Speech by Bill Gates for Indian Institute of Technology's 50th Anniversary Celebration

BILL GATES: Well, good evening. It's a great honor for me to speak at this jubilee celebration. After all, I'm not 50-years old yet, pretty close, I never graduated from college, yet, although I'm not sure I'll be changing that because I'm a little busy right now, but I get a chance to talk with you about an incredible institution that has really changed the world and has the potential to do even more in the years ahead than it's already done.

Rajat asked me to speak and at first my reaction, "Well, I don't speak at many college events. There's more opportunity than there is time." But when I thought about it and I thought about the great things that people from IIT have done at Microsoft, the role that I think IIT can play inside India in tapping into its potential I decided I'd make a very special exception and come here tonight. (Applause.)

I was careful to do research for this speech so I went up to the Web site -- the IIT Web site -- and sort of browsed around, and after I did that I thought, well, I'll go to the MIT Web site and browse around just to see, you know, these things seem very similar. And on the MIT Web site the hot news was that the coffee house was closing down because people weren't spending enough money there. (Laughter.) On the IIT Bombay site, though, things were far more interesting. They said that they had caught a leopard on the campus recently. (Laughter, applause.) And that's something these U.S. universities just can't offer in terms of an experience. (Laughter.)

Well, it is quite phenomenal to look back at the start of IIT and realize that a young nation was willing to pour very precious resources into creating this institution. Most people back then didn't understand how important science and engineering would be and yet the early leaders who got behind IIT obviously saw through and knew that the long-term investment would have a huge payout.

Prime Minister Nehru described IIT as representing India's urges, India's future in the making and the people here and the other graduates of IIT have made that come true.

The impact, of course, has been worldwide, not just on India and the seven campuses but the research and the incredible talent is having a huge impact.

Just one example of that is the incredible revolution taking place in India where literally hundreds of thousands and in the future millions of jobs will be created by taking the educational focus of the country and applying that computer science and high value service type activities and connecting up with the needs for those capabilities not only in India but around the world. It's amazing to see that happening and I think IIT has had a huge role in providing the education and the vision that's led to that wonderful result.

IIT and Microsoft do have a lot in common, an optimism about the future, a belief that fundamental science will lead to breakthroughs that will let us solve some of the toughest problems that mankind faces, a belief that we can provide better tools than ever before and that we've really just scratched the surface.

Sometimes people say to me, you know, "Haven't you achieved a lot; why don't you retire?" And my simple answer is that the original vision that I had for the personal computer, along with Paul Allen, was a machine that was far more capable, far more straightforward, far more in use by more people than what we have today. And so in some sense if you take a big enough vision, as Microsoft did, you never in your lifetime run out of work to be done to achieve that vision.

IIT has certainly taken on a grand vision. Even as an incredibly world-class institution, it keeps challenging itself to renew itself to move to the forefront. And it's hard to think of anything like IIT anywhere in the world. It is a very unique institution.

Microsoft has given over US$7.5 million of its grants (to IIT), more to any organization except some in the U.S. or in the UK because of what we see going on there. We've hired literally hundreds and hundreds of graduates just in the last two years. Over 50 people have come to Microsoft and we're doing our best to increase the number. (Applause.)

We've also decided one way to increase that number is to have a development center in India, and so we've kicked that off and we're expanding that quite rapidly and that's also become a great thing for our employees who come from India. Many of them have chosen now to go back to India and they can keep their career at Microsoft. In fact, that was a key element in our decision to locate a development center there is that it was a way of retaining incredible talent that wanted to be in India.

We have graduates from all the different IIT schools. I have to say that before tonight's cocktail event I didn't understand there's even competition between the campuses of IIT. (Laughter, applause.) Various ones were saying that they had this person who graduated who worked at Microsoft and this one and so I can say that every single campus, even the newer campuses are well represented.

We are very anxious to see the tradition of academic research that IIT believes in brought to a whole new level. After all, the computer industry is a beneficiary of the kind of partnership that can take place between academia and commercial organizations. Most of the interesting advances in computer science have elements of academic research and elements of commercialization that have come together to build great products. And there's no doubt in our minds that IIT will do more than its share to contribute to this, which is why we sponsor research there and we're very impressed with the things going on.

Despite the distance, we do a lot to host people, have people on sabbaticals at Microsoft, have competitions and encourage our employees also through our matching program to support IIT and all of its different activities.

At one time, people thought the boundary between academia and commercial companies was one that was sacrosanct in a way, that you couldn't collaborate across that boundary and many fields I think have been held back by that belief. The two that have really shown that there is another approach that is far better, the field of computer science and the field of biology, and it's maybe no coincidence that those are the two areas that are changing the world the most, that we can speak about outrageous dreams of how computers will be better and they'll improve life 20 years from now or how medicine through biology will deal with the tough diseases that exist around the world, and it's phenomenal to see the energy, the talent, that's being applied in these areas.

Two of our IIT graduates are now vice presidential level people at Microsoft, which is a group of less than a hundred people, and are making huge contributions. I'll just mention those two by name: Amitabh Srivastava is doing our programming tool work as a distinguished engineer and really incredible breakthroughs. They're helping us in things like security that are so important. Anoop Gupta has worked directly for me for a few years now, is just being promoted to be a vice president to drive our real time communications efforts and, of course, was a professor at Stanford before that and really has a vision that's changing what we're doing in that area. (Applause.)

So the aspirations of Microsoft and IIT are very, very compatible and we think that more collaboration in the future is very, very important.

The vision that we have we've described as the digital decade. What do we mean by that? Well, we mean that in the year 2000 the number of people who really used digital approaches for lots of everyday things was quite small. For word processing or e-mail you could say there was some penetration there but for most tasks -- buying things, taking notes, organizing schedules, dealing with music, dealing with photos, really going through budgeting processes -- most things were not done on a digital basis.

And our belief is that by the end of this decade that will have changed; in fact, they will have changed enough that it will almost be common sense. People will think back and say, "Well, why did we have records that we had to take out of the case and put on the phonograph and treat in this really careful way?" In fact, records, that term itself is obsolete. My daughter, who's six asked me why do they call it the record store. Well, they should call it the CD store. Well, a child born six or seven years from now they won't even have to learn about CDs because things will be done in that purely digital way.

And so this idea that this is a transforming decade in terms of these tools moving into the mainstream it runs a little bit in contrast to a view that there was a lot of promises and those have proven out to be empty hype and empty promises. Certainly in terms of valuations, in terms of timeframes, in terms of the simplicity to get there there was some deep oversimplification. Some people who owned the shares in those companies now appreciate where oversimplification can lead, but, in fact, in terms of what the dreams and aspirations were there most of them were entirely right on.

The idea of being able to buy and sell between any two companies anyplace in the world, you know, that dream is a very interesting dream because it means that the opportunity for someone is more related to their talent, to their education than to where they're located. If somebody is very talented they can offer their services through the Internet with the help of software and digital approaches and be able to apply their talent to problems in different locations. And it's that kind of thinking that makes India a superpower of human talent rather than traditional resource extraction or other ways of measuring the potential of a country.

So the digital decade is something that we're very excited about. It's very transforming. And it requires a bit of patience. It requires laying the infrastructure for these new approaches. It requires simplifying things. Just because these great things work doesn't mean that they'll be used very broadly.

In the debates today about the future, sometimes people get caught up in terms of saying which device will be the winning device. I spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show just a week ago and there the rhetoric, "Was is it the TV or the PC?" Often people say, "Well, no, it's the cell phone, the cell phone is the device. Look at lots of people buy cell phones, don't they?" Well, in fact, it's all these devices working together. If somebody is engaged in a digital lifestyle, they will use devices of all sizes. They will use wall-sized devices that we used to call TVs. They'll use desk-size or tablet size devices we used to call PCs. They'll use pocket size devices that we used to call phones or PDAs or handheld games and yet the device through the magic of hardware and software in devices will be every one of those things.

Just recently at that same CES show we introduced the idea of going even below pocket-sized and this is the idea of going to a wrist-sized device, actually taking something like this, a simple little watch, and making it be one of the devices that can keep you informed of the things that you're interested in.

Now, in this audience I have no fear that I can actually give you the technical specifications of this device and you'll appreciate that. (Laughter, applause.) Just to make a comparison, the original IBM PC that got shipped in 1981, the first machine that ran MS DOS was an 8088 computer running at about 6 megahertz and the base configuration was a 48k machine. It sold for a few thousand dollars and IBM was very conservative; they forecast to sell 60,000 of those the first year. They actually sold a few hundred thousand.

Well, if you look at this watch, this watch has an ARM processor running at 28 megahertz and instead of just having 48k of RAM and 32k of ROM this has 512k of ROM and 384k of RAM.

Not only that, it's about an $8 chip that can receive FM data signals, so-called FM sideband. And so the way it works is you go to a PC screen, you type in the ID of your devices and you indicate what kind of sports scores you care about, what stock prices you care about, what cities you want to know the weather. You point it to your schedule so it will give you the traffic information you care about relative to where you're going and those things -- and it tells time as well. (Laughter.)

And so this idea of this glanceable screen that you can simply just look at the information, it's part of that family of devices and it's not a substitute for a phone or a Tablet PC device or a desktop or a wall-sized device; it's simply something that software will use to present information to you.

And so it's things like this that can come in a fairly natural form factor that I think are why many people are underestimating what happens during this digital decade. During this decade certainly handwriting as a natural input technique, speech as a natural input technique, will become mainstream and we'll just take those for granted.

There is a basic approach in terms of how all these devices find each other and talk to each other called Web services that we're also very optimistic about. It's very state of the art distributing computing work. It's a standardized set of protocols that companies like IBM and Microsoft are working on together. We've committed all our R&D to this approach because we see it as not only the foundation for e-commerce but also solving all the tough manageability problems and data exchange problems that we've had in these systems.

Software systems can be far better. Software systems can be easier to work with so that you don't have to have so many people write glue code into how those work together.

One of the biggest challenges we all face to make the digital decade a reality are the issues around trustworthy computing. After all, the kind of reliability we get out of the water system or electricity system, at least in this country, are good enough that we just take them for granted, and we have to have that same capability into this digital infrastructure.

And there are many tough problems here. Even the very basic things are not there today. People use passwords. Well, passwords are very easy to guess. People use the same password on consumer Web sites they use in their office and it's simply not an adequate way to authenticate people. We'll need to move up to smart cards or biometrics.

Mail protocols: you don't actually know when you get a piece of electronic mail that it really came from the person it purports to. So if somebody spoofs a piece of mail that purports to come from your IT department and they said, you know, please shut off your computer immediately, pay no attention to any messages you get that pretend to come from the IT department because they're just trying to fool you, people would be in a complete state of confusion. And so today's systems were not designed from the bottom up with the key elements that are necessary here.

Now, it's a very solvable problem. Again, deep research coming out of academia will be part of it. It won't be solved overnight. Just like a lot of these tough problems it will take most of this decade to do it, but it's something that absolutely has to be done.

So there's no lack of challenges, challenges of getting broadband out, challenges of getting every industry to see how it takes advantage of these things. Even just thinking about education, I remember speaking with a great Stanford professor about 12 years ago about how the Internet might change things and what would happen and he disagreed with me and so he said, "'Well, I don't even know if Microsoft will be in business ten years from now." And that was fine, but then he stopped and he said, "Well, then again, I don't know what education will look like in ten years either, you know, what will the idea of an expert delivering information and students interacting around that information." Well, in fact, to date education has changed a very modest amount and yet with Tablet PC devices, with online video, certainly technology is going to reach into education. We're just scratching the surface there.

There's certainly an opportunity for IIT, and I expect IIT will seize that to be at the forefront of that and define exactly how that can be used to get great education out to more people and improve the experience, including the experience after you graduate when you want to renew your skills and be kept up to date on the latest things going on. It's possible that over time graduates of IIT will be constantly in touch with IIT not just as a group of alums but also in terms of their ongoing education.

One topic that I know I can speak on in this audience is that if you look back on the success that you've had or the luck you've had, if you look back on how your talent fit in to the talent that today's society demands, if you look at the people who mentored you, I think everyone here can look back and say that they've been very lucky in terms of what has happened to them. And I think for all of us it creates an interesting question of how do we give back, how do we take the responsibility upon us that that imposes.

For myself, in terms of the really outsized luck I've had financially, it's a pretty large responsibility and it's one that I put a lot of energy into thinking about and it's really only in the last five years that in my foundation I've really tried to say how can I give these resources that I'm lucky enough to have back to society in a way that can make an impact.

One of the things that struck me most vividly was that the horizon to think about was not just the United States, not just the richest country in the world. And I was a little bit stunned how much of the philanthropy in the richest country is strictly to the richest country. And certainly the more I learned about health issues, the more I felt like that was something where the awareness of the world, the focus of the world taking its advances and applying those, that, along with the digital decade, would be a major theme of the things that I would try and do my best to give back in.

Just last year late in the year I had an opportunity to make a trip to India and it was a wonderful trip. (Applause.) I had a chance to see partners like Infosys and Mr. Murthy of Infosys is here tonight. (Applause.) And I got a chance to see our development center and look at how rapidly the computer software and engineering and services businesses are developing in India and share my views and understand how Microsoft can help with that more.

But I also got to spend time looking at some of these health issues and in particular the threat of the AIDS epidemic and how that's something that needs more visibility, needs more attention. (Applause.) And so I feel privileged to have been able to hopefully cast a little bit of energy on that, put some resources into it and hopefully stop what could be a very bad development and really slow down India's ability to realize its incredible potential.

So where do we go from here? Well, I think it's quite clear that the theme I will strike tonight is working together: the United States working with India (applause, cheers) -- commercial organizations like Microsoft working with IIT (applause) -- and all of us taking these great advances in science and thinking what we can each do to make sure that not only are these great advances available to the developed countries and the luckiest of us all but to the entirety of humanity. (Applause.)

So with that, let me say I'm very optimistic that we will work together and being here with this incredibly talented group talking about this incredible institution just makes me all the more optimistic about that. Thank you. (Applause.)