Davos 07: Breakfast with Bill and Melinda

Gates, that is, in conversation with Tom Friedman of the New York Times. A lot of discussion about their Foundation - whose vision is that "all lives on the planet are equal." They started, and continue, with long term investment in developing vaccines for HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Investment which may not pay off for 10 to 15 years. But they have expanded into more immediate relief of suffering with drugs for disease and, with the endowment from Warren Buffet last year, are now moving into microfinance and microlending to help people lift themselves out of poverty by developing agriculture in particular. And that's just the Health programme - there's Education too. Theirs is, I suppose, the biggest current example of American philanthropy. As Bill put it:" The rich world has not been as generous to the developing world as it needs to be."

With Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, about to be launched we were given a clue about what to expect. A lot of applications you have to currently download - spyware, destop search, - will be built in. It will be "user centric rather than product centric" and the extra functionality will not cost more or require different hardware.

And he had a vision of the future of the media. For those of us involved in the many discussions about whether newspapers can survive online he believed online micropayments and the development of multiple ad markets would mean the businesses would survive. But more than that he believed technology would develop so that the convenience of online newspapers would "overwhelm print". And he was surprised that people had not recognised the huge revolution in TV that was about to break upon us. On-demand TV over the internet would provide huge choice and the end of the linear schedule with all of its inconvenience. TV online would open up creativity and the "long tail" of niche interest content. As it happens, I agree and have been saying so for some time. But strangely people seem more interested when it's Bill Gates saying it....