Gates on geekery and gadgets

…are amazing; the plasma people stepping up for their piece; the improvements in just the capacity and the bandwidth.

I love seeing that 802.11n is happening here. Now that's a cutting-edge thing, but people are sending high definition over multiple input, multiple output-type devices. Those will get standardised; the price will come down. Here, Toshiba, when you connect up your video, they're using ultrawideband to send a DVI video signal from here so that you don't have to connect. It's a docking station with no cables. The only thing you need a wire for is the power. Everything else, you just come within proximity, and there it is. So that's a cutting-edge thing; that it's low-volume this year but over the next several years really will get out there in a huge way.

The relationship of phones to PCs, we'll see some new things there. The relationships of PCs to services up on the internet itself, that's another hot area that we and others are investing in. So everything is here, from purple containers for devices to neat new software. I get to spend a few hours looking around tomorrow.

Obviously, you're still working full-time at Microsoft, but the Gates Foundation is getting a lot of your attention. Health care and education have been two of the big focuses. What are the kinds of things that you're starting to look at in your foundation work?
The change for me doesn't come until mid-2008. I'm totally full-time at Microsoft and get anywhere from 10 to 15 hours on my foundation work. That's going very well. We've got great scientists, and people understand that the challenge is there, and so I look forward to understanding those things better. My new time really will go into health and education, some of which, hopefully, I'll help Microsoft in those areas but very much the foundation getting some of that input.

Both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation have education as a common focus. You and other people have been talking about the problems and putting a lot of energy into it for years now. Especially in the US, is the education situation getting better or is it still not where it needs to be?
Education is complex to even measure. My daughter goes to a school that's been using portable PCs for every student for over six years now. They use tablets. And if she doesn't have a maths textbook, she just cuts the problems out and tries things out. She can email the teacher whenever she wants.

So when you get a glimpse of that, and how interactive it is and how it's easy to analyse, OK, what's going wrong here? And that kind of support that you get from simple communications, and even sending the homework to the parents and saying "Hey, I need help with this" or "Hey, I'm proud of what I did".

You can see a glimpse that we've got some really great things — the lectures that are out there on the internet now. If you can find the right ones, it's kind of amazing, and Microsoft and others can do more to make that simple so that lectures are the simple, the easy part. And then collaborative learning — whether that's just finding people online or even doing the collaborative learning online — software can help with that, you know, build a marketplace that that all coalesces around. We're quite enthused about it.