[7:54] Bill Gates Interview: The Information Highway, Education Reform, and Future Perspectives

Learning English isn't just about grammar and vocabulary—it's about using the language naturally in real-life situations. Textbook phrases often sound too formal and disconnected from how people actually speak. To sound fluent and natural, you need to be exposed to authentic conversations. In this episode, we’ve selected commonly used English expressions from daily life, covering social, work, and travel situations. These help you move beyond 'textbook English' and start using the real English that native speakers use. Here's the content of this episode, 'Episode 2, Part 12: Interview with Bill Gates.' Keep practicing, and make your English part of your everyday life!

What will the information highway be here? One of the key propositions in the book is that this will be a more evolutionary process than many people have suggested. That is, the PC will continue to get better. The internet will have more and more cool content on it. People will be connecting up at higher speeds through ISDN and PC cable modems. And so those are hearing now things that companies are going after, and there's a real business case for them. The ultimate where you connect up all the video devices, or as we say, information appliances in the book, will take quite some time. I still believe that within a decade, pretty much that ultimate vision will be available to a lot of people around the world.

Why did you decide to write a book now? I think if I'd known how much time it would take to write a book, I might not have done a book. I did think it was a great time to share some thoughts on the potential of the technology and take some of the themes that come up again and again as I talk about the topic, the fears that people have, the dreams that people have, and share those to widen the debate and really make my contribution to what should be a very broad discussion about the future.

How will the information highway affect social interaction? Well, I think probably the most difficult thing to predict about the electronic world is how it will affect socialization. This is not an area that people change very rapidly, and yet the idea of being able to get so much information about the neat things going on in town and how you can get there when it's scheduled, what your friends thought about it, you'll see them in you before you go to the restaurant. That information access part, I think, will be a great success. The bigger question though is whether you'll really make friends this way, whether somebody who's elderly can't get out as much, can share their video with other people playing games, go into forums where you have common interests and talk about what should be done, and the possibilities for socialization will be vast. It may be that it's really the young generation growing up with these tools right now that will take this to its fullest potential, and that my generation or people older will always hold back and think of it primarily as an information tool.

What changes in education can be expected? In many areas, there's going to have to be a lot of experimentation before you figure out how to take full advantage of what the highway offers, and the classroom is a fantastic example of that. Clearly with the highway, you can have teachers who specialize in bringing the subject to life, sharing their ideas about how to make a subject engaging with all the other teachers and students throughout the world. The idea of having all the students come together in a group will still be very important for group problem-solving, for them to hear things that other students came up with or things that other students were confused about, but there may also be parts where you can go off and explore the learning material individually or in very small groups, say two or three kids, all in front of a screen, navigating together and deciding where they want to take that learning experience. You're able to track what kids do as they're navigating and have the teacher be aware of that, how far did they get, and what questions were they able to answer, well, what other topics did they go off into, where did they kind of pause? And so we need to get the equipment into the schools, we need to get the training into the schools, we need to have incentives for building this rich and interactive material that can compete with the TV quality things that all these kids are so used to, and yet be used for learning purposes.

What has been your key to success? Well, coming up with a simple explanation for the kind of success that I've been privileged to be part of working at Microsoft is very difficult. Certainly there's many elements to it, the vision of the company coming right when the microprocessor was coming into its own, the focus on software and working with partners who could bring in the other elements, the focus on the long term, hiring great people, really working with customers, knowing that we'd be there working with them 10 years later and 20 years later, all of those have come together to build a great success story that's been incredibly fun to be part of. I think the people is probably the thing I've put at the top, vision has got to be a big part of it, but so many of these things really come down to day-to-day execution. If we'd slacked off at any point, then there would have been plenty of people to come in and take our place. And that's certainly the case as we look forward, that we have to continue to obsolete the products, continue to stay in close touch with the customers, continue to hire in great people and stay on top of the technology or else the phenomenon will continue, but we won't have the role in it that we have today.

What's ahead for Bill Gates? The thing that really gets me energized is how much fun it is to come in every day and work with smart people on very tough, but important problems. So I'm having a lot of fun. I think my job is probably the best job in the world as we go down this path. And month by month make progress and figure out what contribution we can make. I think it's safe to say I'm about halfway through my career because I can't imagine being over 60 and still being on top of it. Maybe when I get to be 60, I'll change my mind and have a different view of it. But I see my future as continuing to play the same role at Microsoft that I have and just bringing a lot of focus and energy to that job.

Above is the content of Episode 2, Part 12: Interview with Bill Gates, organized by Qicaiwang. We hope it helps you!