Bill Gates gave an interview to CNET about a variety of topics including web search and Google. An interesting passage is Gates’ perspective on Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information” and whether that should be the goal vs. his (Microsoft’s) vision of simply providing the tools to organize information, leaving the organizing itself up to the users:
Gates: …they have this slogan that they are going to organize the world’s information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world’s information. It’s a slightly different approach, based on the platformization of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organizer.
Q:So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?
Gates: Well, we don’t know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.
MichaelZimmer.org 