Computing, Connecting, Competing: Microsoft Looks Ahead

The social impact of technology is especially hard to predict, says Richard "Rick" Rashid, senior vice president of research at Microsoft Corp. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

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 -- 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. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Q 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?

A There's no question Microsoft entered the search business later than some of these other companies. 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.

As computing has changed and as storage has gotten larger, it opens up opportunities for what you can do. Seagate [Technology LLC] 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. . . .

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. . . . There's some doctors looking at . . . how a device of this type could augment the memory of someone who can't remember.

Another trend is the fact that increasingly we can disperse computing over a wide area. So everybody now that has a cellphone . . . is suddenly a potential data source if they wanted to be. 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 cellphone capabilities. Will they become potential data collection sources? There's a lot of opportunities there.

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

I'll just admit it upfront: 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 the Pocket PC phone. On this, I've got my pictures, my music. I can do e-mail. And I actually use it as a phone. It's a camera, of course. It integrates really well with my whole computing environment. I know that my Outlook mail will show up here, everything integrates together. When I buy a gadget, whatever function it performs, it should have all the things I care about. [It's] the notion that your game console, your PC and your cellphone now all can have the same information. That's not where we are -- we're far from it. But that's where we can go.

Where do you think social networks are going?

We've been doing some research monitoring how people use communication networks, how they exchange data, how they invest trust in each other. People want to be social. We have a strong personal urge to be social, so it's natural, as computing technology becomes better, that we use it for social things.

People often ask me what's the next big thing or what's the world going to be like in 10 years. It's relatively easy for me to tell you how fast processors will be, how much disk storage there will likely be, how fast networks will be. What's really hard to predict is what is the social impact of technology. It even varies by culture. In Europe, they just latched onto the texting. In Korea, people love playing games on their cellphones. It's a huge, multimillion-dollar business there . . . I think that's what's very, very hard to predict.

Microsoft has built its business around proprietary software, and now a lot of that is available for free. Do you think Microsoft will have to change as more people want to personalize and customize software and make it their own, particularly on the Internet?

A lot of times when people talk about proprietary, they say we charge money for what we do and others give it away for free. I think that's less of an issue. If you create something of value that people want, people will pay for it. People buy Linux -- they may not have to, but for someone to get Linux and to install it all by themselves without any effort from all the free places, is actually pretty hard.

How many of your researchers are focused on security issues, and how big of an issue do you think that is going forward?

You have to write software and build systems with the perspective that you have an adversary and in some cases your adversary has more resources than you do. That's the situation that's out there now. It's a constant battle.