Gates: Hardware, Not Software, Will Be Free

orthogonal writes "That's small-'f', not capital-'F' free: according to Bill Gates, "Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free --...." Gates expects this almost free hardware to support two of the longest awaited breakthroughs in computing: real speech and handwriting recognition. He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed."

Comments

Re:Visual design

[grub]

First person shooter.

This reminds me of a cool hack that uses Doom as a "process manager". Killing a Doom baddie basically "kill -9"s the process.

Re:Visual design

[Anonymous Coward]

Has been done both for smalltalk (parts) and for C++ etc. (VisualAge). Both parts programs and VA programs tend to become an unvieldy mesh of colored lines going from buttons to functions to data and back to UI fields etc.

Just try to visualize (pun intended) a fairly simple event driven program with lines connecting all events, triggers, functions, data and UI components and you get the idea.

Re:Precisely - we can't even get WYSIWYG HTML righ

[The Desert Palooka]

But the visual aspects of pure "compatible" HTML (as in not CSS and Divs, which many design shops still stay away from) are hacks. So you have these editors trying to visually do something that HTML was never intended to do. Dreamweaver, the best of these editors, was oft called "the moody woman" at one shop I worked at, as you had to know just how to coddle it it wouldn't do what you wanted, or even what it was supposed to. Handwriting the code was still superior for these hacks...

Then CSS/Layers became totally (mostly) supported. Now WYSIWYG editors work QUITE well... (Even some non editors generate perfect code. Photoshop's image ready generates some very nice code)

Anyway, point being, when something is designed to be designed visually it can be visually designed much easier. *grin*

Re:Free

[dasmegabyte]

Okay. Let's put aside the silly "Microsoft is Evil" stuff for a minute, and look at the industry in general has gone over the past 15 years.

The price of the average "IBM" PC sold has dropped by roughly 400% since I first bought one in 1989. At the same time, processor speed on these average machines has increased by 50,000%. If this trend continues, and I see no reason for it not to, the average computer in 15 years will have a 10 THz processor and cost $125.

Now, the while the cost of hardware continues to go down, the cost of software continues to go up. The number of people who are needed to build the massive applications to make use of 10 THz will be huge. Somebody's got to pay the damn programmers, right? So the price of software will continue to go up. Even if OSS succeeds and the operating system and incidental programs are free, the CUSTOM programs will be expensive.

Therefore, it makes sense to give the hardware as an added bonus with the software. The same way you have cell phones given away with calling plans today. This isn't a Microsoft thing...this could easily be an IBM thing or an Adobe thing, etc.