Gates: The internet could do better

Addressing a conference of more than 7,000 IT professionals, government officials and students in Singapore, Bill Gates said there is still room for improvements in search engines and the internet. He also predicted the rise of 'richer' mobile apps which would enable users to access features such as maps or e-wallets on the move.

Describing a future where everyone, and every system, is highly connected through wireless devices and web services, the Microsoft chairman and chief software architect talked about the changing role of tech in an 'always-on' society.

"We have the availability of information wherever you go, delivered by the breakthrough of wireless networks [in the office and public areas]. This means that when you take the portable PC with you, you're connected up," said Gates. "That portable [device] will get even smaller and will turn into a tablet device where pen-and-ink can be used as well as the keyboard."

Discussing the internet's low-level standard TCP (transmission control protocol), he said: "Now we're moving up to have standards that work at very high level - containing data like healthcare, supply chain and e-government records, and letting those be exchanged between systems of all types." These, he said, were made possible by web services and standards such as XML (extensible markup language) and the emerging service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"This means that the software can connect no matter what language it's written in, or what environment it's written for," he added. "So in an ecommerce application, you don't have to insist that the buyer and seller have a common implementation [but] simply that they abide by the same [web services] standards."

Competition in the software market is then about finding the IT vendor who can provide products that run on the most pervasive hardware, deliver the highest level of runtime and who can offer the most efficient development tools, he noted.

But, Gates added, the internet still needs to be improved - as do search engines.

"The internet is so popular today that we need to just keep evolving it. It's not like we're going to throw it out and start over," he said.

"People are very impressed at what search is today but it's really quite poor compared to what it should be," he said, noting that technology needs to allow users to better navigate and find information more easily.

"[In the future] we'll be able to have, essentially, document understanding so that when you search for something, we give you an answer and not just a bunch of links that starts a treasure hunt that now takes about 11 minutes," he added.

And, as expected, Gates also touched on his company's ongoing rivalry with the open source movement.

"We're certainly not against open source," he said. "But it is important to recognise that when you take an IT budget, your real goal is to get things done. And [with] packaged software, whether ours or open source, the key thing you want to look at is whether it lets you buy inexpensive hardware, reduce your communications cost and, most importantly, reduce personnel cost [associated with] development and operational."

Gates added that companies would see that Microsoft offers a better "value equation", if they kept "an open mind".

Eileen Yu writes for ZDNet Asia