Analysis: What's eating Bill Gates?

Las Vegas (NV) - It’s not as though prominent business executives shouldn’t be allowed the occasional bad day, or that they’re immune from the occasional ailment that afflicts an ordinary person, such as a stomach flu, a migraine, or the deep, sinking feeling that your country is slipping away from you. But yesterday seemed clearly not to be Bill Gates’ best day, as he ascended the podium yet again for the latest in a seemingly quarterly array of keynote speeches. And the fact that he appeared obviously out of sorts, not "in the zone," may in an almost voyeuristic way give us our first glimpse in quite some time of Microsoft’s attitude in a business environment that’s changing all around it - some would say, out from under it.

Perhaps the Microsoft chairman himself would be the first to admit that he is not, by any means, the greatest public speaker. Those of us who have watched him for the last three decades are well familiar with his unvarying speaking style : how he lists forty or fifty separate items, all of which his company is simultaneously "focused" on ; how he omits active verbs from his sentences, substituting participles, as in, "Working with our partners, developing the tools that are improving user’s lives..." end of sentence ; and how he begins most of his sentences with "And," as though he were reading from the gospel. Many of us have been tempted to bring to Gates’ keynotes little hotel desk bells, to be pinged once each time he utters the word, "great." But most of the time, over the years, he has managed to project an air of steady, if detached, self-assuredness, as though he’s casually reading over all the items in the executive summary while listening to Frank Sinatra through an invisible, wireless earpiece.

Yesterday, at the inaugural Mix ’06 conference, which addresses a new and growing segment of Web developers who are leading the movement toward XML, RSS, and Asynchronous JavaScript, the self-assuredness, the peaceable contentment, were missing from Bill Gates for the first time in years. In their absence, he was visibly scrambling, struggling with a pointer device in his hand, squinting at a TelePrompTer that was admittedly stationed too far away, and spending way too many minutes trying to fill space with words as he scrambled to catch up with what it was he had intended to say.

It could be that the man might just have needed an aspirin, or a nap, or a break - that I’m over-analyzing one man’s attitude. But the historically unflappable, invariable Bill Gates generally gives us very little that’s new to ponder over ; and yesterday, we got something : a picture of a man standing not in the great auditorium, but someplace somewhat smaller, realizing himself the best-dressed man in the room, pondering perhaps the role of his company in a market or a world where it is not the pre-eminent, dominant leader.

Five minutes into the speech, Gates began bringing up talking points that had relatively little to do with the audience he was addressing, including one of his current keyphrases, the difference between the "two-foot PC experience" and the "ten-foot PC experience" - the latter referring to the Media Center PC. They weren’t the right talking points, most likely ; but he picked up on that right away. When Gates is on stage, whether he appears smooth and composed, or agitated as he did yesterday, beneath that demeanor, we’ve always known there lurked a man of extraordinary intelligence, maybe a bright light from within a deep basement. Unlike the certain other head of a different, once-dominant global monopoly, who when given the wrong talking points, can do little more than the shell of a malted milk ball does to belie its own vacuous center, there is a keenly observant and active spirit at the center of Bill Gates. In glossing over the other talking points that didn’t apply, like the rising power of GPUs in system performance (18 minutes in), the rising volume of Media Center PC shipments (20 minutes in), or the Xbox 360 (21 minutes in), he worked to extemporaneously weave the points into his main message, which became about how the "start of the programmable Web," as he put it, was pervading every class and category of device.

So when Gates rolled around to a topic that did apply, you could feel the effort it took for him to clamor back to the forefront of that topic, hauling his weary mind with him like a tired child in a late-night department store. "RSS...a lot of discussion about that," Gates began at one point, in the typical way he introduces one of the headings in his talking points outline. "You’ve seen us do a number of things that we’ve put out as industry standards for people to adopt around RSS. We think it’s very, very important...We think the amount of RSS going on is going to skyrocket. It’s already very significant, but it’ll move up to new levels. And making it easy for you to manage those feeds," he continued, again with the participles, "so that they show up at the appropriate place. And some of the same mechanism that we thought about with things like e-mail rules can be applied here." At last, he had found a connection in his mind between a topic he knew - Outlook - and a topic he wasn’t so solid with.

"We think about RSS as the start of the programmable Web," Gates stated, feeling just a bit more comfortable now. "As you expose APIs to your Web sites, some amazing things can happen. EBay, of course, is an extreme example where over half the product listings now are done in a programmatic way. And the tools that are turning the Internet into essentially a programming environment, where any Web site is almost like a component in a software application..." Now he was on his home turf, and the familiar vernacular - some of it decades old now - began flowing again. "...where you’d make requests to it like you would a subroutine call, it comes back asynchronously with the information, that’s allowing people to think through architectures in a very different way."

Gates didn’t appear to realize it, but during his brief reverie through the memories of Microsoft Basic, with its GOSUB and RETURN statements (and how Microsoft came up with the idea of returning a value from a subroutine), he had inadvertently opened the wrong floodgate. Among the crowd of hundreds were quite a few people, apparently, who had witnessed or even partaken in the success of Google’s having "exposed its APIs" - having made the code words for the functionality of Google Earth, Google Maps, and other services freely available to other companies and developers to create new applications without licensing.

Would Microsoft announce a similar move ? Gates only briefly mentioned Atlas, Microsoft’s implementation of Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) - which is the language those Google apps are written in - a full 15 minutes into his speech. "We’ll focus a lot on Atlas, which is our framework of this type of development," he said, before breaking focus completely and diving into another reverie about Microsoft’s support for Dynamic HTML - one of the oldest forms of Web page scripting - back in 1997. Apparently, some in the crowd grew more agitated than even Gates himself. Later in the presentation, hecklers started making themselves heard, including one who shouted, "Give us some open APIs, please !" as Gates escorted the demo team from MySpace.com off the stage. At least he said "please."

At the end of one hour, as Gates appeared more than eager to exit the stage, he was signaled back on to share some one-on-one time with Tim O’Reilly, the publisher and CEO of O’Reilly Books, who assumed the role of the gushing interviewer from "Inside the Actor’s Studio." O’Reilly’s having chosen to wear a dark, collarless sweater, Dockers slacks, uncombed hair and a three-day, salt-and-pepper beard, couldn’t have helped Gates’ nerves all that much. But after about five minutes of lofty questions with glorious implications, the Bill Gates we’ve come to know came out to play for a bit, with his wildly swinging arms gesticulating like a platypus learning to swim.

How does the Web evolve from here ? O’Reilly asked the all-seeing oracle and author of The Road Ahead, the first volume of which didn’t really mention the Internet. Does the Web become a sea of component programs contending to provide services, or does there become a master control program overseeing all...like Win32 did for developers, as opposed to the latent reference to the villain from Tron ? "I think we’re definitely going to have some of both of those things," Gates responded. "It’s like, when you wrote a Windows application, you could call whatever services you felt like calling. You didn’t need to call every one of them...Everything that we’ve had in an operating system - authentication...storage services...presentation richness...You can call whichever of those services you want," he explained, in an attempt to illustrate that Windows was making itself open to the outside world, for Web developers needing to leverage services.

Isn’t that what everyone means by "open ?" It was becoming clear that Gates wasn’t getting the clue. When the audience mikes were opened for questions, the first one Gates received...was that question : Will you open up your APIs, "so we can move our data between systems ?" Gates was prodded. "You’re not the only system...We all want to have open APIs on everything." Applause.

"Well, absolutely," Gates began, being affirmative without being definitive. Earlier, the lead developers at MySpace.com had demonstrated how Asynchronous JavaScript could enable users to customize the appearance of their public Web pages and blogs without programming effort on the users’ part. "I definitely think we can help them as they want to provide those APIs," he said. "EBay and others have shown that they can provide those open APIs, in such a way that it enhances what you’re doing, it doesn’t take away from that. And they’ve gotten to a critical mass now where I think that’s a huge opportunity for them."

It was a careful and thoughtful answer, reminiscent of the brilliant young mind that couldn’t tear itself away from a good game of chess, even during meetings. It’s up to everyone else to open up their APIs, the underlying message stated, and Microsoft will be there to help them do that...but not to create open APIs for itself. But what would Microsoft do to help companies, including those that use such open APIs, if they end up both competing and collaborating with Microsoft, a later questioner asked ? Or is that not Microsoft’s responsibility ? "It’s certainly Microsoft’s responsibility," Gates responded, "to make sure the software industry thrives. It was the success of DOS, the success of Windows, and now in this broader Live platform world, creating new opportunities for software companies key to us. As you say, [with] many of those companies, there may be some overlap in what we do. We’re very used to that...If you can beat the things we do, more power to you. That’s really fantastic."

Gates was finally on a roll : "We have a lot of different services that we’re going to build, that’ll take some of the things you would’ve had to do, and just make those simpler. So I think giving people the opportunity to specialize, that means you can find a customer segment that you’re doing better than we are, but we’re just doing the horizontal platform."

It does not take a brilliant chess player to infer the meaning from Gates’ message. Microsoft does have a responsibility, he believes, not only to help small developers thrive but to make certain they continue doing what they set out to do...and no more. If someone else out there can best Microsoft in its designated, vertical field, it’s "fantastic." But as far as weaving a cohesive Web fabric is concerned, that’s not your job, Mr. Small Developer. Let Microsoft take care of the big picture, the "horizontal" controls, to borrow a phrase from the opening to The Outer Limits. We control the horizontal. You stay within your assigned segment.

It was an unmistakably pointed and well staked-out message, dangling participles and all. But matters of attire aside, it may be an elementary conclusion that Bill Gates was not the only intelligent man in the room yesterday morning. The question was literally shouted at him, will you open your API the way Google does ? The answer is no. And yet, by choosing "no," and letting a few thousand intelligent people hear that "no" loud and clear, Microsoft takes a huge gamble. Mix ’06 is the company’s best opportunity to make new friends and allies in a market where, Microsoft concedes, it has a lot of catching up to do. For the first time in years, other players are setting the rules, and Microsoft is choosing not to play by those rules. All of a sudden, Microsoft finds itself the outsider, the holdout, the would-be up-and-coming player, and Bill Gates finds himself playing the role of the conservative stalwart, resistant to change, impervious to the winds of history.