related to their talent, to their
education than to where they're located. If somebody is very
talented they can offer their services through the
Internet with the help of software and digital
approaches and be able to apply their talent to problems in
different locations. And it's that kind of thinking that makes
India a superpower of human talent rather than traditional resource
extraction or other ways of measuring the potential of a
country.
So the digital decade is something that
we're very excited about. It's very transforming. And it requires a
bit of patience. It requires laying the infrastructure for these
new approaches. It requires simplifying things. Just because these
great things work doesn't mean that they'll be used very
broadly.
In the debates today about the future,
sometimes people get caught up in terms of saying which device will
be the winning device. I spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show
just a week ago and there the rhetoric, "Was is it the TV or the
PC?" Often people say, "Well, no, it's the cell phone, the cell
phone is the device. Look at lots of people buy cell phones, don't
they?" Well, in fact, it's all these devices working together. If
somebody is engaged in a digital lifestyle, they will use devices
of all sizes. They will use wall-sized devices that we used to call
TVs. They'll use desk-size or tablet size devices we used to call
PCs. They'll use pocket size devices that we used to call phones or
PDAs or hand-help games and yet the device through the magic of
hardware and software in devices will be every one of those
things.
Just recently at that same CES show we
introduced the idea of going even below pocket-sized and this is
the idea of going to a wrist-sized device, actually taking
something like this, a simple little watch, and making it be one of
the devices that can keep you informed of the things that you're
interested in.
Now, in this audience I have no fear that I
can actually give you the technical specifications of this device
and you'll appreciate that. (Laughter, applause.) Just to make a
comparison, the original IBM PC that got shipped in 1981, the first
machine that ran MS DOS was an 8088 computer running at about 6
megahertz and the base configuration was a 48k machine. It sold for
a few thousand dollars and IBM was very conservative; they forecast
to sell 60,000 of those the first year. They actually sold a few
hundred thousand.
Well, if you look at this watch, this watch
has an ARM processor running at 28 megahertz and instead of just
having 48k of RAM and 32k of ROM this has 512k of ROM and 384k of
RAM.
Not only that, it's about an $8 chip that
can receive FM data signals, so-called FM sideband. And so the way
it works is you go to a PC screen, you type in the ID of your
devices and you indicate what kind of sports scores you care about,
what stock prices you care about, what cities you want to know the
weather. You point it to your schedule so it will give you the
traffic information you care about relative to where you're going
and those things -- and it tells time as well.
(Laughter.)
And so this idea of this glanceable screen
that you can simply just look at the information, it's part of that
family of devices and it's not a substitute for a phone or a Tablet
PC device or a desktop or a wall-sized device; it's simply
something that software will use to present information to
you.
And so it's things like this that can come
in a fairly natural form factor that I think are why many people
are underestimating what happens during this digital decade. During
this decade certainly handwriting as a natural input technique,
speech as a natural input technique, will become mainstream and
we'll just take those for granted.
There is a basic approach in terms of how
all these devices find each other and talk to each other called Web
services that we're also very optimistic about. It's very state of
the art distributing computing work. It's a standardized set of
protocols that companies like IBM and Microsoft are working on
together. We've committed all our R&D to this approach because
we see it as not only the foundation for e-commerce but also
solving all the tough manageability problems and data exchange
problems that we've had in these systems.
Software systems can be far better. Software
systems can be easier to work with so that you don't have to have
so many people write glue code into how those work
together.
One of the biggest challenges we all face to
make the digital decade a reality are the issues around trustworthy
computing. After all, the kind of reliability we get out of the
water system or electricity system, at least in this country, are
good enough that we just take them for granted, and we have to have
that same capability into this digital
infrastructure.
And there are many tough problems here. Even
the very basic things are not there today. People use passwords.
Well, passwords are very easy to guess. People use the same
password on consumer Web sites they use in their office and it's
simply not an adequate way to authenticate people. We'll need to
move up to smart cards or biometrics.
Mail protocols: you don't actually know when
you get a piece of electronic mail that it really came from the
person it purports to. So if somebody spoofs a piece of mail that
purports to come from your IT department and they said, you know,
please shut off your computer immediately, pay no attention to any
messages you get that pretend to come from the IT department
because they're just trying to fool you, people would be in a
complete state of confusion. And so today's systems were not
designed from the bottom up with the key elements that are
necessary here.
Now, it's a very solvable problem. Again,
deep research coming out of academia will be part of it. It won't
be solved overnight. Just like a lot of these tough problems it
will take most of this decade to do it, but it's something that
absolutely has to be done.
So there's no lack of challenges, challenges
of getting broadband out, challenges of getting every industry to
see how it takes advantage of these things. Even just thinking
about education, I remember speaking with a great Stanford
professor about 12 years ago about how the Internet might change
things and what would happen and he disagreed with me and so he
said, "'Well, I don't even know if Microsoft will be in business
ten years from now." And that was fine, but then he stopped and he
said, "Well, then again, I don't know what education will look like
in ten years either, you know, what will the idea of an expert
delivering information and students interacting around that
information." Well, in fact, to date education has changed a very
modest amount and yet with Tablet PC devices, with online video,
certainly technology is going to reach into education. We're just
scratching the surface there.
There's certainly an opportunity for IIT,
and I expect IIT will seize that to be at the forefront of that and
define exactly how that can be used to get great education out to
more people and improve the experience, including the experience
after you graduate when you want to renew your skills and be kept
up to date on the latest things going on. It's possible that over
time graduates of IIT will be constantly in touch with IIT not just
as a group of alums but also in terms of their ongoing
education.
One
topic that I know I can speak on in this audience is that if you
look back on the success that you've had or the luck you've had, if
you look back on how your talent fit in to the talent that today's
society demands, if you look at the people who mentored you, I
think everyone here can look back and say that they've been very
lucky in terms of what has happened to them. And I think for all of
us it creates an interesting question of how do we give back, how
do we take the responsibility upon us that that
imposes.
For myself, in terms of the really outsized
luck I've had financially, it's a pretty large responsibility and
it's one that I put a lot of energy into thinking about and it's
really only in the last five years that in my foundation I've
really tried to say how can I give these resources that I'm lucky
enough to have back to society in a way that can make an
impact.
One of the things that struck me most
vividly was that the horizon to think about was not just the United
States, not just the richest country in the world. And I was a
little bit stunned how much of the philanthropy in the richest
country is strictly to the richest country. And certainly the more
I learned about health issues, the more I felt like that was
something where the awareness of the world, the focus of the world
taking its advances and applying those, that, along with the
digital decade, would be a major theme of the things that I would
try and do my best to give back in.
Just last year late in the year I had an
opportunity to make a trip to India and it was a wonderful trip.
(Applause.) I had a chance to see partners like Infosys and Mr.
Murthy of Infosys is here tonight. (Applause.) And I got a chance
to see our development center and look at how rapidly the computer
software and engineering and services businesses are developing in
India and share my views and understand how Microsoft can help with
that more.
But I also got to spend time looking at some
of these health issues and in particular the threat of the AIDS
epidemic and how that's something that needs more visibility, needs
more attention. (Applause.) And so I feel privileged to have been
able to hopefully cast a little bit of energy on that, put some
resources into it and hopefully stop what could be a very bad
development and really slow down India's ability to realize its
incredible potential.
So where do we go from here? Well, I think
it's quite clear that the theme I will strike tonight is working
together: the United States working with India (applause, cheers)
-- commercial organizations like Microsoft working with IIT
(applause) -- and all of us taking these great advances in science
and thinking what we can each do to make sure that not only are
these great advances available to the developed countries and the
luckiest of us all but to the entirety of humanity.
(Applause.)
So with that, let me say I'm very optimistic
that we will work together and being here with this incredibly
talented group talking about this incredible institution just makes
me all the more optimistic about that. Thank you.
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