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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates spoke yesterday at Microsoft's eighth annual Strategic Account Summit in Seattle, Washington, and spoke about what the future may hold in store for web and search technology. Mr. Gates has only 15 months left before retiring from the chairman position at Microsoft. When asked by Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Chief Media Officer Joanne Bradford about how he planned to spend those remaining months, Gates likening users of current search engine technology to adventurers: "When people go to the Internet they have a task in mind. And it's not just to see a list of links. This is not a, hey, I'm paid to go do treasure hunts." Bill Gates to Focus on Search Gates hopes to bring web content to consumers without the middleman of search sites, and said, "Today if you want to do a certain type of transaction, there's probably a specialized Web site you don't know about that's far better than just the general, say, search way of going about." Looking at the overall picture of the web, Gates also offered that, "...broadly thinking, it's about search, it's about buyers and sellers, and that will be my biggest thing." He went on to elaborate his idea for the future of the web, asking, "Why can't we take, by using a platform-type approach, the best of those dedicated sites and bring them in so that you don't have to click on a tab or anything, you just type your words, and yet that domain, those people who are expert are somehow incorporated into that." Bill Gates Using YouTube - What is He Finding? Bradford asked Gates about his current search habits, "...what inspires you about what's going on on the Web today? What are you looking at?," and he noted that he had been using Google's YouTube to view old lectures he's given, "I'm finding a lot of neat lectures and watching those." Gates also commented on e-commerce at the summit, noting that, "The word e-commerce has always been hard to define. It's essentially how we use these digital platforms to match buyers and sellers, how they find each other in the first place, and then through a complex transaction how it's digitally facilitated." He further noted that the web is now primarily about commercial enterprise, stating, "Generally the Web is about commerce, and any way you measure it, it will go to dramatic new levels." A Silverlight at the End of the Tunnel? Playing a part in Microsoft's possible move to circumvent traditional search sites on the web is a new project called Silverlight, which Microsoft Product Manager on the Web Platform and Tools team Brian Goldfarb described yesterday as, "a cross-browser, cross platform plug-in that will usher in a new generation of media experiences and applications on the Web." Gates said that Silverlight will change the way the web is used, and that, "...the future of the Web experience [is] that you're not going to think about it as just being text, or click and wait long periods of time, really will be created around that Silverlight runtime [environment]..." He also spoke to the limitations he sees in pure HTML coding, saying, "...people have been really finding the limitations of HTML to be very problematic..." Enter the Seadragon Goldfarb also spoke about another new Microsoft web technology called Seadragon, which the company also appears to have high hopes for. "Now there's a new technology called Seadragon that enables very smooth browsing of incredibly high resolution images. It scales from low bandwidth connections all the way to the highest broadband connections, and it gives customers a new experience on the way they deal with very valuable imagery. Now for advertising, this certainly opens up a lot of interesting new scenarios," Goldfarb said during a live demonstration at yesterday's summit. "What you see on the screen here is a very typical search results page. I have contextual ads on the right. I searched for Land Rover, but using Seadragon and Silverlight, if I cursor over this image icon, I actually have access to a very high resolution image," Goldfarb said, and concluded that, "this gives customers an amazing way to reuse the imagery that it already has for print publications, and now they can include that directly on the Web in these landing pages." Gates, speaking about Seadragon web technology and the merging of television and the web, noted, "We're saying that TV, the biggest ad market in the world will completely go online and have the kind of targeting and interaction that you only get out on the Web today," and that, "TV on the Internet, we talked about it for a long time. We're saying now we really mean it." What the Future Holds in Store In her opening remarks, Bradford spoke of the web being a place where content should evolve and improve, noting, "If you put something on the web and it doesn't work, you need to fix it and make it better," and mentioned author Seth Godin who wrote the book "The Dip" which was given to summit attendees. She also mentioned MSN and their search aspirations. "...at MSN we're trying to give them [customers] tools to do things, to be able to search, to be able to look for things," she said. Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's President of Platforms & Services Division, noted also that, "...across every division in the company, we are building services that are based on a business model of online advertising." Only the Consumer Wins Gates expanded upon his vision for the future of the web, noting that, "What we need to do with software is  allow you to participate in those [on-line] communities, but really go to one place driven through the portal and the instant-messaging that will let you see immediately if any of your friends have done something out on a photo site or a listing site -- actually pull that into the user interface using advanced forms of our accounts, but it feels like a single experience; that you're not logging in multiple times and having to go check all those different sites." The winner in the future Microsoft sees is the consumer according to Gates, who went on to say, "The Internet is like a lot of things, the only sure winner with the breakthrough are the consumers themselves." Gates spoke about Microsoft's SharePoint technology as well. "...SharePoint, an interactive media manager that actually builds the Web sites you want for connecting up with customers, putting up graphs, looking at the measurement tools. That's just a template that does most of the work..." Using Search History Data Finally, Gates spoke about providing information on-line in context, stating, "In the future, instead of just a publication saying, OK, I'll go to a single provider who will do that, it will actually be a richer thing than that, because the publisher knows something about that particular reader, and various other companies, say, who have that user on their portal, or see the search operations that user has done recently, they know enough and it's really a combination of that knowledge, far more than the article itself, that allows you to think, what should I display in that context." While Gates didn't speak about it at yesterday's summit, many have wondered if a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo is in the works, and on this the outcome remains to be seen. Additional Resources about Bill Gates to Focus on Search:
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10:30 am on May 9, 2007 (utc 0)