Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates took to Reddit yesterday for an "Ask me anything"-style interview with the site's users. While a goodly part of the conversation focused on his work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates fielded plenty of questions about his views on Microsoft and its current offerings, on Apple, and about his perspectives on the state of information technology.
Following are some of the more interesting tech-related tidbits from the conversation:
On Windows 8: "It is a huge advance for Windows, which people will see even more as the great applications and hardware come out."
What's he running Windows 8 on: "I just got my Surface Pro a week ago and it is very nice. I am using a Perceptive Pixel display right now -- huge Windows 8 touch whiteboard. These will come down in price over time and be pervasive..."
On which search engine he uses: "Seriously, Bing is the better product at this point. Try the challenge. I am biased, but the work to make Bing better has been amazing."
On which Microsoft product he wished had made it to market: "We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will reemerge, since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding."
(Later in the thread, he acknowledged that he was referring to the much-hyped WinFS -- aka Longhorn -- that Microsoft ended up killing in 2006.)
On his relationship with the late Steve Jobs: "He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project was the Mac, where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications. I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away."
