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Bill Gates with a printout of the Altair BASIC source code from 1975, one of Microsoft’s earliest software artifacts. Click to enlarge. (Gates Notes / Ian Allen)
[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025. Learn more and register here for our special Microsoft @ 50 event, March 20, 2025, in Seattle.]
Back in 2008, during an interview at Microsoft headquarters shortly before leaving his day-to-day role, Bill Gates bluntly dismissed the question of whether he could ever imagine needing to return to run the company full-time.
“No,” he said. Next question.
But in a recent interview, nearly 17 years later, Gates acknowledged that he did grapple with this concern at times in his Microsoft career, when he considered what it would be like after eventually stepping down.
“I always thought, Oh God, I’m going to leave and the company’s going to get screwed up, and I’m not going to know what to do,” he recalled. “Do I go back? Do I not go back? Oh, this is going to be torturous.”
He hasn’t needed to deal with that dilemma. Microsoft’s continued strength has been “a great thrill for me,” he said.
As planned when he left his full-time role, Gates still contributes as a part-time advisor to the company. He meets regularly with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the company’s technical and product teams to review their work, and offer feedback, direction and insights.
In that role, he takes the long view — describing the rise of artificial intelligence as the repetition of a pattern that he recognized in the early days of the PC revolution.
“Now, what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free,” he said, “and that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.”
For this latest installment in our Microsoft @ 50 series, we talk with Gates about the company’s 50th anniversary, parallels between AI and the early days of the PC, and where he sees the next big opportunities for innovation.
This is part of a wide-ranging interview coinciding with the release of his new book, Source Code: My Beginnings. We published Part 1 of the interview last week, focusing on his upbringing in Seattle, the influential people in his life, the early days of the company, and his perspective on events now unfolding in the world.
Listen to the rest of the conversation below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for clarity and brevity. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
In many ways, the story that you tell in this book is still unfolding. I’m wondering if you see any parallels between the early days of the PC revolution and the current era of AI in the business models and technologies.
Bill Gates: Well, this era is new and different, and it’s a continuation.
So the mind-blowing thing about the PC era is how few people are involved. … For Paul and I, we thought, OK, this is not only going to replace mainframes and minicomputers, very expensive machines before then, but also create a whole new modality of use, which is why we said, “a computer on every desk and in every home.” Other people were like, “What? In every home, what’s that?”
My way of describing that was that computing was becoming free. And because it was free, could we use it for word-processing or spreadsheets or email, or things like that? I and others we were evangelizing this as this incredible tool and then connecting them together.
Now, what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free. And that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.
I went back and reread The Road Ahead from 1995 and 1996, your book at the time, and spoke with Peter Rinearson, one of your coauthors on that book. One of your visions was for software agents, and you’re now just seeing this start to happen. How do you see this unfolding from here?
Gates: Well, it’s moving pretty quickly. We have a lot of work to do on reliability. In a certain sense, say, doing a medical diagnosis, we in many respects are better than humans at that, the AI software. But there are times where it gets off the path and it’ll make mistakes humans won’t make.
There’s a wide range of opinions of how quickly we’ll drive that reliability for it. I tend to be somewhat on the optimistic side, seeing exactly how that’s going to work. There’s a fervor here and some pretty profound tools in education and in health and scientific discovery. The Gates Foundation is applying these things.
Have we yet seen the killer app for AI? Is it ChatGPT?
Gates: Well, ChatGPT is kind of a horizontal tool. And they’ve done a great job getting user usage and momentum.
There are things like, “organize all my messages,” where the way it works today, you go into your text messages, your mail messages, your Instagram messages, they’re all separate. You don’t really trust the computer to [organize] them for you. …
We’re finally changing that. “I want to plan a trip with my kids to go see some colleges. Gather data from websites, look at my calendar, show me the information about the colleges.” You can take very high-level tasks, and the software will be working at your level.
Bill Gates with early PCs and a teletype machine that was used for programming. Click to enlarge. (Gates Notes / Ian Allen)
Can you take a few moments to reflect on what Microsoft has become from that two-person partnership that you and Paul Allen started in 1975, to what the company is today?
Gates: Well, we had crazy ideas early on that software would be important, and that we would know how to hire people, write better software tools, and we would do just all kinds of software.
Many of our competitors were single-product companies. … Until Google comes along, there really is not another horizontal company that’s thinking about software in this very, very broad way.
By the late ’90s, we were so successful that even I could say, “OK, we might even make a few mistakes and not disappear.” Because I was always running scared, it’s not until 1998 or ’99 that I said, “OK. Yeah. We are in pretty good shape with what we’ve done.”
Then we get into the question of, are we adapted to the internet? And what about this antitrust thing?
And so we have this schizophrenic thing: are we so obsolete that nobody should care about us? Are we so dominant that we have to be split into pieces? I mean, which one is it? Just tell me because we’re dealing with both of those. Both had an element of truth to them.
Steve took over and put his mind-blowing energy into it. And both Steve and I were saying to the board, hey, we think Satya’s the one. I knew he would do a great job. He’s done even better than I expected.
So, it’s nice. I always thought, “Oh, God, I’m going to leave, and the company is going to get screwed up, and I’m not going to know what to do. Do I go back? Do I not go back? Oh, this is going to be torturous.” The fact that, along with many other companies, it’s doing incredibly well is a great thrill for me.
What do you hope the next ten years will be like for Microsoft? Do you have a sense for where this company could go and where it might be in another decade?
Gates: Well, software is more important today than ever. We are going to face the challenge of success in how powerful the software is. Everybody wants that. This is hyper competitive.
I do think that hyper competition will be beneficial to users. The pace of innovation will have to be very, very fast despite the capital costs involved, and these tools will just improve very rapidly.
I hope Microsoft can lead the way. I certainly brainstorm with the product groups at Microsoft about what we’re doing, trying to make sure, whether it’s AI to help write software or AI to do drug discovery, that Microsoft is in the lead.
Listen to the full conversation above, or subscribe to the GeekWire Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
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