Bill Gates at University of Waterloo
Posted by Jon Lee in Personal, tags: bill gates, keynote, Microsoft, talk, University of Waterloo, WaterlooAs I had mentioned on Monday, I was selected to attend Bill Gates talk at the University of Waterloo this morning. This is a recap of the presentation.
9:00 – Doors open and I found a seat on the lower level in the 7th row — not too bad. University of Waterloo emblem on screen and Matchbox 20′s Unwell playing in background. The lecture hall was half filled at this time, news crew and video cameras were plentiful.
9:30 - Presentation announced to start in 10 minutes. Matchbox 20′s 3 a.m. playing in background (I guess Bill is a Matchbox 20 fan). The lecture hall was pretty much packed at this point. There was a little buzz in the air as everyone started taking out their cameras.
9:45 – University of Waterloo’s president, David Johnston walks on stage and welcomes everyone and talks about the other two times Bill Gates visited the campus (1989 and 2005).
9:50 – Bill Gates enters wearing a University of Waterloo sweat shirt, crowd applauses. His introduction talked about his plans for retirement and was a build up towards showing his “Last Day at Microsoft” video. It was a slightly different version than the one posted yesterday. His “audition reels” were cut out (Perhaps due to copyright infringement? Just a guess) and instead featured longer segments with Matthew McConaughey and George Clooney.
10:00 – The rest of the talk continued focusing on two main topics. The first being the next big thing in technology which Bill Gates believed to be new ways of interacting with computers and technology (insert obvious Microsoft Surface plug here).
The second part of the talk was the most interesting to me. Bill Gates talked about the importance of developing software for developing countries. One thing in particular he said that stuck in my mind was his indirect criticism of the One Laptop per Child project. He said something along the lines of
If we divide the world population into thirds in terms of wealth, making our technology cheaper and more readily accessible to them is not the answer. We can create 10 cent laptops and still it would not solve their problems. What works for us, does not necessarily work for them.
I couldn’t agree more with this. The reason people aren’t developing software for the lower third of the world population is because there is very little money potential there. So it is a good thing that Bill Gates is spending his time working with his foundation to accomplish some of these things.
10:30 – Bill Gates finished his presentation, crowd applauses. Questions and answers period begin. A lot of typical questions regarding the future of technology but when asked what he felt surprised him most in the last 10 years, he answered as followed:
I didn’t expect online advertising to become the goldmine it has become but we’re slowly catching up in that area.
Is he admitting that Google got the better part of Microsoft? Anyway, all in all, the talk was good but a little short. I didn’t think it was spectacular but he raised a lot of interesting issues.
The full webcast of the presentation is available here.
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