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Gates: 'Free hardware all round'
Very generous of you Bill...

By Reuters

Published: Wednesday 31 March 2004

Within 10 years, the cost of hardware will dwindle to insignificance, says Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates.

And falling costs will mean that new developments, such as widespread computing via speech and handwriting, won't be limited by expensive technology, according to the Microsoft boss.

"Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs, you can almost think of hardware as being free," he said, speaking at the Gartner Symposium in San Diego. "I'm not saying it will be absolutely free - but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor,'' he added, referring to networked computers and advances in the internet's speed.

Microsoft has often been at odds with the computer hardware industry during the past 20 years, given its dominant position in software through its Windows operating system.

The world's largest software maker is betting that advances in hardware and computing will make it possible for mainstream computers to interact with people via speech and that computers with the ability to recognise handwriting will become as ubiquitous as Windows, which runs on more than 90 per cent of the world's personal computers.

"Many of the Holy Grails of computing that have been worked on over the last 30 years will be solved within this 10-year period, with speech being in every device and having a device that's like a tablet that you just carry around,'' Gates said at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo, sponsored by market researcher Gartner, referring clearly to his own company's drive towards Tablet computing.

Microsoft is also already selling into the speech market. Last week Microsoft launched Speech Server 2004 for companies developing automated call centres.