Yesterday, Bill Gates met with 14 influential bloggers as part of a pre-Mix event. A handful of the bloggers have already posted comments as of this morning. Check them out on TechMeme.
Most of the conversation appears to have been pretty light. Makes sense. They only met with Bill Gates for an hour. Some questions were about Linux. Some about Zune. Some about Bill Gates' personal interests.
Ryan Stewart points to two questions that interested me the most. One was about the designer/developer workflow model that Microsoft is promoting now. As I've blogged before, I'm not so keen on it. If Microsoft wants to break out a graphics group, that's fine. There's room for an accessible, professional quality photo editing app too, for instance. However, from a developer standpoint it seems like the goal should be more direct: making the designer and/or developer more productive by reducing the need for one or the other thereby, significantly reducing costs or enabling more people to create more products.
The other question came from Liz Gannes. She asked Bill Gates which type of apps would be inside the browser and which would be out. Bill answered, "The distinction is silly from a technology standpoint….. And, you know, [inside the browser and outside the browser are] moving towards each other, but there’s still a bit of a barrier there, and new technology, things we’re working on, really will change that.�
As you might have guessed, among these bloggers there were plenty of Apples. No Tablets, of course. So in my book they missed a lot of obvious questions when it comes to the web and Microsoft. Take education, for instance. The Tablet PC is a great platform for education. So is the web. How do they fit together so that the experience is 10 times better than a standard notebook? Right now, they appear to be on two separate tracks. Even Microsoft's forthcoming WPF/e "standard" doesn't support ink. With all of the advantages of browser-based apps it makes sense for ink to be supported in the browser. Well. And cross-platform. Maybe Tablet ink will evolve this way. It would have been interesting to see if Bill Gates sees this possibility.
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