By Rik Turner in Paris
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates outlined the drivers behind his company’s forward-looking research projects in Paris yesterday, taking time out, during a subsequent Q&A session, to play down the importance of one of his leading competitors, Oracle Corp. These were the main points of a lightning appearance Gates made at the Forum d’Informations des Hautes Technologies (FIHT) conference and show, which opened at the city’s Parc des Expositions and runs until February 5. Passing through after a weekend spent among world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates also reiterated his recent remark that some high-flying internet stocks are bound to fall, adding that, if he knew which were going to succeed, he would be investing and making billions. He said the four main objectives behind the pure research at Microsoft are: to make PCs easier to use, by making diagnostics more readily available in the event of a user getting an error message; to give them greater power, via technologies such as clustering, so as to provide the fail-safe type of mission-critical networks previously only available from companies such as Tandem; to incorporate new devices, which means improving the screens of handheld devices for greater legibility, as well as incorporating handwritten notes and develop richer applications, escaping from the clunky filenaming procedures common to this generation of word processors; and to move to greater interactivity, via such technologies as handwriting, speech and video recognition. Of the first, Gates said venture capitalists all but gave up on this technology four or five years ago, but Microsoft has continued to invest in it, citing the ClearType software as a first result of this work. Of the second, he said the work of both the company’s own labs and of Belgian speech recognition developer, Lernout & Hauspie are to be incorporated into Windows, while the third technology, which will enable consumers to make, edit and transmit home videos across the net, is a little further down the road though Microsoft is already working on it. It was in a brief question and answer session with FIHT’s organizer and commissaire general, Alex Vieux, that Gates made his barbed remarks about Oracle. It started innocently enough, with the Microsoft CEO saying that he couldn’t think of any other company that had been so totally dedicated to the research into and development of software as his own. What about Oracle? Vieux piped up, to which Gates replied that all that company really has is a great enterprise sales force on the IBM model. He did concede though that they’ve taken the database business and done it well, though we’re offering them some serious competition in that sector. But Oracle don’t think about things like collaborative servers, or email. Why haven’t they made a business out of these areas?
