Bill Gates on the Role of the PC

I think people are greatly underestimating the continued importance of the PC. The PC is where the center of action is today, and that’s where it will continue to be, where people get unbelievable flexibility.

When people work with consumer information, they don’t just want to look at it, they also want to organize it, they want to edit it, and they want to share it. And that’s where having that full screen interface, processing power, and incredible disk capacity gives the PC a very unique role.

PCs have the local power for photos, music, editing, and searching. One of the PC’s roles will be to service the different peripherals in your house—the picture frames, the music playing devices, etc. Instead of having a disk in each one of those devices, and manage getting the information back and forth from the PC to all those disks, the data can simply exist on the PC. So you have one copy of your music files, and unless you want to walk away and take the media with you, you don’t have to think about moving that around. Likewise, for the photos, or the videos, or the games you want to play. So we’re taking the PC and using the wireless infrastructure to make its capabilities available throughout the home.