I’ve been doing a bit of a video catch-up today, and one of the items I watched was the recent round table discussion between Bill Gates, Robert Scoble, and a number of other bloggers.
The discussion runs for just over 40 minutes and covers a multitude of topics, including everything from Gates speeding tickets, to a discussion of the long standing problems of parallel processing, that have kept Computer Scientists busy for years, and are starting to become more mainstream issues as Intel and AMD introduce parallelism into their processors. You also find out how much spam Gates gets, and also where and what games he plays online. There are also a couple of moments which show quite how sharp Gates can be, in particular when Robert asks a question about computer power consumption and guestimates some figures. Gates retort is quick, and very direct!
The conversation is fairly easy to follow, although at times it is difficult to hear some of the bloggers especially, as the whole thing was recorded using the pretty directional microphone on the camera itself – perhaps some sort of central microphone would have been better. It also doesn’t help having periodic planes going over the interview site! Having said that, it is worth the effort, as whatever your position on the company, it is certainly interesting to get an insight into where someone as influential as Gates believes the industry is heading.
