How Bill Gates Works

ZZeta writes "What's a day like for the richest man on Earth? In this Fortune interview, Bill Gates explains what he does on his average workday. Most interesting? He is not into some of Outlook's features, such as to-do lists and email notification. Also, he works with three monitors and is looking forward to buying a digital whiteboard next year." I was interested in how he gets his e-mail filtered. Hey Bill, if you read this, I'll totally put you on my e-mail whitelist!

The Technology Hasn't Been Up To Snuff

[eldavojohn]

I use a digital whiteboard at work. It's placed on top of a multi-thousand dollar plasma screen and and the whiteboard itself cost thousands also. I think the company that makes it is called Smarttech [smarttech.com]. It's a nice thing but there are many frustration/time consuming aspects of it. If I were a billionaire, I wouldn't want to waste my time fiddling with a whiteboard that--in the end--would give me a little better control over my demos and presentations.

What I'm trying to say is that I bet he was waiting for this technology to get to a point where maybe the two units came as one and were more sleekly integrated. The maintenance/recalibration of this thing is a pain and there are times when we have customers sitting in front of us and we're trying to present to them but we have to run through some diagnostics.

Not cool.

Now imagine those customers were interested in million dollar contracts with you.

Re:huh?

[aug24]

Presumably he doesn't think they are quite there yet. Certainly the ones I've used haven't been good enough (they printed on heat-paper, rather than created vector graphics and emailing the file to me).

J.

Re:Ikea beats Microsoft?

[TERdON]

Nope, not anymore. Ingvar Kamprad used to be though, when the IT market flushed, making all BG's stock more or less worthless.

Re:Ikea beats Microsoft?

[Bromskloss]

Ingvar Kamprad used to be though

That's a man who really lives on the cheap, though. Far more than most western people, it seems. He's kind of known for that. And is not very much into modern things like mobile phones.

Re:Ikea beats Microsoft?

[__aapmdj9174]

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/03/07/06billionai res_worlds-richest-people_land.html [forbes.com]

1 William Gates
2 Warren Buffett
3 Carlos Slim Helú
4 Ingvar Kamprad
5 Lakshmi Mittal
6 Paul Allen
7 Bernard Arnault
8 Prince Alwaleed
9 Kenneth Thomson
10 Li Ka-shing

Re:How he gets his email filtered

[tpgp]

... I read an article in which he was quoted saying that he had a small staff that personally goes through his email.

Four million Spam a day - here's the article [guardian.co.uk] for ya, and a quote from it:

Unlike ordinary people though, Mr Gates doesn't get a sore finger from deleting unwanted missives. The company has a team of people dedicated to ensuring he only gets mail that he wants to read.

Look's like he'll have to find some other way to make his finger sore :-(

Snake Plant

[genghis_1971]

I noticed the snake plant in the background and can only wonder if the name appealed to him. On the other hand a snake plant is a hearty plant that requires little attention and is a wise decision for an office plant. "How many people here have telekinetic powers? Raise my hand."

Re:Outlook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here it is: €
Try HTML Formatted and use € for the Euro symbol

Re:Is he watching?

[mslinux]

Saving up for a digital whiteboard. Right.

Wealthy people tend to save money. This may be difficult for non-wealthy people to realize, but it's true. The average millionaire in the US drives a 10 year old car... didn't we just read about the Head of Ikea driving a 14 year old Volvo? If you want to be wealthy, you budget, plan and spend accordingly, you don't rush out and buy trinkets whenever a whim strikes you and you don't get a new car lease (fleece) every couple of years.

Re:Not everyone can afford multiple monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's MSVDM powertoy provides you with multiple workspaces.

Re:HSW

[Y0tsuya]

Sure, let's all conveniently forget all the time and money he's spending to help the poor all over the world. What have YOU done lately?

A lot of FOSS and /. readers seem to think that working on open source will "make everything all right". Well, it's all nice and well, but let's not kid ourselves. Basically, poor folks living in dumps all over the world don't give a rat's ass about open source.

When I see posts like this I'm reminded of the south park episode where all the hippies gather to "change the world" and "stick it to the little Eichmans" by having a hippie jam festival. It's all just mental masturbation.