Skip to Content

Surprise! Bill Gates Is a Surface Tablet Early Adopter

Gates thinks Windows 8 will transform computing–when he can be torn away from his charitable work long enough to think about it.
October 23, 2012

Bill Gates offered some thoughts on Windows 8, in a YouTube video posted by Microsoft’s Steve Clayton. And what, do we learn, is one of the main perks of having built Microsoft, even if you’re no longer involved in day-to-day operations? You get first dibs on emerging gadgetry.

“It was one of the first off the line,” Gates told Clayton (who doesn’t have a Surface of his own yet, despite being a bigwig Softie himself).

Gates is (predictably) pretty gung-ho about the Surface tablet, calling it an “unbelievably great product… it embodies this idea of can you get an even better tablet that also has what you expect in a PC?”

Gates held forth more generally on Windows 8, which he said would “take Windows into the world of touch, low-power devices.” Windows 8, he said, embodied “the best of a tablet-type experience and the PC experience.”

One of the most intriguing parts of Gates’s interview is a moment where he talks about Microsoft “blending all the different forms of input.” I think many of us are feeling a certain amount of frustration and confusion over which devices are suited to which forms of input. Just today, I found myself swiping across my e-ink Kindle, absentmindedly. As I become more used to my new-ish iPad (see “My First Week as an iPad User”), I crave a touchscreen for my MacBook almost as much as I crave a keyboard for my iPad. Were I a regular Kinect user, or a big fan of dictation software, I suspect I’d be craving a way to unite those forms of input, too. A dream device would incorporate all manner of input so seamlessly that we wouldn’t have to think twice about the particular capabilities of the device at hand. But we’re not nearly there yet.

Nonetheless, Gates promised that “people will be pretty amazed,” and urged us to “get to a store, play around with this thing” soon.

Almost the most interesting element of Gates’s interview is that it happened at all. Much as he may love his Surface, the interview actually underscores again how Gates’s involvement with Microsoft is really and ever increasingly part-time thing. Though a rumor surfaced about 10 months ago suggesting Gates might return to Microsoft (where he is officially “Chairman,” but has little to do with day-to-day operations), Gates quickly quashed the rumor, emphasizing that his charitable work would be his full-time gig “for the rest of my life.”

Clayton was lucky enough to nab a few moments to pick the technological side of Gates’s brain only because Gates was around to praise 30 years of charitable giving among Microsoft employees. You have to admire Gates for having set his priorities and stuck to them. These days, he’s more interested in rebooting sanitation–a project that could after all save countless lives around the world–than in peddling software and hardware.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments.

Faults in a certain part of the immune system might be at the root of some long covid cases, new research suggests.

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.