Questions for Bill and Steve’s Excellent Adventure?
by Kara Swisher
Posted on May 23, 2007 at 12:36 AM PT
So soon enough, you will be hearing a lot about the joint interview with tech legends–Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs–that Walt and I will be doing exactly a week from tonight at our D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif. (You can read Dow Jones’s press release on the May 30 event here.)
We’ve certainly got a lot of important questions to ask this pair, who really are the twin icons of the digital revolution and key players in its evolution. They also have had a dramatic professional relationship and, just as often, rivalry.
Given the long history of cooperation and competition they have shared, that they have agreed to show up to be interviewed together should make for great high-tech theater.
After next week, Gates will have been onstage at all five D conferences and Jobs will have been four times (he will also appear in a solo interview earlier in the day next Wednesday).
This site will have all sorts of coverage, from live blogs to photos to video excerpts of the whole event (more on that later).
But in the spirit of user-generated content (we mainstream-media types are fast learners), I will be going around all this week with my little video camera and asking well-known tech types and also average folks–good thing I live in San Francisco, where there is a large concentration of geeks–what they would ask the pair if they could.
Starting tomorrow, I will post the video queries, but you can also add questions in the comments section below. Until then, here are three photos by Asa Mathat of the duo at our third D in 2005 at dinner, sharing obviously amusing tales (I would love to know about what), and three more yukking it up with another tech icon, Mitch Kapor.
Follow Kara on Twitter | Follow AllThingsD on Twitter
Comments
I’d like to hear some bold suggestions from the two visionaries on this topic -
The United States is lagging behind some other countries in broadband deployment, especially in rural areas. What should be done to regain leadership in this area?
How much longer will we be stuck with century-old wireline telephone technology? Verizon seems to have a good plan with their FIOS network, but AT&T seems to be stuck in the analog Copper Age.
Given the new partnership between Apple and AT&T for the iPhone, would Steve Jobs consider joining the AT&T Board of Directors, and leading them in an effort to modernize their infrastructure?
Posted by Douglas Ward at May 23rd, 2007 at 1:13 pmWhat would each of these men wish to create for the world if there were no political, financial or even technological barriers? How would the world be different if they had their way with any “broken” industry or issue plaguing the world today?
If either of them had made careers in some other field what would it have been and why? What do they think would be different in those industries if they had chosen that path?
Can either of them do anything to jump society into the “Jetson’s era” we all dream of when thinking of technology? Where’s my jet-pack and flying car?
Posted by Kam Wixom at May 23rd, 2007 at 2:20 pmKara – miss you on CNBC, love your work. How exciting for your conference, a grand coup-a-liscious.
(I’m sure you’ll ‘razz the boys into the future, break their ‘habits of response’ as you always do — so what would I want to add, you say?)
The internet — that you two geniuses lay the groundwork for with the Apple personal computer and the Microsoft ubiquitous platform — developed in ‘classic evolutionary fashion’ — as a discontinous mutation of human language that has now spread exponentially virally into an emerging awareness of what is now being called the ‘new global mind.’ This mind being at once atomized into long tails of influence like particles and hive-like in waves of mass group-think — the ‘Quantum Age’ seems to have been born. What are its categorical moral imperatives? Love or Survival of the fittest?
Posted by Jeanne Cavagnaro at May 23rd, 2007 at 3:58 pmI want to know if either or both see room in the desktop market place for more competition, especially in the consumer vs. enterprise arena. Furthermore I would like to get some kind of perspective on how they see their respective opportunities today vs. a future where there are several, or many competitors in the desktop computing market place, mostly with regard to Operating Systems, and do they feel that the consumer has been cheated out of real cutting edge technologies today on the desktop, that very likely could have come from a plethora of viable OSes competing in a more traditional, even more healthy competative marketplace?
Posted by Ralph Sanchez at May 24th, 2007 at 7:57 amI’d like someone to ask them why they are encouraging the ongoing web browser wars and continuing to make it more difficult to create good internet applications that work on both Macs and Windows systems. Why are they encouraging Internet Explorer vs Safari when if they both simply worked with Firefox life would be better for everyone — users and developers? If they really believe so strongly in the web — as they say they do — then they should be working to improve it.
Posted by Mason Jones at May 25th, 2007 at 2:34 pmI am a teacher and have worked with several global collaborative projects (http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com) and http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com where my students were paired with classrooms in China, Australia, Bangladesh, and Austria where the students collaborated and actually “outsourced” parts of their work to one another.
I and the other teachers involved have found that the stereotypes that many of our students have adopted (largely from the news media) are dispelled when students connect directly with other students.
The problem we have today is that most collaborative tools are blocked because of the fear of predators.
Currently most foundation money is being spent on projects for individual schools — what would they think about creating a safe internet for educators and students to interact on a global basis to enable more classrooms to participate in such projects?
My thoughts:
I believe that our hope for better understanding in the future is to connect our students today but so many schools cannot access anything because of filters.
Those of us at progressive schools are seeing great benefits of using social networking and student “sticky” technologies to make students more interested in all subjects. We are seeing a lot of development in what we can do but not a lot of development in policies that protect AND provide access to mainstream American schools.
Posted by Vicki Davis at May 29th, 2007 at 7:30 pmI would like to ask Mr. Jobs if the iPhone would support 3rd party developer’s software or will the additional software be like the iPod games (that can only be downloaded from iTunes store).
Also I would like to ask Mr. Gates if microsoft plans to create an iPhone-killer device in the future. If the answer is no, is it because of the unsuccessful attempt to bring iPod down with the zune?
At last, I would like to ask why windows vista and OS X 10.4 have so many similarities. Is it because microsoft copies the mac os like said in the last WWDC or apple has microsoft’s intel but manages to bring the software to market first?
P.S.: Keep up the good work gentlemen and please Mr. Jobs we want Apple Greece.
Posted by Billy Lapatas at May 29th, 2007 at 10:46 pmIf Steve Jobs views technology as a tool into changing the world to be a better place, what does Bill Gates derive from Microsoft’s purpose?
In other words, Steve is often portrayed as a visionary (the John Lennon of computing), while Gates is seen in quite a different light. How does Bill Gates see himself in the world of technology?
Posted by Ryan Taylor at May 30th, 2007 at 6:52 pm