Jayson sent me a nice link to Billg's latest Channel 9 video. Billg gets into just how important backwards compatibility has been for Microsoft since day one, and sees it as a big positive, even with the baggage it causes. Some days I would agree with him on this, many days I would not.

I did notice that Bill, like SteveB, must be watching me. He actually quoted me in the video when he was said he 'doesn't watch TV, but is addicted to 24'. I think it is a hint to me that he wants me to send him my resume.

Anyhow, back to reality. He goes into alot of awesome information about Office 12 (now called Office 2007). He talks about collaboration, and Sharepoint services and it sounds like they will have a relationship similar to that of Outlook and Exchange today. And this sounds like a very interesting, possible powerful concept.

He even comes out and calls Office 2007 'sexy' (editors note:he actually said 'Office 12 has got more sext new stuff' though we won't go into a discussion about the grammar).

Talking further on integration, he talks alot about XML, both in the new Office products and with the move SQL etc has made to fully exposing XML so far. I see alot of potential in this, and I am glad to see that Microsoft has taken this path, I think it makes their products more powerful, and increases their value relative to alternatives, even as it gives the alternatives an easier time of interoping with file created from Microsoft products.

I have a prediction about one of the things Bill talked about. If you remember in his book 'The Road Ahead', Bill made a lot of prediction of where he thought technology would be going. He is right on many things, and not so right on many as well.

I am going to make a prediction today. In the video, Bill talks about wanting to be able to 'walk down the aisle of Amazon', seeing the books as you would in a store. My take on this is, 'wtf is he talking about'. Yes, the 'cool' factor would be nice, but do you really think it would be faster/better/more convenient to the customer to have this big heavy thing in their browser? I predict this is not happening any time soon. Change is driven by what brings a customer to the site, and faster/better/more convenient/cheaper are usually the things that do that.

Maybe he is speaking metaphorically and he just wants to be able to read more of the book online or something, but it doesn't seem so to me.

Bill goes into a nice talk about truly getting children involved and revolutionizing the way education works, allowing things to be more interactive, more efficient, more involved and just more 'there' for children, centralizing on what a computer attached to 'the knowledge of everything' could teach. I agree that with the cost of provising education, the shrinking number of teachers, etc that something needs to be done. The only concern I would have is what would we be doing to society as we start teaching children from the age of 5 that their computer is their only friend? We could end up with generations of really smart introverts and the movie 'The 40 year old virgin' stops being so funny... 

The last thing he talks about is using data in a new way, more collaborative, and being able to truly centralize your data store (yeah, don't we wish). He talks about how this could be used to truly revolutionize the healthcare industry. 

You can say whatever bad things you would like about Bill, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation speaks for itself.