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Bill Gates and the new Workstyle

Here’s a report on CNN Money, on the way Bill Gates deals with information. The article does provide a rare glimpse into Gates’ office, but you come away with the feeling that this kind of article ought to have appeared on a technology website, like ZDNet, maybe – and ought to have been more in-depth. Can someone out there do an interview with Gates on this specific topic – Personal Information Management?

There are multiple issues about today’s increasingly high-tech workstyle that come forth in this piece by Gates. I’m going to go through a few of them here:

Desktop v/s Laptop v/s Mobile:
Gates works on a desktop PC, using a massive display spread across 3 21″ LCD monitors. What struck me was not the awesome display (I have experienced the joy of working with a 21″ LCD display before I switched to a ThinkPad), but the fact that for a person who travels a lot, and works from multiple locations, he uses a PC! I’d think his chief workstation would be a laptop. I couldn’t imagine life without a laptop now – I am so used to being able to access my documents whether I’m at work, home, at a conference, or at a speaking engagement. Gates says that “when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.” Well, I want to know more about this synchronization solution he’s using. I’d find it pretty difficult to sync all of my stuff on my Thinkpad to a PC, or the other way round – there’s just too many different types of things.

What’s interesting is that there’s nothing in there about mobile tools. Does Gates not use any? After all, the mobile world is now high on MS’ agenda. I would think that a touch-screen mobile device would be ideal for his meetings. I was speaking to a CEO of a technology company a few months ago, and he described how people used to walk into meetings these days without a laptop, TabletPC, or even a notebook. Then they’d whip out their Nokia smartphone and a foldable Bluetooth keyboard from their pocket, and type away!

I would think that Gates, who’s always championed the idea of “eating your own dog food” (witness how they migrated to Windows Server 2003 across MS internally even before the actual product launch), would use one of those Palm Treos that now run Windows Mobile 5.0:

Desktop Search:
“Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search”. Windows Desktop Search is probably (I hope!) what he uses, and although I don’t find it as snappy as Google Desktop Search, I can imagine what a huge productivity enhancer it can be for Gates. No filing, no browsing. As I had said previously, I do not use the Windows Start Menu anymore. I simply type the name of the application I want to in the Google Desktop search window, and click on it from the results list. Way faster.

The challenge for Gates is now to make Search the new paradigm for managing personal and public document repositories.

The Paperless Office:
The paperless office is now pretty much a reality with most tech companies now – we at IBM have digitzed almost all of our internal processes. There are a few instances where transactions are performed online but need to be printed out for approval – those are being addressed as you read this post. But the overall statement is true – it’s been a long time since the average technologist used a paper and a pen.

In his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, Gates has covered the Paperless Office over an entire chapter. He points out that the only paper forms that remain at MS are the ones that deal with the Government. I’m certain that the situation is more acute here in India, where there’s no sustained, pan-department, nation-wide drive to cut down on paper. (Recall the ubiquitious sarkaari “file”!) That is where the most innovative minds must focus.

Sharepoint and Wikis:
Gates talks about collaboration using Sharepoint: “…SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks.” We at IBM use Wikis extensively. I haven’t had a chance to look at and evaluate Sharepoint, but Wikis do the same job with aplomb. Wikis are very scalable – two people working on an idea can use a wiki just as well as a multi-site, enterprise-level software development team with a staff of over a hundred – and very usable – no knowledge of HTML needed.

So we’re finally moving away from moulding our collaboration practices to fit in with existing tools, to building tools that are more suitable for efficient collaboration. For years, teams used email as a form of communication between teams, cc’ing everyone on the team to make sure everyone had the entire context. This is hugely inefficient! Think of the immense duplication of information – text, context, attachments. And speaking of context, it’s extrememly difficult to follow the flow of information by looking at multiple emails bottom-up. Wikis solve these problems with one stroke. The only shortcoming of a Wiki today is that representing tabular data is a bit of a pain.

Finally…
Finally, Gates talks about the “digital whiteboard” in a few MS offices, which takes a snapshot of the board and all its contents as an image. Hmm. We at IBM simply whip out our mobile cameras and take a photograph of the whiteboard! This remninds me of the story of NASA spending a lot of money on developing a pen that would work in Zero-gravity conditions, only to find that the Russians were doing fine with a pencil :)


April 6, 2006 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Insights, Microsoft, Mobile, Social, Trends ·  1 Comment


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One Comments


  1. nanolucifer on April 6th, 2006 12:24 pm

    His monitors seem to be the Dell UltraSharp 24′ ones and not the 21′ inch ones. Two of them on a dual DVI display are an extremely efficient productivity booster. 21′ is so ‘yesterday’

    We used to have both Sharepoint and Wiki in my previous company. But users got so frustrated with sharepoint that people exclusively started working on the wiki.

    Oh and thanks for the bouquets :) . I almost spilled water on myself laughing at the thought of him using GD.

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