8 ms·

Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]

139 points by ytrash 8y ago

rococode 8y ago
Wow, is this the original source? Such a low view count for what I feel is a very interesting look into a more casual Bill Gates. This seems much more spontaneous than the usual videos we see of him, and it's pretty cool to see the kind of thoughts he has before being filtered into prepared statements for the public.
- ytrash 8y ago
  Yes it is, the youtube uploader is the camera operator and Wired Editor Kevin Kelly
- stevewodil 8y ago
  Well if the interview was in 1996 and YouTube was created in 2005 I would say it was available elsewhere first Also the YouTube video itself was just uploaded a couple of weeks ago.
  - jahlove 8y ago
    From the video description: > I don't think we ever did anything with the interview. I had completely forgotten I had video'ed it.
- wslh 8y ago
  > Such a low view count... Many few pages have high view count. If you expect that good content has only high view count you are missing what Internet is.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Uploaded a month or so ago, and never online before that. Appears people are just figuring out it's there.
Torwald 8y ago
At ~25-30 min they talk about "content club" as a business. The Wired guys propose this could be a +4$ billion biz. Gates laughs them off. Now, today we have the numbers: - As of May 2018, Apple Music had 50 million paying subscribers worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/604959/number-of-apple-music-subscribers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/604959/number-of-apple-m... - Apple Hits $10B in Revenue From Services Like iTunes https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple-hits-10-billion-revenue-services-like-itunes-1157173 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple-hits-10-billion...
- dpandya 8y ago
  This seems like a questionable comparison. Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses. In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.
  - Torwald 8y ago
    Gates doubted verbatim that the whole industry would exceed 4$ billion in total, thus no single player could reach that point. > Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses. That's not true, because Apple licensing anything is still not a barrier to entry into that market even today. Also, such licensing wasn't available to anybody back then. > In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player. No, that was another point he made. The fragmentation of the market and he was certainly right on that one. However, that was still not the point he mad I was talking about, the total size of the market. Also notice, I didn't inter
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player. Well, we have at best 2-3 "dominant players" in each field, so not much better. And doesn't already Kindle dominate in eBooks? Surely iBooks is not that much of competition.
strayamaaate 8y ago
For whatever he gets right or wrong, this is a fascinating look back into the past. Thanks for sharing!
HammadB 8y ago
My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is, the Wired interviewer who makes this point?
- Torwald 8y ago
  Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today. Think for example about a one person business like daringfireball.net, that was the type of business Gates was envisioning. Or Drudge report.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today. They're very close to that. And the same is true to other content, e.g. Spotify, Amazon Kiddle, Netflix for films, YouTube for video, etc. People still go to other sources, but increasingly less so, and those sources all increasingly fringe (Daring Fireball? Compared to Facebook and the like?). Nothing like the wild west (and much freer and distributed) market it was 10 and 20 years ago. Between the 3-4 big social aggregators for example, there goes 80% of the internet advertising pie. Gates (as quoted below): "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that". Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue... [1] https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
    - IncRnd 8y ago
      > Gates (as quoted below): "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that". > Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue... Good CEOs and Chairpersons don't blather about things that can adversely affect their company. Do you recall what happened after Musk tweeted that funding was secured?
mckee1 8y ago
"There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that". Netflix revenue last year was $11.6 billion. Fascinating interview.
- blihp 8y ago
  I suspect there was a little rope-a-dope going on on his part. Microsoft was less than a year in to turning their ship around (https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/ https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/) to ride the Internet wave. So he wouldn't have wanted to telegraph to other large competitors that this was going to be huge. (hopefully, given their investments) They already had their hands full with all the tiny startups who had been there years earlier.
  - flashmob 8y ago
    Yep. Also, he had to be careful not to say anything that would suggest that having a monopoly in the OS market would somehow benefit the dominance of the content busniess, it seems like the interviews were trying him on that. I think the antitrust accusations started to simmer around then? Interesting to note, Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million the following year.
  - atm0sphere 8y ago
    I felt the same. Another piece was avoiding regulatory scrutiny as far as any discussion on monopolies. It's amazing how much business acumen the guy has.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nightski 8y ago
  To me if I look at the bigger picture of what he was saying however - he was comparing it to their software division which brought in $4 billion. If you look at where that division is today it is FAR more than $4 billion and dwarfs Netflix's revenue.
- 8y ago
santiagobasulto 8y ago
I've just watched the first 10 mins, but it's amazing how he's incredibly aware all of the technical details, and combines a strategy perspective ("unified email client") with all the technical details (low level networking details) to make those strat decisions a reality.
- jensv 8y ago
  I thought Jack Ma was good but Bill is better. I wouldn't want to compete with him, Bill is fearsome and scary smart.
- abvdasker 8y ago
  Yeah and he demonstrates both a complete and precise knowledge of everything his company is doing in nearly every arm of the business (not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of business Microsoft is not in). It's easy to forget why Microsoft was so dominant in this era of computing, but listening to him it begins to make more sense.
sfblah 8y ago
He looks sort of overweight and unhealthy. That surprised me.
- tyingq 8y ago
  He was 41 years old in 1996. Here's the magazine cover: https://media.wired.com/photos/5bbbd018b1d78f2d74578369/master/w_2000,c_limit/04.06_g-w.jpg https://media.wired.com/photos/5bbbd018b1d78f2d74578369/mast... Certainly not any sort of athlete, but doesn't look unusually overweight or unhealthy.
adventured 8y ago
I always find it fascinating to compare just how large the tech industry has become since this era, when Microsoft was already regarded as something close to a giant in the industry. Microsoft sales 1995: $6.1 billion ($10b today) Google is about 12x larger. AWS by itself is about 3x larger. Facebook is 5x larger. Salesforce is similar in size. Oracle is 4x larger. SAP is 2x larger. VMWare is closing in on 1x that size, as is Adobe. And Microsoft today is 12x larger. If people back then understood how large technology companies would become today, I wonder what would be different (if anything).
- traskjd 8y ago
  It was considered more than something close to a giant. If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now. Back then there was nobody else. We've gone from a monopoly to an oligopoly (ish) which in some ways feels less scary. It's hard to overestimate Microsoft dominance in the 90s. If there was a wiff of them entering a category, the players in that space would be in trouble (similar to Amazon today, though Microsoft followed through more in decimating their rivals).
  - adventured 8y ago
    > If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now. Yes, I recall those days intimately. It was hysteria and laughable even then. Breathless magazine articles claiming Microsoft was going to dominate everything, set up toll roads on the Internet, dominate e-commerce, publishing, media, and so on. None of it was even remotely feasible or credible. The fear that briefly surrounded Microsoft's reign was almost entirely baseless hysteria. Its preeminence and monopoly abuse era lasted for six or seven years. Facebook has been abusing US consumers with its social monopoly for longer than that already, as has Google with its search monopoly (they're at least a decade plus in now). Both Facebook and Google are not only drastically more powerful and wealthy (greater financial resources by at least a factor of 10) than Microsoft in 1995-96, their reach is far beyond anything Microsoft had at that time. World-wide PC sales in 1995 were a whopping 70 million. Google and Facebook touch nearly all corners of the globe, in real-time, at all times. Billions upon billions of people. Microsoft's reach in 1995-96? Extremely slow in nature, and less than ~150 million people globally. Ability to throw or bias elections and control global commerce? Microsoft had almost none of that type of power with their operating system, or IE. Extraordinary amounts of commercial activity and referral flow directly through Google and Facebook products/platforms each day. Google's algorithm changes have dramatic effects on businesses. Android is a far larger gatekeeper and toll road than Microsoft could have dreamed of in 1995. YouTube by itself is roughly worth as much as all of Microsoft was in March 1995 (and has dramatically greater influence and reach, along with a monopoly position in what it does), Instagram is worth even more. And Netscape, Microsoft's most famous 'victim'? (although not the thing that really got them in anti-trust trouble) The notion of building a large business around charging for a consumer browser was a dead-end. Nothing that Chrome or any other free browser wouldn't have put an end to later. Netscape was always going to die, short of pulling off a magic in-flight engine change to enterprise software (which they tried and failed at). There's no chance Microsoft killed off more competitors in those days than Amazon has. How many small and mid size retailers has Amazon put under as it has added $100+ billion to its retail sales? Given the very low consumer & economic growth of the past decade, the tally would have to be thousands of businesses across the US. There are radically more retail stores of all sizes across the US than software companies. It's impossible for Microsoft to ever compete with the business rival destruction that Amazon must inherently cause as it grows ever larger. How many physical stores will Amazon destroy as it adds its next $100 billion in retail sales? It's not detracting from Walmart's sales, that's not shrinking, so it's coming from everybody else.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
atq2119 8y ago
Funny to hear him talk about Encarta. I had totally forgotten that that used to exist.
- stevewillows 8y ago
  It's funny, at around the 32 minute mark Gates even touches on 'free information publishing', which seems to surprise the journalists. This 'free information publishing' would later replace his Encarta, which was costing ~$30m alone to translate. What a great video! It's fascinating to see the perspectives on the media, content, advertising, etc, in contrast to our current ad-driven world.
projectramo 8y ago
Something to keep in mind: the DoJ consent decree was 1994, and the lawsuit was filed in 1998. This was right around the time that Microsoft’s monopoly power was under intense scrutiny. In that environment, it makes sense for BG to push back against the notion that they could use their desktop OS market share into some kind of content market share. If you notice he gets particularly vehement whenever someone asks if they can use their control of the OS (or tools or the browser) into control of the content. He emphasizes that the distribution platform has to be neutral.
trucho 8y ago
Msft has always missed a bing or two.

139 points by ytrash 8y ago

Wow, is this the original source? Such a low view count for what I feel is a very interesting look into a more casual Bill Gates. This seems much more spontaneous than the usual videos we see of him, and it's pretty cool to see the kind of thoughts he has before being filtered into prepared statements for the public.

ytrash 8y ago
Yes it is, the youtube uploader is the camera operator and Wired Editor Kevin Kelly
stevewodil 8y ago
Well if the interview was in 1996 and YouTube was created in 2005 I would say it was available elsewhere first Also the YouTube video itself was just uploaded a couple of weeks ago.
- jahlove 8y ago
  From the video description: > I don't think we ever did anything with the interview. I had completely forgotten I had video'ed it.
wslh 8y ago
> Such a low view count... Many few pages have high view count. If you expect that good content has only high view count you are missing what Internet is.
tyingq 8y ago
Uploaded a month or so ago, and never online before that. Appears people are just figuring out it's there.

Torwald 8y ago

At ~25-30 min they talk about "content club" as a business. The Wired guys propose this could be a +4$ billion biz. Gates laughs them off. Now, today we have the numbers: - As of May 2018, Apple Music had 50 million paying subscribers worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/604959/number-of-apple-music-subscribers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/604959/number-of-apple-m... - Apple Hits $10B in Revenue From Services Like iTunes https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple-hits-10-billion-revenue-services-like-itunes-1157173 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple-hits-10-billion...

dpandya 8y ago
This seems like a questionable comparison. Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses. In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.
- Torwald 8y ago
  Gates doubted verbatim that the whole industry would exceed 4$ billion in total, thus no single player could reach that point. > Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses. That's not true, because Apple licensing anything is still not a barrier to entry into that market even today. Also, such licensing wasn't available to anybody back then. > In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player. No, that was another point he made. The fragmentation of the market and he was certainly right on that one. However, that was still not the point he mad I was talking about, the total size of the market. Also notice, I didn't inter
- coldtea 8y ago
  >In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player. Well, we have at best 2-3 "dominant players" in each field, so not much better. And doesn't already Kindle dominate in eBooks? Surely iBooks is not that much of competition.

strayamaaate 8y ago

For whatever he gets right or wrong, this is a fascinating look back into the past. Thanks for sharing!

HammadB 8y ago

My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is, the Wired interviewer who makes this point?

Torwald 8y ago
Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today. Think for example about a one person business like daringfireball.net, that was the type of business Gates was envisioning. Or Drudge report.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today. They're very close to that. And the same is true to other content, e.g. Spotify, Amazon Kiddle, Netflix for films, YouTube for video, etc. People still go to other sources, but increasingly less so, and those sources all increasingly fringe (Daring Fireball? Compared to Facebook and the like?). Nothing like the wild west (and much freer and distributed) market it was 10 and 20 years ago. Between the 3-4 big social aggregators for example, there goes 80% of the internet advertising pie. Gates (as quoted below): "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that". Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue... [1] https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
  - IncRnd 8y ago
    > Gates (as quoted below): "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that". > Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue... Good CEOs and Chairpersons don't blather about things that can adversely affect their company. Do you recall what happened after Musk tweeted that funding was secured?

mckee1 8y ago

"There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that". Netflix revenue last year was $11.6 billion. Fascinating interview.

blihp 8y ago
I suspect there was a little rope-a-dope going on on his part. Microsoft was less than a year in to turning their ship around (https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/ https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/) to ride the Internet wave. So he wouldn't have wanted to telegraph to other large competitors that this was going to be huge. (hopefully, given their investments) They already had their hands full with all the tiny startups who had been there years earlier.
- flashmob 8y ago
  Yep. Also, he had to be careful not to say anything that would suggest that having a monopoly in the OS market would somehow benefit the dominance of the content busniess, it seems like the interviews were trying him on that. I think the antitrust accusations started to simmer around then? Interesting to note, Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million the following year.
- atm0sphere 8y ago
  I felt the same. Another piece was avoiding regulatory scrutiny as far as any discussion on monopolies. It's amazing how much business acumen the guy has.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nightski 8y ago
To me if I look at the bigger picture of what he was saying however - he was comparing it to their software division which brought in $4 billion. If you look at where that division is today it is FAR more than $4 billion and dwarfs Netflix's revenue.
8y ago

santiagobasulto 8y ago

I've just watched the first 10 mins, but it's amazing how he's incredibly aware all of the technical details, and combines a strategy perspective ("unified email client") with all the technical details (low level networking details) to make those strat decisions a reality.

jensv 8y ago
I thought Jack Ma was good but Bill is better. I wouldn't want to compete with him, Bill is fearsome and scary smart.
abvdasker 8y ago
Yeah and he demonstrates both a complete and precise knowledge of everything his company is doing in nearly every arm of the business (not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of business Microsoft is not in). It's easy to forget why Microsoft was so dominant in this era of computing, but listening to him it begins to make more sense.

sfblah 8y ago

He looks sort of overweight and unhealthy. That surprised me.

tyingq 8y ago
He was 41 years old in 1996. Here's the magazine cover: https://media.wired.com/photos/5bbbd018b1d78f2d74578369/master/w_2000,c_limit/04.06_g-w.jpg https://media.wired.com/photos/5bbbd018b1d78f2d74578369/mast... Certainly not any sort of athlete, but doesn't look unusually overweight or unhealthy.

adventured 8y ago

I always find it fascinating to compare just how large the tech industry has become since this era, when Microsoft was already regarded as something close to a giant in the industry. Microsoft sales 1995: $6.1 billion ($10b today) Google is about 12x larger. AWS by itself is about 3x larger. Facebook is 5x larger. Salesforce is similar in size. Oracle is 4x larger. SAP is 2x larger. VMWare is closing in on 1x that size, as is Adobe. And Microsoft today is 12x larger. If people back then understood how large technology companies would become today, I wonder what would be different (if anything).

traskjd 8y ago
It was considered more than something close to a giant. If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now. Back then there was nobody else. We've gone from a monopoly to an oligopoly (ish) which in some ways feels less scary. It's hard to overestimate Microsoft dominance in the 90s. If there was a wiff of them entering a category, the players in that space would be in trouble (similar to Amazon today, though Microsoft followed through more in decimating their rivals).
- adventured 8y ago
  > If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now. Yes, I recall those days intimately. It was hysteria and laughable even then. Breathless magazine articles claiming Microsoft was going to dominate everything, set up toll roads on the Internet, dominate e-commerce, publishing, media, and so on. None of it was even remotely feasible or credible. The fear that briefly surrounded Microsoft's reign was almost entirely baseless hysteria. Its preeminence and monopoly abuse era lasted for six or seven years. Facebook has been abusing US consumers with its social monopoly for longer than that already, as has Google with its search monopoly (they're at least a decade plus in now). Both Facebook and Google are not only drastically more powerful and wealthy (greater financial resources by at least a factor of 10) than Microsoft in 1995-96, their reach is far beyond anything Microsoft had at that time. World-wide PC sales in 1995 were a whopping 70 million. Google and Facebook touch nearly all corners of the globe, in real-time, at all times. Billions upon billions of people. Microsoft's reach in 1995-96? Extremely slow in nature, and less than ~150 million people globally. Ability to throw or bias elections and control global commerce? Microsoft had almost none of that type of power with their operating system, or IE. Extraordinary amounts of commercial activity and referral flow directly through Google and Facebook products/platforms each day. Google's algorithm changes have dramatic effects on businesses. Android is a far larger gatekeeper and toll road than Microsoft could have dreamed of in 1995. YouTube by itself is roughly worth as much as all of Microsoft was in March 1995 (and has dramatically greater influence and reach, along with a monopoly position in what it does), Instagram is worth even more. And Netscape, Microsoft's most famous 'victim'? (although not the thing that really got them in anti-trust trouble) The notion of building a large business around charging for a consumer browser was a dead-end. Nothing that Chrome or any other free browser wouldn't have put an end to later. Netscape was always going to die, short of pulling off a magic in-flight engine change to enterprise software (which they tried and failed at). There's no chance Microsoft killed off more competitors in those days than Amazon has. How many small and mid size retailers has Amazon put under as it has added $100+ billion to its retail sales? Given the very low consumer & economic growth of the past decade, the tally would have to be thousands of businesses across the US. There are radically more retail stores of all sizes across the US than software companies. It's impossible for Microsoft to ever compete with the business rival destruction that Amazon must inherently cause as it grows ever larger. How many physical stores will Amazon destroy as it adds its next $100 billion in retail sales? It's not detracting from Walmart's sales, that's not shrinking, so it's coming from everybody else.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

atq2119 8y ago

Funny to hear him talk about Encarta. I had totally forgotten that that used to exist.

stevewillows 8y ago
It's funny, at around the 32 minute mark Gates even touches on 'free information publishing', which seems to surprise the journalists. This 'free information publishing' would later replace his Encarta, which was costing ~$30m alone to translate. What a great video! It's fascinating to see the perspectives on the media, content, advertising, etc, in contrast to our current ad-driven world.

projectramo 8y ago

Something to keep in mind: the DoJ consent decree was 1994, and the lawsuit was filed in 1998. This was right around the time that Microsoft’s monopoly power was under intense scrutiny. In that environment, it makes sense for BG to push back against the notion that they could use their desktop OS market share into some kind of content market share. If you notice he gets particularly vehement whenever someone asks if they can use their control of the OS (or tools or the browser) into control of the content. He emphasizes that the distribution platform has to be neutral.

trucho 8y ago

Msft has always missed a bing or two.