Robert Scoble interviews Bill Gates on Channel9. And, yes, the topic of Tablet PCs came up. Here's a transcript (I hope I got it close enough) of the portion on Tablet PCs. It starts about 4:40 into the video, but I recommend starting from the beginning.
Starts at about: 4:42
Scoble: You mentioned my favorite thing, the Tablet PC, too. You know I’ve gotten around your company with this little camcorder, and my favorite three teams are the Tablet team, Virtual Earth team, and Window Media Center team.
Is the Tablet still happening?
Gates: Absolutely.
Scoble: I keep hearing the naysayers, you know.
Gates: Well, yeah, and that’s fine. Windows had its naysayers. And we proved them wrong. Every Office category we were in people thought you know that we wouldn’t do that well, but we’ve done very well there so we’re very persistant. Take something like IPTV. We started more than 10 years ago and now very few people would say that wasn’t a good investment, but even a year ago it might have seemed that way. Likewise database you know. Taking on Oracle. That’s a long term thing. You’ve got to do really incredible work. Taking on Sony in video games. Taking on Nokia in phones. We take the hard ones.
Tablet is one I love because we’re out there alone. There is no competitor. You can’t say it’s the Microsoft Tablet versus somebody else’s Tablet. But that idea that a student for $500 can have something—all their textbooks are there. The whole internet is there. Communicating rich ways is there. It’s lighter than their textbooks. Over a period of years it’s actually cheaper.
Scoble: Wait a minute. $500?
Gates: Well this is not today. Not today. We’ve got pretty good Tablets at let’s say $1200 or so. Over the next three or four years it’s just going to get lighter and thinner and the software is going to get better and better. And so the dream, not today’s reality, the dream is that student Tablet. Now even before then we want people in offices when they go to meetings to take it use it for their notes and that kind of thing. This is a big year. The hardware improvements our hardware partners have brought forward this year are really fantastic. Getting it into retail. Getting students going with it. So we’re seeing a good uptick. We’ve more than doubled. But we’re not mainstream yet. But we’re committed to get there.
The video goes on from here, but this is the last of the Tablet talk.
After listening to Scoble's interview, one thought comes to mind: If I only had one question to ask, what would I ask of Bill Gates?
Hmmm. I think I'd ask something about ConferenceXP and opening it up to the developer community. Yeah, it's a bit of a niche question, but it's that big of a deal. I guess I could frame the question more generally in terms of working with innovators in small businesses and those in Universities. But either way, I'd really like to see some of ConferenceXP's technology hit the mainstream--particularly the parts that enable shared sessions like those in OneNote. Wouldn't it be so cool if more Tablet apps worked the way OneNote does?