Gates Sees Boom Ahead in Home, Business Touchscreens - Page 2

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Gates also talked up social computing technologies, such as personal profile pages, which he sees becoming increasingly adapted for use inside corporations to help information workers to find others with the skills and expertise they need.

Multitouch computing, however, remained at the center of Gates' vision of the future.

"Surface will happen much quicker than people think," he added. "We believe [devices like Surface] will be absolutely pervasive."

Gates even gave partial credit to Apple's iPhone for innovations leading the trend towards multitouch interfaces. Both the iPhone and the Surface fit into a category of emerging technologies that Gates calls "natural interface," which also includes speech recognition and pen-based computing.

Gates' presentation wasn't all about prognostication, however. Several of the demos he showed were examples of how Microsoft's own internal management processes have changed from the company adopting its own technologies.

Those technologies include SharePoint collaboration tools tied to Microsoft's business intelligence and performance management product -- Office PerformancePoint Server -- to improve the effectiveness of senior management.

He also demonstrated other current technologies, including the enterprise search tools the company acquired when it bought out FAST last month. The features provide search capabilities without requiring users to type query terms, by drawing inferences from what else the user has up on their screen at the time.

Gates also pointed to Microsoft's use of unified communications technologies -- the central premise of which is that all communications, whether voice, video, e-mail, or instant messaging, will be available from any device at any time.

The annual CEO Summit is at least partly held to give Gates and Microsoft the chance to socialize with the global executives who sign the checks of their CIOs, thus helping in some small part to assure future sales.

Besides the chance for Microsoft's elite to rub shoulders with so many chief executives -- and vice versa -- the event also includes workshops with several big names in the business world.

[cob:Special_Report]Participants this year including business consultant Ram Charan, journalists Tom Friedman, Suzy Welch, Maria Bartiromo and Michael Kinsley, as well as former GE CEO Jack Welch and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, a close friend of Gates's.

It also features a gala formal dinner at the Gates' estate and a yacht excursion.

Gates continues to follow a frantic pace of speaking appearances -- delivering a speech on Thursday in Tokyo and Friday in Jakarta -- even as his tenure as a full-time Microsoft employee draws to a close.

As of the end of June, Gates will cease his day-to-day role at the company, although he will remain chairman of the board and its largest shareholder.

He passed off his duties as chief software architect to the nearly-as-legendary Ray Ozzie, the father of Lotus Notes, two years ago.

A Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com in an e-mail that Gates would participate in next year's CEO Summit, but couldn't say in what capacity he would appear.