Craig Mundie is trying to fill Bill Gates' shoes. Well, at least one of them.
Keenly aware that no one person can replace Microsoft's cultural icon, the company has divided Gates' responsibilities among two top executives. Ray Ozzie has taken over as chief software architect, but Gates' role overseeing technical strategy and policy has gone to Mundie.
While Ozzie is tasked with trying to reorganise Microsoft's product units to better prepare for a world of online services, Mundie is focused on issues such as how to get PCs in the hands of the next billion users and how the software industry must retool itself, as chipmakers add more cores to chips instead of trying to simply speed them up.
In an interview at this week's Windows Hardware and Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer touched on those issues as well as the company's overall efforts to prepare for the coming time when Gates doesn't show up for work at Microsoft every day.
Q: Bill Gates has pointed to a couple of things that are still part of his vision but are going to take longer than the amount of time he's going to be working full time — things like the Tablet PC really becoming a mainstream interface and his dreams of what WinFS or a new file system could mean. What are your thoughts on those two projects?
A: I've been, with Bill, a strong supporter of both of those things. I think that context-based both retrieval and interaction are going to be increasingly important in making the computer just a better partner for people. One of the reasons people love search is [that] search is content-addressable access to information. You didn't have to think about where it was. No one put it in a particular place so you could find it; you just get it. That's the way your brain works. You don't have little yellow folders in your head [or] say: "Oh, let's see, I just talked to Craig. I have to file that someplace." It just kind of goes in there, and you have this associative retrieval capability.
Intrinsically, humans love that kind of thing, and computers haven't yet got to that point. I think that that will happen, and all this kind of computation, as Bill mentioned in his speech, the big memories, I mean, all those big memories are a big part of getting to that kind of associative retrieval capability — that and a lot of computation.
One thing that has been an instinct of Gates', which I think Ray and I and others at the company share, is the idea that we are a long-term investor
Craig Mundie
And so we're laying the foundation. Many of the things Bill and I will say we tried to do together over almost 15 years, we've been surprised and sometimes disappointed by how long it takes before things that seem so obvious are ultimately fully realised. The IPTV vision as we know it today started out as the interactive TV in 1993, and it's only getting broad deployment today, almost 14 years later. When we latch onto things that we think will have strategic importance, we just stay with them for very long periods of time.
One thing that has been an instinct of Gates', which I think Ray and I and others at the company share, is the idea that we are a long-term investor. When we latch onto things that we think will have strategic importance, we just stay with them for very long periods of time. And many companies would not persevere through that; they'd give it a shot, it wouldn't stick, and they'd throw it away and go on to the next thing. But I think one of the reasons Microsoft has such staying power is this duality of long term, sort of long-lead pure research where you don't know exactly what the value is going to be, and the ability to say, you know, when you get something you think is going to be important, don't give up, just keep on moving ahead.
And I think that those have served us well and, I think, will continue to serve us well.
You talked about the pendulum swinging again in terms of work being done on the server versus work done on the client. Does Microsoft need to change the way it develops software?
What we had to add to the company, and have done — you could say we've been at it since the mid-1990s — is we've had to add services. That was a whole new thing. So, it started out as MSN and then Hotmail and the whole family of service-oriented properties, and they've been growing now for more…
