Bill Gates chats to Channel 9 - without socks
Robert Scoble gets to chat to Bill Gates for 15 minutes on Channel 9. Its an interesting interview and has a few insights about Bill's 10 and 15 year vision for software, and where he thinks we're headed. He talks about XML and development initiatives and where he sees things going in developer land and also his excitement about Office 12. He's also not wearing socks :-). And no ones given him an Xbox 360 yet either...!
Bill also mkes a few good comments on blogging and how people who read bloggers at Microsoft get to know us as a person and not just part of a machine. (I'm not sure you'd want to know too much about my home life though - its rather bit less geeky than my Microsoft life!). It's worth listening to a couple of times as he pushes out a heck of a lot of information in a really short space of time. And he's funny. And warm. And witty too.
This did get me thinking though about the type of software I was using 10 years ago. We also had hundreds of green screens hooked up to the System 36, System 38 and AS/400's in the Data Processing room (Gosh that dates me!). I was in the middle of a migration. Migrating Netware 3.12, Windows 3.11, Wordstar 6 and Lotus 123 version 2 to NT 3.51 with Windows 95 on the desktop, and Back Office 4.2(?) strutting its stuff out the back. Oh happy days... Everything (our needs were simple then) on the desktop was controlled by ntconfig.pol (very scary in those days), and we were just moving over from our AS/400 based system to MsMail 3.2. But my pride and joy was the machine over in the corner attached to one of those soft cup modems (1200 baud I seem to remember) . You know the sort of modem that you had to shove the telephone handset into the modem when you heard the warbles down the line? I had a Compuserve account and was connected to a couple of news forums for troubleshooting help and information. This was "The Internet" and I was incredibly protective of it too! How far have we come?...
So what sort of technology were you using 10 yesrs ago? and what do you expect to be using in 10 years time?