In Secret Hideaway, Bill Gates Ponders Microsoft's Future
One way to peek into technology's crystal ball last month was to take a winding road into a cedar forest in the Pacific Northwest to seek out one of tech's top thinkers. A sunny Thursday afternoon found him waiting alone behind the gate of his secluded cottage.
"Hi, thanks for coming," said Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates , appearing eager for company after four days alone at the waterfront cottage. He was there for his "Think Week," a seven-day stretch of seclusion he uses to ponder the future of technology and then propagate those thoughts across the Microsoft empire.
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It's a twice-yearly ritual that can influence the future of Microsoft and the tech industry. A Think Week thought can give the green light to a new technology that millions of people will use or send Microsoft into new markets. One week in 1995 inspired Mr. Gates's paper, "The Internet Tidal Wave," that led Microsoft to develop its Internet browser and crush Netscape. Plans to create Microsoft's Tablet PC, build more-secure software and start an online videogame business were also catalyzed during Think Weeks.
Mr. Gates's retreats are famous in the computer industry, but what happens in them has been a tightly held corporate secret. Mr. Gates agreed to show his hideaway to a reporter, the first journalist to visit in the many years he's been holding Think Weeks, on the condition that the location be kept secret.
The week typically starts with Mr. Gates, 49 years old, taking a helicopter or seaplane to the two-story clapboard cottage on a quiet waterfront. It's a tidy, relatively modest place with a small bedroom for Mr. Gates. During the week he bars all outside visitors -- including family and Microsoft staff -- except for a caretaker who slips him two simple meals a day.
He starts the morning in bed poring through papers mostly by Microsoft engineers, executives and product managers and scribbling notes on the covers. Skipping breakfast, he patters upstairs in his stocking feet to read more papers. Noon and dinnertime bring him back downstairs to read papers over meals at the kitchen table, where he has a view of the Olympic Mountains. Thursday's lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches and clam chowder. His main staple for the week, he said, is a steady stream of Diet Orange Crush.
Four days into this Think Week, Mr. Gates had read 56 papers, working 18 hours straight some days. His record is 112 papers. "I don't know if I'll catch my record, but I'll certainly do 100," he said. Among the unread papers: "10 Crazy Ideas to Shake Up Microsoft."
What had he read of interest this week? "Actually, let's go upstairs real quick and I'll show you, because that's where I spend all my time," he responded, as he popped out of his chair and bounded up the stairs two steps at a time, landing in his upstairs study.
Facing the windows with a water view stood a desk with two Dell personal-computer monitors. To the side was a bookshelf lined with "The Great Books" series of literature classics. A portrait of Victor Hugo hung on the wall. A bathroom and a small refrigerator, stocked with Diet Orange Crush and Diet Coke, were added to the office in recent years, Mr. Gates said, so he could maximize his reading time by not having to go downstairs. Papers in bright orange covers littered the floor, their pages stamped "Microsoft Confidential."
'Virtual Earth'
Standing at his desk with ink-stained hands, Mr. Gates flipped through a 62-page paper titled "Virtual Earth," covered with his notes. It described future mapping services that deliver travel directions with live images of destinations and details on traffic conditions and other information. Some of the ideas he later dismissed as "overly Jetsons," but he prefaced the comments he would send to its authors with a ringing endorsement: "I love the vision here."
Mr. Gates settled behind the PC monitors, which displayed a database of nearly 300 papers for this week. Among the topics: the growth of Internet video, hard-drive capacity and the diminishing advances in microprocessor "clock speed," historically the driver of PC-market growth. Other paper topics include trends in digital photography, computing trends in 2005 and ways for software to better handle languages like Vietnamese.
"There's one here on security that's just a breakthrough," Mr. Gates said, tipping forward in his chair and clicking on a paper titled "Can We Contain Internet Worms?" from Microsoft's research group in England. Tellingly, 31 papers on the list -- the largest category -- were on software security, a critical problem for Microsoft. The worm paper describes a new way Microsoft might stop the spread of a type of destructive code that has plagued the Internet lately.
Think Week's reading and thinking spawns a flood of e-mail and comments from Mr. Gates. A paper might inspire an e-mail to dozens of employees around the world. Employees anticipate the week with hopes that their projects will get a green light or influence the company's direction. "It's the world's coolest suggestion box," says Stephen Lawler, a Microsoft general manager of the MapPoint group.
Working until the wee hours the night before, Mr. Gates had begun spreading his thoughts on the worm paper around the world. In an e-mail to Microsoft executives, he mused that the approach seemed almost too good to be true and might have a flaw. But if it doesn't, he explained out loud, "we've got to deploy this thing." By morning, he had e-mail responses from as far away as Cambridge, England.
Mr. Gates has held some form of Think Week since the 1980s, first as a quiet time to visit his grandmother while reading and strategizing. Think Week's material has evolved from heaps of paper reports to a computerized library that has fields for Mr. Gates to enter comments and links to related documents -- backed up by paper versions.
Two months before Mr. Gates's February seclusion, his technical assistant, Alex Gounares, collected papers from every corner of Microsoft and culled what he thought should be Mr. Gates's priorities. It's an open call for papers that lets employees of any level reach the top with their ideas.
Some papers make pleas for more people and money but most are focused on technology trends and development. Mr. Gates says he finds the latter "more relaxing" to read. "They're rarely saying, 'We're doomed. Give me $100 million and we won't be doomed anymore.' "
Keeping Pace
Mr. Gates got a head-start reading over the weekend, arriving at his retreat Monday. But he was already worried about his pace the next day. "I had worked so hard. I had worked 24 hours" yet had only finished a dozen papers. One of them was a 120-pager titled "The Book of Xenon" that details plans for Microsoft's next videogame machine, codenamed Xenon, and posits a videogames strategy for the next 20 years.
He soon hit his stride, reading the 80-page "Education Product Strategy at Microsoft" on how to hone the company's appeal to the education market. He responded to the authors online, promising that "we're going to get some progress" toward the paper's recommendations, adding that it would be a "tragedy" if the project's funding ended, one author said later. Mr. Gates said he e-mailed a note telling Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to read the paper.
Working through midnight Tuesday, Mr. Gates was feeling punchy. Reading a paper titled "Speech Synthesis," he says he began reading aloud words like "anger," "boredom" and "playfulness," pronouncing each in the emotional tone it evoked. "It was two in the morning so I was being goofy," he said.
For breaks, Mr. Gates allowed himself five minutes to solve a daily online bridge problem. On Wednesday, he donned shoes for the first time and left the cottage to stroll the beach for 30 minutes. "I just walked outside thinking about, actually, video on the Internet," he said.
As the sun set over the lake Thursday, Mr. Gates vowed to read 24 more papers by bedtime. "Tonight, because I'm pretty well slept now, I'll go until like two or three," he said.
By week's end, Mr. Gates would read 100 papers, send e-mails to hundreds of people and write a Think Week summary for executives. He would send his top executives a reading list, including papers on software security and the growing power of cellphones.
The effects of this Think Week are rippling through Microsoft. Yusuf Mehdi, vice president in the MSN online group, says he lugged a 6-inch-thick printout of Mr. Gates's Think Week comments on a business trip. In the Office-software division, one group says it used Mr. Gates's comments to change direction on whether to team up with or acquire certain companies. (They won't say which way.) A team member was soon in Europe meeting potential partners.
In the MapPoint unit, source of the "Virtual Earth" paper, Mr. Lawler, the general manager, called a meeting to brainstorm on Mr. Gates's comments. Mr. Gates put the kibosh on certain ideas. But word of his endorsement of the paper's overall vision had spread across Microsoft, and several other groups including Microsoft's research arm are now involved in the project.
Craig Bartholomew's spirits lifted when he opened an e-mail with Mr. Gates's comments on his group's education-strategy paper. Mr. Bartholomew, the group's general manager, quickly instructed his team to factor the insights into product plans and posted Mr. Gates's comments on an internal Web site to solicit input from the group. Before Think Week, there was "hope but there wasn't belief" that the team's plans would fly, he says. "People in my group are optimistic now."
In the weeks since returning to his regular schedule, Mr. Gates has settled into a stretch of follow-up meetings spawned by Think Week, including two, he says, on security strategy. Last week he huddled for two hours with the Virtual Earth team helping plot the group's next move.
Mr. Gates is well aware of the potential impact of his comments and doesn't take writing them lightly. "If I write a comment that says, 'We should do this,' things will be re-orged, engineers will move," he says. "It's not like I can just read this paper and say, 'Hey, cool, looks good.' They'll assign 20 people to it then."
盖茨闭关修炼 酝酿微软未来
上个月，如果你有机会一窥蕴藏了科技行业未来的水晶球，那么就会看到太平洋西北沿岸一片浓密的雪松林中一条曲折蜿蜒的道路，它带你穿越林海通往科技业顶级智囊人物的隐居之地。上周四一个阳光灿烂的午后，他悠然端坐门后，好像正在等候远道而来的客人。
“嗨，欢迎光临！”迎接你的是微软公司(Microsoft Corp.)董事长比尔?盖茨(Bill Gates)热情洋溢的问候。在这座临水别墅独自一人潜居四天之后，他似乎很高兴看到有人来访。这周是盖茨例行“闭关修炼”的时间，这七天里他远离尘嚣，凝神思考科技业的未来，然后把所思所想传遍整个微软帝国。
这个每年两次的仪式意义非凡，不但会影响微软的前景，也能勾画整个科技业的未来。为期一周的潜心修炼能为科技行业找出几个新领域，为微软开拓几个上百万人的新市场点亮一盏明灯。1995年那周，盖茨写出了享誉全球的论文──《互联网浪潮》(The Internet Tidal Wave)，带领微软开发出了最终击败网景(Netscape)的互联网浏览器。微软Tablet PC、种种更安全的软件、开创网络游戏业务等等构想都是在盖茨“闭关”这一周勾勒成形的。
盖茨的“闭关周”在电脑行业闻名遐迩，但这期间发生了什么却是微软公司的绝密档案。开始闭关数年后，盖茨终于同意在隐居之地破天荒招待一名记者，但前提是不能泄露具体地点。
盖茨往往乘坐一架直升机，或者水上飞机抵达这里。这是一座看似普通的两层结构的小木屋，临水而建，四周宁静优雅，室内井然有序，一间不大的卧室供盖茨起居之用。整整一周，他闭门谢客，不论是家人还是微软同事概莫能入。只有一个门房每天给他送两次饭。
早上醒来后，一般他并不下床，而是呆在床上浏览微软工程师、高级管理人员和产品经理们的各色报告，在报告封面上草草写些摘要。他常常不吃早餐，穿上袜子就急匆匆上楼继续审阅报告。只有午餐和晚餐的时候他才下楼，在餐桌旁一边看报纸一边吃饭。从餐桌边看出去，奥林匹克山跃然入目。周四的午餐是烤芝士三文治配蛤蜊浓汤。盖茨说，他这一周常喝节食橙汁。
这是闭关周的第四天，盖茨已经读了56份报告，有几天曾连续工作18个小时。他的最高纪录是一周阅读了112份报告。“不知道这次能不能打破纪录，但我至少能看100份，”他说。那堆还没读的报告中，有一份赫然写著《震动微软的10个疯狂念头》(10 Crazy Ideas to Shake Up Microsoft)。
这周看到了什么有趣的内容吗？“说实在的，我们还是快点上楼，到那儿再看吧，我大部分的时间都是在那儿过的。”他一边说，一边起身，一步两个台阶地上了楼，这儿是他的书房。
正对著窗户的是一张书桌，从这里正好可以欣赏窗外的水景。桌上摆著两台戴尔(Dell)显示器。书桌旁边立著一个书柜，里面是整套《文学经典》系列。墙上挂著一幅法国大文豪雨果(Victor Hugo)的肖像。盖茨指著旁边一个小冰箱和卫生间解释道，这是最近这几年添置的。冰箱里摆满了节食橙汁和健怡可乐(Diet Coke)，为的是不用下楼可以阅读更多文件。浅黄色封面的报告摊了一地，上面都盖著“微软机密”的印章。
盖茨两手墨迹斑斑，迅速翻动著桌上一份厚厚62页的报告──《虚拟地球》(Virtual Earth)，他在封面上写了几句评语。报告畅想了地图服务业的未来，向客户传送旅行目的地的实时图像，以及交通状况和其他有关信息。其中有些想法盖茨后来说“太超前了”，但他写在封面上准备返回给报告人的评语却很鼓舞人心：“我喜欢这个主意。”
盖茨在显示器前坐了下来，电脑屏幕上展示著他这周要看的大约300份报告，都输入了数据库。主题五花八门：互联网游戏的发展、硬盘容量、微处理器时钟速度优势渐失,还有数码照相趋势、2005年电脑计算发展趋势、语言处理软件优化方法等等。
“有一份关于电脑安全的报告，的确是个突破，”盖茨说著，身体前倾，用鼠标点开了一份题为《我们能否扫除互联网蠕虫？》的报告。这是微软在英格兰某个研究小组提交的报告。在“软件安全”──微软最严峻的难题──类目下一共31份报告，是所有类别中最多的。这份关于蠕虫的报告描述了一种新方法，微软或许能够以此制止这种最近给互联网带来极大损害的病毒代码。
闭关一周中的阅读和思考会让盖茨发出难以计数的电子邮件和评语。看完一份报告引发的思考可能会通过一封电子邮件传达给微软全球各地的数十名微软员工。员工们满怀期待地静候这一周，希望他们提议的项目能得到盖茨的批准，或者对公司的发展方向施加影响。“这可是全世界最棒的意见箱，”微软MapPoint集团的总经理史蒂芬?劳勒(Stephen Lawler)说。
周三晚上一直工作到凌晨，盖茨已经把他对这份蠕虫报告的想法传遍了微软在世界各地的许多员工。在一封写给微软高级管理层的电子邮件中，他深思熟虑地说，这个办法太完美了，令人难以置信，恐怕会有漏洞。但如果没有，他言之凿凿地说，“我们就要实施。”周四一大早，他就收到了远在英格兰剑桥的研究团队发回的邮件。
从80年代开始，盖茨就定期找机会静修一周，起初是为了安安静静不受打扰地陪伴祖母一周，同时读读书，构想一下微软的发展战略。后来，这一周阅读内容从厚厚几摞报告逐渐演变成一个庞大的电脑文库，每一份都留出盖茨加评语的地方，以及和其他相关文件链接的地址。每一份文件都有打印稿。
盖茨今年2月份“闭关”的前两个月，他的技术助理亚历克斯?古纳里斯(Alex Gounares)就从微软各处收集报告，从中遴选出他认为值得一看的报告供盖茨审阅。微软内部各个部门任何级别的员工都可以提交报告，把自己的想法告诉盖茨。
有些报告申请更多资金更多人手，但大多数报告都专门讨论某种技术发展趋势和发展状况。盖茨说，后一种读起来“更让人放松”。“他们很少会说，‘我们已经走投无路，在给我1亿美元，我们就能走出困境。'”
这一周实际上从周一开始算起，但他已经在这之前的周末就开始审阅报告了。就这样他现在还在为第二天的进度担心。“我工作非常努力，甚至每天工作24小时，”但只看了几十份报告。他看完的报告中，有一份题为《Xenon之书》，详细讨论了微软下一代游戏机Xenon的开发计划，以及微软未来20年游戏机业务的发展战略，整整120页厚。
盖茨很快继续前进，开始读80页厚的《微软教育产品战略》，展望微软在教育市场的未来。他从网上联络这份报告的作者，许诺要根据报告中的建议“做出一些进展”。报告作者之一后来透露，盖茨当时还说如果项目资金枯竭不啻是一场“灾难”。盖茨说，他已经给微软首席执行长史蒂夫?巴尔默(Steve Ballmer)发了电子邮件，让他好好看看这份报告。
盖茨说，周二晚上他一直工作到午夜，不免觉得头昏脑胀。当时他正在看一份题为《演讲合成》的报告，就开始声情并茂地大声读出报告中的词汇，比如“愤怒”、“无聊”、“有趣”等。“那已经是凌晨两点了，我开始有点犯傻了，”盖茨说。
作为休息，盖茨会玩上5分钟每日网络桥牌游戏。周三，他从抵达后第一次穿上鞋，走出小屋，到湖边散布了半小时。“我只不过到外面走走，实际上在想网络视频，”他说。
周四傍晚，太阳渐渐落到湖的那一边，盖茨下决心睡前再看24份报告。“我睡得不错，所以今晚能工作到半夜两、三点。”他说。这样，到周末他就能看完100份报告，给上百人发了电子邮件，写完了闭关周报告交高级管理层研读。他还要给高层管理人员列一份阅读清单，包括软件安全和移动电话的威力不断增加等内容。
这一周凝神静思的结果会在微软内部掀起层层涟漪。MSN业务部门副总裁尤素福?迈赫迪(Yusuf Mehdi)说，有一次出差途中，他把盖茨闭关周的评语都打出来看，打了整整6英寸厚。微软Office软件部门的一个小组说，他们根据盖茨的建议调整了方向，是同某家公司合作还是乾脆把它收购了事。（他们不肯说最后到底选择了哪条路。）见到盖茨的评语后，一位小组成员很快出发到欧洲会晤潜在的合作伙伴。
在MapPoint部门，也就是提交了《虚拟地球》构想的那个部门，总经理劳勒召集了一次会议，根据盖茨的评语集思广益讨论进一步发展。盖茨给某些想法打上了“异想天开”的标签，但认可了这份报告的整体构想，寥寥数语传遍了整个微软，几个研究小组已经投入了研发工作。
盖茨的邮件点燃了克雷格?巴索罗梅(Craig Bartholomew)的热情，正是他领导的团队提交了微软教育市场战略构想，得到盖茨的关注。作为部门总经理，他立即下令，组建了一个工作小组，把盖茨的建议落实到产品计划中去。他还在内部网站上张贴了盖茨的评语，征求部门员工对这个计划的意见和建议。他说，在盖茨闭关这一周之前，大家对这个项目能否启动“抱有希望，但不敢肯定。现在每个人都非常乐观。”
这一周后盖茨重返日常工作的轨道，紧接其后的几周他召开了一连串的会议，把他在闭关期间的种种想法传播到微软各处，其中两项与软件安全战略有关。上周他还同“虚拟地球”研发小组一起呆了两个小时，帮助他们规划下一步行动。
盖茨很清楚自己的评语会产生怎样的影响，所以从不轻易落笔。“如果我写：‘应该这么干’，各方面就会重新调整，工程师闻风而动，”他说，“这可不像我说‘嗨，真棒，看起来不错’，这一句话就能让他们为某个项目再投入20个人。”
