At the recent Mix n Mash event, each of the nine attendees had an opportunity to ask Bill Gates a question. I'm sure that like me, the others had hundreds of questions they would have liked to ask, so this was a little difficult. My husband had been building his own list of questions for me to ask ... each time something didn't work on his computer or with Internet Explorer. I didn't choose from these questions, however. ;-)

What I did ask him, which just came to me when it was my turn, was if he had any visions for Microsoft that he hoped would come to fruition even though he won't be there to drive it anymore (as he goes to work on the Gates Foundation full time as of July 1).

His response was surprising because I was not aware of how Microsoft looks to the future.

To begin with, he said that what is always the driving force behind everything they plan for is the question of what should computers be able to achieve.

Then he explained about the "quests" that a number of people partcipate in a few times a year. During these quests, they have a set of communities that they try to create goals for. The communities number about 6 and represent different types of computer users, for example students, business people, scientists, etc. Then they ask what should computers be able to acheive for each of these communities ten years from now. Once they have determined those visions, they plan how they can achieve them. This, of course, is where Microsoft Research comes in. MSR is usually working about 5 years ahead of the curve. MSR has an RSS feed for their news which is one way to keep tabs on all of the amazing work they are doing.

While each of the attendees was given a copy of the transcript from the entire hour, Keith Peters is posting it in sections on his blog, so I will point you to the blog post that has my Q&A along with Kelly Goto's so you can read exactly what Gates replied.

He mentions Lily in his response. This is Lily Cheng who I was so thrilled to meet at the Women in IT Luncheon at TechEd a few years ago. Lily focuse on social computing at Microsoft Research.