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Bill Gates discusses the future of Web 2.0
Speaking to a group of business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Gates gave some insight into where he believes technology is heading. During the conference, which played host to several big names in the industry such as YouTube's Chad Hurley and Flickr's Caterina Fake, Gates touched on topics such as the Web 2.0 craze, IPTV, and a possible micropayment model for the web. Gates stressed that software is becoming more advanced and capable every year for hosting multimedia content, saying, "Every year we just move to more of a digital environment. We take away the older approaches." In the next few years, for example, we should expect to see the disappearance of the Private Branch eXchange (PBX) in telephone systems. "In voice telephony, you have a thing called a PBX. You won't have those anymore. You'll have a communications system that is using your Internet network and it's a far richer, more flexible software-drive system." The Microsoft chief also said online storage services will have a major impact in computing. > People always want some demarcation where this stopped and this other thing began. The Internet goes back even into the 70s. As a student, I would take all my files put it up on a big computer in the sky. We're just getting that back on the Internet where your storage shows up on all your machines. A large piece of the online utopia that Gates described is the growing popularity of viewing multimedia content over the web, including television. "Once video gets on the Internet, the ability to just see the news you want, the ads are personalized, the educational stuff is far more interactive; it becomes very different than it has been in broadcast," he said. "I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had." The interactive content that Gates speaks of isn't limited to television, either. He wants to see online shopping become 3-dimensional where, using a technology such as Virtual Earth 3D or Second Life, a consumer can walk into a customized store and examine products just as though he were there. Using a micropayment system, consumers could then try different models of a product, assuming it could be examined over the web. Gates claims that the only thing holding back all this from happening is the lack of a digital rights management system. > If there's any one thing that holds this back at all, and only in a small way, it's because we don't have a digital rights model where content creators understand how to let their stuff get out there flexibly and yet can feel like they're going to get remunerated the right way. You get hesitation from people who dive in completely. In general, Gates has a tendency to paint the future of technology in a wonderful light, even if his crystal ball needs calibrated [|periodically]. While Gates' predictions could be a reach, he accurately summarized Steve Ballmer's actions over the last five years. > Every year the number of PCs sold has increased substantially. Every year the number of Internet users has increased substantially. Every year the amount of traffic, the richness of the traffic has increased. Now there's this other kind of manic depressive who's valuing these things. Now he got a little bit manic in 2001, in fact we didn't have him taking his medicine at all...forgot that gravity existed. Then he got a little bit sane, and maybe he's a little hallucinatory now. Yes, that sounds like the [|Microsoft Steve] we know