Over 1,000 directors gathered to hear Microsoft founder Bill Gates talk about everything from managing growth to managing poverty. Andrew Main Wilson was there to ask the questions

Before Bill Gates arrives on stage, a short film is shown. With good humour, it depicts Gates's last day at Microsoft and his attempts to find a role afterwards. Contributions came from Bono, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and Steven Spielberg. As we all know, his role after Microsoft will not be a guitarist for U2, Democratic nominee for President, or indeed the lead role in Spielberg's latest film. He will turn his efforts full-time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is focused on delivering better health to Africa.

Before sitting down to answer questions on Microsoft and the Foundation, Gates spoke about technology and the changes facing the world. The process of change, he said, is accelerating. "We are living in an increasingly digital world. There are already one billion PCs in the world and a third of them have broadband access. This will make entertainment over the internet more accessible. Everything from newspapers to music and TV will be available and delivered over the internet in the next 10 years," he said.

Noting how the speed of change in technology and software had far outstripped innovation in other sectors, he pointed to the fact that few other sectors could match the rate of development. "Technology might improve productivity in the food sector by five or 10 per cent in a year, whereas the processing power of computers is doubling every two years."
This, he said, was good news for owners of small businesses. "This equalises things between small businesses and large businesses. Now it's harder to distinguish between large and small. Everyone can have a well designed website and can incorporate things, such as video content. Web technology has been a democratising influence in business."

He explained that Microsoft currently spends some $6bn a year on research. "To do this, we have to put our money where our predictions are."

Gates predicted that the computing devices we use every day will get smaller and more powerful. And more of these devices—if not all—will be internet enabled. Gates added that this greater connectivity will be a driving force in the move to access all major software via the internet. This idea of software as a service (SAAS) is one central to Microsoft's vision for the future. "Modern business is about effective collaboration. Software over the internet allows partners to collaborate more effectively and to communicate better. This enhances workflow and improves communication, which leads to greater productivity," he said.

Gates predicted that the way we interact with computers will change. "We are moving away from the keyboard and mouse, towards greater use of speech, pens and especially touch."

At this point Gates unveiled the Microsoft Surface—a computer where the top surface is also the screen. The PC projects images on to the surface and captures images traced on the surface—thus making it able to copy writing, or act as a touch screen. One use for this will be the ability to create personalised products in a retail environment, taking a standard product and personalising it while being able to see what you are doing in three dimensions.

Ultimately this could lead to a new type of workplace computer, with the current desktop computer replaced by a computer "in the desk", with the touch and drag screen able to capture handwriting. Likewise, it could lead to the concept of "networked whiteboards", able to capture notes and drawings and share these ideas more widely.

"The computer almost disappears, but at the same time it becomes more powerful." As he moves out of the business world and into the Foundation, it's perhaps a fitting epitaph for Gates himself.

Andrew Main Wilson: All of us want teams to work together to generate revenues. You have recruited plenty of high-intellect people. How do you harness those intellects and egos into a cohesive team?

Bill Gates: That's a huge challenge. Often the IQs can subtract, rather than adding up, which is what you'd like to see. You can use technology so that once you pick a goal everyone can see how they are meeting that or falling short. But more important is how you pick the people in the first place. And how you organise them. Early on we had a tendency to say 'if you are a top engineer, this management thing... just go and read a book and be nice to people'. What counts is selecting the people for their collaborative ability and how they draw in the experts and create a team.
And it's interesting how many of the non-engineers turn out to be good at saying to the engineers 'how can we do it differently, how can we do it better?' and that's led to pretty cohesive teams.

Jack Welch has said that however talented the individual, if the team ethic wasn't there he either didn't recruit them, or got rid of them. What do you do with geniuses that aren't team players?

I think there is room for geniuses, somewhere. If they are sitting there, doing the design and working on things you can create a special environment for them and sometimes that's worth doing. But as they move up and want responsibility for broader decisions then I agree with Jack that it isn't enough to be very smart. People have to enjoy working with you and for you—and you have to set an example. 

Were there moments when you were growing the business that you thought 'this is a big risk, even for me' and that gave you a few sleepless nights? And if so, what advice have you got for managing stress as you're growing a business?

There have certainly been a few stressful points along the way. I'd say try and avoid being sued by anyone, particularly your own government. That's really stress-inducing... especially if it's unjust. As a company grows you do go through a mode change. In the early Microsoft, I would write most of the code and would look over any other code that was written. As we got past 20 people I couldn't review all the code and I had to trust other people to do it. As we got to multiple products, I had to make sure we thought like a multi-product organisation. From 10 employees to 70,000 we've had times when we've had to think, we're now global and we've got broader products. We always had a disdain for management overhead, so at each level we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves and create too much process. We always did the new process two years later than we should have.

Imagine that you were a college kid again with a few hundred dollars in the bank. What business would you start and why?

Science is always where the cool new things happen. So in biology, if I had an insight into great new drugs that could cure diseases that would be fun, or in energy where there's a need for something that's cheaper than we already have and without the environmental impact. And if you knew which one of those would work and you got it right, that is a Microsoft-sized opportunity. But I would still say that software is the coolest thing. Software is a kind of enabling element and is used by all those other people. Hopefully I'd pick something Microsoft had missed, because that's how you make it, by picking something that the big guy has a blind spot for.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has endowment assets of $30bn and Warren Buffett has given another $31bn. But with 40 per cent of the world's population living on less than $2 a day, how do you prioritise the hundreds of potential projects?

The thing that we've picked to be the majority of what we do is global health. That is, taking on the diseases that are still rampant among the poor [but] not in the rich countries. For example, malaria has been eliminated from Europe and the US, but it is killing over one million people a day in Africa. One of the things I've learned is that as you improve health, population growth goes down. Parents are having a lot of kids to have a high chance of some surviving into adulthood. As you improve health, population growth declines, so feeding and educating and providing jobs become more reasonable.

There are many of the top-five diseases—Aids, TB, malaria, diarrhoea and respiratory disease—that we can make major breakthroughs on in the next 10 years. Governments don't fund that kind of drug discovery, they don't bring scientists together and take those risks. That's the sort of thing a software company or a pharmaceutical company does. We saw a chance for a breakthrough and we saw the tragedy and the inequity that those lives are not treated as being as valuable. We knew we needed a focus, so that became the thing that over half of our activities are focused on. And as we make these improvements it will help all those other things.

If you look at what you've achieved in business and your experience in world poverty and education issues, it makes sense that your next step might be to run as a senator or maybe even for president one day. Does that fill you with horror or do you think that's a great opportunity?

I'm certainly not going to do it. I work with politicians and get them to tell the story of why voters should be good about generosity. But my role is full time at the Foundation and making sure we've got the best malaria scientists and the best TB scientists and that the whole aid system is measurable.

Coming up with the Millennium Goals was something that I drove because I didn't see the metrics in the development world, which we take as given in business. So there's a lot of reform and improvement we can do. It helps being off on the side and working with government and development agencies and filling our unique role—that's the highest impact. Running for an election, and worrying about the next election, I don't think I'll get into that.

A list from Forbes last year showed there were 946 billionaires on the planet. Are you going to try and persuade the others to follow the example set by yourself and Warren Buffett?

Absolutely. But I'm going to do it in a friendly way. I'll tell them it can have a lot of impact and I'll tell them how much fun I'm having. There's a sense that this philanthropy is wasted money and that these countries are tough to work with. We're trying to show the success stories and show you can be concrete about these things so more people are drawn in.

We need more philanthropy, we need more business involvement—I use the term creative capitalism to talk about drawing more businesses in. We need government aid to be even more generous. All these resources are necessary. Even as big as the foundation is in terms of drug delivery systems or education, we're actually a fairly small piece. We need to work in partnership with the others and drive generosity.