Gates on free tools, Yahoo bid Video

Gates on free tools, Yahoo bid Video Transcript

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>> I'm Ina Fried with CNET News.com here on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California where a short while ago, Bill Gates spoke to a group of students on the promise of technology as well as some of the challenges that will need to solve in terms of global health and education. Just a few moments ago, I had a chance to sit down with the Microsoft Chairman and talk about some other issues including the company's plan to give away its Developers Tools to college and high school students throughout the country and throughout the world, as well as the company's massive bid for Yahoo. Microsoft is giving away its programming tools to students. Do you think this will help regain some of the energy that's moved towards open-source development projects?

>> Actually, the percentage of professional developers that are using Microsoft tools is higher today that it's ever been. Now, many of those professional developers choose quite a variety of tools. They'll use Visual Studio, but there are other things as well. We have some new tools that are entrants with some innovative ideas like Expression for the design community that were just now catching on. But in terms of giving them out to the other departments outside the computer science where students can just go and get Expression or just go and get Visual Studio, that hasn't really easy for them to do. So, now, I'm making this directly available to students even down to the high school students. We think we'll let people do neat things at a young age that includes the developer kit that we have for Xbox development and stuff for designers. It's quite broad in terms of things that are there.

>> Do you see the University fundamentally changing to where maybe the lecture aren't delivered locally and everything sort of the discussion section that used to be separate.

>> If you're the university that decide, hey let's do those study groups super, super well. And then leverage the top one hundred to actually have that lecture piece and you already see that with textbooks. Not every university goes writes his own textbooks, but for the lecture piece, they basically recreate those things. So, even universities are gonna have to look at, kind of a digital environment, just reordering things -- just like companies have to reinvent themselves and think about new things as the digital age has come along now it's there's a opportunity here to make education, which is super, super important far more effective than it is today.

>> Do you think we're entering a world where we have fewer professional content creators and more amateur content creatures producing better and better stuff?

>> They'll still be demand for saying MIT education, although, the impact of their lecture work is much broader. So, you can call that a business model where the concert, the in-person concert is sort of paying for things and include that in the CD. In this case most of them have decided to make them free. Now, they haven't had a textbook maybe they'll get a little bit of up-tech in sales because of that. These are kind of things we have to experiment with. It is important to have incentive systems, recognition, and payment to drive the most creativity possible and we're gonna see what that ends up looking like in a number of realms.

>> Microsoft historically, has not done huge acquisitions, have added technology here and there. You guys are talking about doing basically by far your biggest ever if you buy Yahoo. What was it that you saw that said, yeah, I know this is something where we really need to go out and spend a considerable amount of money to do what we need to do?

>> Yeah. Our history of acquisitions -- Visio at a billion, Great Plains, it's somewhat more than that than Visio and then aQuantive, that's six billion. Those are the gigantic acquisitions. We've been more about hiring people and doing in-house development although we've always layered in some smaller acquisitions to help us get things done more quickly. So, the Yahoo proposal is very unique thing for us. Looking at our accomplishment with Google that we're very committed to and in case in saying this would really help that in a very substantial way that the combination of our engineering, their engineering, plus the good presence they have that that would accelerate the ability to have a very, very competitive market in what's our growing area. ^M00:04:15 [ Music ]