Transcript: Microsoft's Senior Vice President of Research

As senior vice president of research at Microsoft Corp., Richard "Rick" Rashid is charged with thinking far into the future of technology and investing in new ways that computers can shape society. Rashid heads up Microsoft's five research labs -- located in Redmond, Wash.; Silicon Valley; Beijing; Bangalore, India; and Cambridge, England -- that employ 700 scientists in a wide range of fields. In an interview yesterday, Rashid discussed some of his ideas about the future of technology and some of the hurdles Microsoft faces.

Many people seem to think that Microsoft has fallen behind in terms of technology and innovation, mostly because of what's happening with Internet search. Can you tell me about one or two innovative things in the works where you think Microsoft will prove it's still at the forefront of innovation?

Rashid: There's no question Microsoft entered the search business later than some of these other companies. One of the ways I like to look at it -- of having a basic research group like Microsoft Research -- it gives us the ability to rapidly address new competitors or new issues. It gives you a kind of agility that lets you change rapidly. If you look at Microsoft today, a lot of the technologies, I mean a lot of the company, is derived from the research organization. I started the first e-commerce group in the company. The work that went into the tablet PC was originally done in our lab in Cambridge, England. A lot of key technologies that went into the tablet came out of our research group. All the technologies we are now deploying against our competitors in the search space -- and there' s a lot in the pipeline there -- comes from the fact that we've been able to go from nothing to being a strong competitor and having an engine that is very competitive with Google and Yahoo in that space in a short period of time.

It's interesting, people can look at Microsoft and put these blinders on and not see all the innovation, all the things the company does. If you think about where we've been able to take technologies for business, the fact we've expanded our product line now, it literally goes from supercomputers all the way down to wristwatches. There's nobody else that comes close to spanning that collection of computing entities, that collection of product. We operate in consumer space, we operate in the business space, we operate in the scientific space. I think sometimes people get a very narrow perspective of what the company does. We have one of the leading solutions in interactive TV space, yet most people wouldn't even think about that. We're innovating in so many areas. If you sat in the meetings I sit in at Microsoft, and you saw this breadth it is a little daunting sometimes. That's a statement of the original vision of the company, that software really is a key element and is going to be a key element in almost anything.

As computing has changed and as storage has gotten larger, it opens up opportunities for what you can do. Seagate just announced you can buy a terabyte for $700. You could store every conversation you've every had from the time you're born until the time you die on a terabyte of disk and you'll probably have a lot of space leftover. You could take a picture every minute of your life whether you are awake or asleep and you could store it on a terabyte of disk. You're getting to a point now where computers are becoming capable of augmenting human memory.

We have a research project in Cambridge where one of our researchers designed and built a device that just literally takes pictures, it's like a black box for a human being. We call it a SenseCam. The idea behind it was really just to see what you could do. The interesting part of it is the device will take an image of everything in front of you but it also records temperature, motion. What that does is it's a potential way of augmenting an experience you might have. There's some doctors looking at how a device of this type could augment the memory of someone who can't remember when events go by. The initial results out of that are really stunning, some of the most surprising results these doctors have seen. Now you can think of technology doing things you couldn't have thought of before.

So one trend is storage. Another trend is the fact that increasingly we can disperse computing over a wide area. We're doing it accidentally by giving everybody a cell phone. So everybody now that has a cell phone becomes is suddenly a potential data source if they wanted to. You don' t use it that way, but if you wanted to, you could collect temperature, weather conditions with that device. Cars now have navigation devices, many have cell phone capabilities. Will they become potential data collection sources? You have very cheap and inexpensive sensors that lets you do data collection out into the environment. That can do a lot of things for you, like traffic analysis, which means you can do better urban planning, better use of the roads, you can reduce energy consumption, you could make people's lives better. It could also do things like give you more data on the way that resources are being used or the way things are changing.

What kind of tech gadgets you carry around? . . . I wonder how you think that might change over the next 10 years.

I'll just admit it up front: I really like tech gadgets. I love the "smart watch" because I've got my sports scores and traffic and everything, all the time. I carry around one of these, the Pocket PC phone. On this, I've got my pictures, my music, I can put my TV shows from my Media Center PC at home on it. I've got a 2 gigabyte card on here so I can put eight or nine programs. I can do e-mail. And I actually use it as a phone. It's a camera, of course, so I can take pictures. It integrates really well with my whole computing environment. I know that my Outlook mail will show up here, everything integrates together. At E3 [videogame conference], Bill Gates showed off a service that will, later this year, allow you to keep track of your XBox buddies on your cell phone, so I'll look forward to that. Those are ones I carry with me. Obviously the laptop when I need to do a presentation. I don't have any sort of communicator in my shoe, but maybe I could work on that.

There will continue to be a constant progression. You want the information tailored to you. I think what you're going to see evolving is this notion of really a connected world where the devices are in service of you and your task, that they're connected to each other and some data in the sky. When I buy a gadget, whatever function it performs it should have all the things I care about. That's not where we are, we're far from it. But that's where we can go. A week ago at E3, Bill was talking about Live Anywhere. That's a little bit like that vision -- the notion your game console, your PC and your cell phone now all can have the same information. They can have the same games, the same buddy lists and can keep track of what's happening in your virtual world.

Where do you think social networks are going?

People just have a natural need to communicate with each other. We've been organizing running a social networking conference. We've been tryng to take a leadership role in that space, not just for us as a company but working with academia. We've been doing some research, kind of monitoring how people use communication networks, how they exchange data, how they invest trust in each other. Some of that work shows up in our own communities for developer networking communities. So there's been a lot of work there.