Bill Gates spoke to CMU students and faculty on February 25. The Windows Weblog at Information Week provides a detailed write up of the ideas shared by Mr. Gates to the crowd.
Say what you might about Bill and Microsoft, he is capable of some very interesting and profound ideas.
- The Cost of Interruption
When, where, and how should we recieve messages or interruptions. The mobile revolution is going to make our already limited attention even more valuable. Understanding behaviour and building software (systems) that is aware of your context will be a huge area for research. There has been a lot of work done by Anind Dey and Gregory Abowd. But this is just the start, it begs the question about how do you build an OS that supports heterogeneous, dynamically configured devices. - Business Process
Business is business. Bill talks about the law hasn’t changed. I think that this is where he is actually wrong. It’s continually changing (slowly, but continually). Nothing is static even business processes. By changing our focus from how do I write software, to what do you need to do, we can start to - "The boundary between people and software needs to be addressed"
The experience, call it a man-machine interface, user interface, GUI, user experience or whatever. The "boundary between people and software" is changing. Darn ability to learn. But this is a very interesting point. I am not sure if current usability practices are the solution. How do you build software for a world where much of your information can be time-buffered in a TiVO for life experiences? Steve Mann has some interesting tools for this. Bill talked about technologies like Media Frame which seems to be a large information space technology (but I can’t find any more than passing reference to this project).
