Bill Gates
reflected on Microsoft's 33-year history and shared his predictions
for the future in his final public speech as Microsoft
chairman.
Gates, who is due to step down as chairman on July 1, addressed
5,000 developers at Microsoft's Tech Ed North America 2008
Developers conference.
"When I think back on the early days of development when we were
all programming in DOS, and then take a look at what we can do now
with technologies like the .net Framework, it simply amazes me how
far we have come," Gates said.
Gates will continue to work part time at Microsoft and will work
full time with his charitable foundation.
"Now, that is the first time I have really changed my career
since I was 17 years old. I do not know what it is going to be
like. It will be a bit abrupt, and put me in new territory," said
Gates.
Gates spoke about the evolution of computers and cited the
development of microprocessors as being a key part of modern IT
applications but warned that clock speeds would not continue to
increase as fast as they have done in the past.
"We went from the 16-bit processor with a meg of memory, and now
we are in the transition to 64-bit and that is quite soon. Looming
after that, though, is an even more interesting challenge, which is
that clock speed will not increase at the same rate it has over the
past 30 years."
Beyond the microprocessor, Gates said the increasing ubiquity of
broadband through wireless and wired connections and development of
cloud services would shape the IT applications of the future.
Microsoft made several announcements at the event, including an
August release for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, a technical
collaboration with IBM, availability of Silverlight 2 beta 2, and
the launch of the Microsoft project code-named "Velocity," a
distributed in-memory application cache platform.