Gates, as usual, was excited about the PC market. Unit volumes are up, prices are down, and new uses, such as digital photography are taking hold. Gates was also impressed with all the power packed into today s PCs. In fact the overall message at the WinHEC confab was that PCs should be fatter, not thinner clients. The battle cry was for faster CPUs, and more memory, moving to 64M-bytes as the norm, and then onto 128.
Gates also sees new device types.
One he is most excited about, some five years out, is a high resolution tablet. This way, people could actually do most of their reading on a PC, without going buggy. The ebullient Gates has one major worry though - the state of high speed access for consumers. While some progress has been made by cable modems and DSL trials, the vast majority of home connections are still a paltry 28.8K. Gates believes that the Universal DSL standard will drive consumer demand and create a high volume market, but that carriers are still constrained by government regulation, which will slow the rollout. If we can solve that problem, we can all move on to leading Web lifestyles, where the Net is always on, and is the main source for news and information.