This article was adapted from Bill Gates's remarks at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show and is reprinted courtesy of Broadband Properties Magazine.
We talk about this as the decade of Digital Lifestyles, the decade of Digital Workstyles. That means that all these tools are becoming mainstream. And it’s not just one application that makes it happen. It’s not just banking or advertising, or filling out your tax return, or even instant messaging, it’s the fact that as you adopt those things they really go together. Consumers are getting more and more connected. They’re getting richer experiences.
In Four Years …
Here’s a scenario that we think will be real by the end of the Digital Decade, within the next four years or so. Let’s say we’re at home in the morning. We’ve got a screen that shows some of the information that we care about. It’s automatically kept up to date. We just touch it to access. We’ve got some of the kids’ drawings here. We can just grab those, move those around, and pick different pictures that we want. We see the time of day here. All very simple to work with.
Down here on the screen we’ve got a little bit of a map, and because everyone in the family has decided that they’re willing to share their location with the rest of the family, we can see here on the map where mom left early and headed off to that soccer game. We see the family schedule. So, we’re able to track everybody and know what’s going on.
We’ve got a connection to our video, and so the latest news has been categorized. The system picks the news items that would be of interest to us, and it actually lets us navigate. So, here I can pick a particular show or news item that’s relevant to the work that I do, and I can see there’s been a storm here, it’s interrupting the supply chain of a lot of different companies, probably including mine.
That could be a real challenge. So, I’ll click this button here and say, I would like to track that topic. I would like to continue to watch that video clip, and so as I head in to work that video has now been connected up to my mobile phone, and I can watch that as I’m getting into the car and heading off to my at-work office.
At the Office…
When I arrive there, I’ve got a nice desktop screen. … I see a lot of different information here, including that news story that I was tracking. I go ahead and set up a little conference call that’s going to have a lot of people talking about this problem. And so we can see here our Chief Operating Officer is online but our VP of Operations is only connected up through voice. We’re talking through the issue. There is the article there, people are annotating that, seeing how it affects us. I’ve actually got a chart here on my Tablet PC, that’s really logically just part of the desktop screen, as if it is one PC.
I think the chart is relevant, and I can either drag it to my desktop, or I can move it into the video conference. So, I’ll go ahead and drop it there, and we’ll sit and talk about this thing.
The chart was actually created, I can see, by Thomas Anderson, and so I’m interested in bringing him into the conversation we are having. So I go off and select him on the screen, and say that I want to do instant messaging in a side conversation. We’re talking to him, and I indicate, hey, you really ought to come in and give us some advice. I can simply drag him over into the conversation, and so he’s there. He’s now part of that, so not only do we have his document, but also we have his advice, and we figure out pretty quickly what needs to be done.
And actually as we get toward the end of the call, I notice that the system has been looking at my schedule, and it says there’s a traffic jam, so I’m going to have to leave a little bit earlier to get to the airport. I’ve got a flight today, and actually it puts that right here on my telephone as well, along with the map, suggests an alternate route, so I can grab onto this, and take that with me as I leave for the airport.
At the Airport…
Later that day, I find myself in the airport switching planes, and all I’ve got with me on this particular trip is my phone. … I just put it down on a table that’s here in the airport lounge, and the screen built into the table recognizes it. The phone has a little camera, and a little Bluetooth, nothing very complicated. And it says it wants me to authenticate that this is really me, my phone. So, as soon as I put my fingerprint there, I’m connected up….
I’m going to take a business card that somebody handed me while I was on this flight, and just put that down on the table there, and the camera scans that, recognizes it, I’ll just flip that over, I’ve got a little note I made when I was talking with this person about some information he would like to see, and it sees that, gets that text, and then I can take that and say, OK, go ahead and put that into my contacts. …. So, now I have a reminder of a task, send him that information, and see his picture, his name, his e-mail, it’s all been added to my contacts list.
Now I’ll look at whatever mail has come in…. I authenticate that this is me, and I make my digital signature available because of the fingerprint.
Now, I can see up in the right-hand corner through my calendar it knows the flight I’m taking next, so it’s showing me exactly how much time I have before I have to leave, so I can work here and get the benefit of the full screen, even though this phone normally just has that small screen. When I’m done, I just pick this phone up, and of course it’s smart enough to recognize now that it’s logged me off, and somebody else can come in here and use this table-screen.
The Promise
Five or six years ago, if you’d said to people that software and connectivity would make photos better, music better, TV better, phone calls very different, they would have been quite skeptical.
Well, now particularly in music, to some degree in TV, consumers have seen that it makes a huge difference. It allows them to pick the things that they’re interested in, it allows them to see it when they want to, to share with friends what they’ve seen and what they like….
Broadband was a luxury only three or four years ago, and now has actually overtaken dialup, and we’re getting over a hundred million broadband users here in the United States and we’ll have 80 percent of all online households broadband by the end of the decade. And the U.S. is not even the leading country in that respect, all the developed countries (are) moving very quickly.
What Does It Mean?
So what does it mean? Picking the music that you want, finding out other things by that artist or similar artists, not having to think about disks and putting them in the case; entertainment, finding the things that are great, seeing them when you’d like to, having a digital jukebox so anywhere in the house you can call up the movies that you own and see those exactly when you want to; photos, organizing not just photos but all the memories of your kids growing up, being able to search those, send them off to relatives, have them appear on various nice screens around the house like that one I had in my kitchen in that scenario; communications, not just with the voice but also with the screens connecting people together, letting them annotate documents, work together in a very rich way:
These are scenarios that people can understand, if we make them simple, we make them inexpensive and we drive them through a single interface….
As I move between devices, the people I’ve chosen to share my presence with become available. A friend can see, if I want, what game I’m playing and say he might want to play with me, ask me to join in and do something else. … That’s complemented by the fact that there will be what we call “live services” where a lot of your files, your information will actually be stored out in the Internet, and even if you pick somebody else’s device up, once you authenticate, all that information becomes available to you.
There are a lot of themes there, themes of personalization, themes of empowerment, themes of everything moving to the Internet. What is telephony moving to the Internet? That’s VoIP. What is TV moving to the Internet? That’s Internet TV or IPTV. People have to have confidence in these things … and easy connections, connecting to people, connecting up to devices.
In sum, it’s very revolutionary, but every year we have big milestones, more adoption, and it only really catches up to us in terms of how it’s changed the world of media, changed how the business models work there, changed the way that magazines and newspapers are delivered, changed the way that entertainment gets done, bringing these new interactive elements in; TV, where we’ve picked the new segments we want, we interact with a learning show, we can find the video that wouldn’t have been available in a broadcast system; all of that is becoming very, very mainstream.
