MS wants to be part of Unique Identity project

TK Arun, Shelley Singh & Shubham Mukherjee, July 27, 2009
The Economic Times
Coming to slowdown, the US is erecting barriers in terms of tightening visas and forcing companies to create jobs locally. Is that the answer to cope with a slowdown?

Of course not. Immigration restriction in the US didn’t really emerge out of the recession. We have had some difficulty and unfriendliness in our immigration system, limits in H1B visas, difficulty in green cards. We have had these for quite some time. The recession may have made it even more difficult politically to get the system changed, but my personal voice and Microsoft’s voice very strongly is that system is bad for lots of individuals, bad for the US, bad for the country and so we will do our best to try and get that changed. Some countries don’t have restrictions like that. India lets people come in, Canada is good on it. That is a political debate...the current answer (to erect barriers) is not the best one.

Coming to Internet with all its hype and growth it’s reached about 1.5 billion people. Will the Internet ever reach the 6 billion plus global population?

Sure. Low cost PCs, low costs cell phones, community kiosks, computers in schools, computers in libraries, WiMax, wireless connectivity, breakthroughs in satellite connectivity will help and it takes many pieces to do it. People using Internet don’t understand all the innovation underneath it. Just like when they plug something in the electric system they don’t understand how is it continuously maintained at a particular voltage.

The Internet has very complicated networks underneath. The advances in Internet plumbing are there all the time and they are trying to bring the costs down and accessibility up. If you look at it a year ahead it may appear not to be moving fast, but if you look at a 5-10 year time frame big things are happening.

What’s the next big thing for Microsoft?

We are big -- we work for business customers, video games, cell phones, data centers -- its not a single thing. The general trend is this natural interface -- where speech, ink and vision make the computing experience far more pervasive and as you move between devices its kind of seamless that you are using your phone, PC, car, TV, all those things are connected to the internet, sharing information, connected to the cloud...making the cloud complimentary to all your different devices. Those are two big thrusts (cloud and new interfaces) that Microsoft is getting into.

Any products you have in mind you would like to get into...

We do software for cell phone and that lets us work for the bunch of hardware makers like we do in the PC market and that’s the strategy that is the best -- its different from Apple or RIM (Research In Motion--makers of BlackBerry). We will write software where it can be used, like TV sets never been a software intensive application and we are doing some great work there. We are doing IPTV -- you can watch anything, it’s interactive, its a breakthrough in TV and a decade from now you won’t think of TV as just one way but an interactive device.

Microsoft became big before the Internet became mainstream. There’s a sense that you took time to adjust with the post Internet world, while other companies came along. How far has Microsoft adapted to the changed world and enable customers to fully utilise the benefits of Internet?

The Internet is always changing. We put the browser into Windows in 1995 and what was the Internet then. We didn’t have search, we didn’t have video. Internet will continue to change. Video is a new scenario. In education space Internet is going to be phenomenal.

The world’s going to get lectures online. My favourite scientist Richard Fenyman’s lectures are now up for free, anybody can benefit from his brilliant way in explaining science and that wouldn’t have been possible before. So Internet keeps changing.

I worked on the Internet in 1973, before there was a Microsoft, before there was a Google or a Netscape or anything. The amazing thing is it took a while to get critical mass and then it just exploded in the mid-1990s. Every company has been a beneficiary of that and we all contributed. It made computing all the more important and it will become more and more important. The next decade will be a great period to be in the software business.

Will Bing become the dominant search engine?

Not anytime soon, but there are people at Microsoft who dream of such glory. They are brilliant people, who work hard, they make that space competitive. I spend little bit of time and help out. They are doing great work, after all Google needs some competition and who the heck else is going to do it but Microsoft.

What’s the future of software?

Very bright. What is the most interesting field in terms of innovation? It’s software. When people talk of robots they are talking about software not the motor or metals or cameras that are interesting and go to make a robot. When we talk about modelling drugs so you can figure out in advance what drug is going to work, that’s software. When you look at designing cars knowing how it will react to a crash, how eco friendly it is, you do it with software. Software has more headroom in terms of what it will do than any other business. There was no software before Microsoft came along. We decided there should be this big industry with high volume, low cost. The Widows platform allowed this rich ecosystem to grow and that created lot of jobs. It’s a very vibrant business.