The gum would be used to test, painlessly, for malaria in children while the chocolate would serve as a way of getting some of the disease-feeding fat out of a patient’s body. There’s already some promise in these methods and the Gates contribution should certainly keep research going. [Telegraph]

From the Fortune profile on her earlier this year (the first ever):

Moreover, they say, she has helped Bill become more open, patient, and compassionate. “Bullshit!” he bellows. Nicer, perhaps? “No way!” he shouts, grinning because he knows it’s true. One thing he admits readily: Thanks to Melinda, he is easing comfortably into his new role. About the philanthropic work he says, “I don’t think it would be fun to do on my own, and I don’t think I’d do as much of it.”

An all-rounder, Melinda is the girl you remember from school who was top of her class, good at games, popular, and a volunteer. She rose through the ranks at Microsoft, ending up as general manager of information products, before marriage to Bill, and their three children. And now it’s all systems go for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the one-time backroom girl has had to step into the spotlight–not a position she relishes, but where she knows she needs to be in order for the charity fund to realise its full potential.

Would the couple’s foundation, expected to dish out around US$100 billion of goodness in its lifetime, have been created without her influence? Perhaps Bill would still be flogging software to the world and beyond, with Ballmer, his Sancho Panza, riding alongside him. Misunderstood, he might claim, just plain weird, we might whisper as his wealth took him further and further away from reality. Melinda had the foresight to see what an aggressive, capitalist lifestyle would do to their family life and steered him away from it. He, in his wisdom, did not fight it.

The way I see it, most rich, workaholic men tend to marry someone who fits into their lifestyle. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has married a woman who has made him fit into hers. When I read about how she handled him in the parking lot at Microsoft after he asked her out on a date, her ballsiness made me weep with laughter. (”That’s not nearly spontaneous enough for me. I don’t know. Call me up closer to the day.” He called her that night.)

Plans for a trampoline room and nonsense-strosity high-tech in his new-build Seattle home were coolly dismantled without even a squeak from her other half. Melinda is credited for making him more open, patient and compassionate. Last week I watched a BBC documentary about him as he prepared to step down from the day-to-day stuff of Microsoft. “As he has grown older, the ratio of shouting to non-shouting has decreased,” one of his employees said about him. “That’ll be the Melinda effect,” I thought.

She is credited for having brought in a whole host of powerful partners to the couple’s eponymous foundation–not for nothing is she known as a great team-builder. Rockefeller, Hewlett and the Dells are on board, as well as a couple of big pharma companies. Joel Klein, the man who took the government’s anti-trust fight to Microsoft a decade ago, is batting for them on the education front in New York. And then there’s the current world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, who has pledged all his billions to the cause. “I’m not sure,” he said, when asked if he would have done it without Melinda.

Personally, I hope that the Nobel committee does make Gates Nobel Laureate, because that will mean that he did manage to make a difference to the world. And all because she made a difference to him.

Joel Johnson at CES 2005:

I didn’t quite know what to think of it, but I wasn’t going to turn it down. I would ask the hard questions: Does Ballmer really eat children? Can I swim in your Money Bin? I didn’t quite muster the balls to ask those, though, and instead acted like I had real questions or something.

[CES 2005]

Blam at CES 2007:

I’d asked him about the mug shot [from his Albuquerque arrest] and at first he looked a bit apprehensive, but answered. Apparently, Bill loves fast cars. In 1978, he told us, he’d gotten 3 speeding tickets on his drive to move up to Seattle. Two from the same cop. It was a Porsche 911 from that era.

[CES 2007]

Wilson at CES 2008:

When it came to be my turn, I had the warnings and admonitions of Blam to guide me. And sure enough, he didn’t look me in the eye at first, and though he was accommodating with my nervous stuttering, I could tell he was judging the substance of my questions. Mercifully, he little by little began looking more directly at me, and he lit up with answers, even letting his guard down enough to comment frankly about Windows, and the difference between Apple and Microsoft.

Here’s the vid itself, plus various excerpts, shot and digitally mastered by our own Chris Mascari:

Excerpts:

Part 1 – On the difference between Microsoft and Apple

Part 2 – On his changing public image

Part 3 – What he worries about most

Part 4 – On Windows Vista maybe, just maybe, sucking

Aw shit, I just annoyed Bill Gates.

I asked about collaborative tech projects between the Gates Foundation and Microsoft. You could see the question practically crawl up his spine and spill out of his eyes as laser beams of frustration fuelled by my stupidity. I knew should have asked him about his prison record again—after all, it’s a cocktail reception and small talk about his tough youth might’ve been a better icebreaker. His answer is a bit rambly, with several little examples such as micropayments on phones, PC setups donated to libraries and other tech. Then he turns to say he is going, awkwardly, forcefully, but I stop him to say one last thing: “Thank you for what you’ve done in computing for all of us.” You know in about a week he’s retiring from his full time work at Microsoft.

Gates appears on stage in front of many-hued lights with Steve Ballmer, both sitting across from Mossberg and Swisher in bright red leather chairs. It is the first liveblog of All Things D. I warm up my fingers and kick the beer well under my chair, so it would not get in the way. I try to capture the meaning of his words in real time, a familiar feeling washes over me of helplessness. After dozens of liveblogs, I am struggling to comprehend the ramblings of one of the most interesting, richest, smartest people in the world. The last time this happened was a year ago, trying to liveblog Gates with Steve Jobs.

Gates is jovial, carefree, but also speaks in super random clusters of phrases. The phrases are more like strings of bullet points. Yes, bullet pointed tech jargon interjected with business jargon from Ballmer. My mind searches for facts or clear concepts. I could not grasp any. And I realise that it’s not me, it’s Gates.

All through the hour, Mossberg attempted to gets them to face Vista. They talk about 290m units of Vista sold, dodging questions. But no one can get them to say that Vista is an incredible operating system that people love. They talk scale and business, and draw charts on white boards of data flywheels surrounded by the words advertising and publishers, but Bill and Steve could not talk about the product itself. It’s a dead horse, this Vista thing, I know. I use it to illustrate the priorities of the heads of the company—tackling big-scale markets, whether that’s desktop software, or email, or advertising or search—but not so much the intricacies or polish of those actual products. Why ignore that? Tim O’Reilly asks the even bigger question: What the hell are you doing?

He actually said this, more or less this: “You had this Big Hairy Vision for Microsoft: To put a PC on every desktop. You did that. What’s your Big Hairy Vision now?”

Now compared to my question, this is a very good one, even if Microsoft PR probably hated it. You have the company depending on Windows OEM and Office sales, which do well by the scale and brilliance of the business model. But that is undoubtedly part of a vision they’ve already accomplished. What’s the next big thing? Gates should have answered this succinctly. But he didn’t.

Here, as the man’s giant brain grasped at the problem in front of an audience, the response is as fragmented as any:

“We’ve codified the goals into things we call Quests. What is the home going to look like in the next decade? How will you be able to write 1/10th the amount of code that you do today? Why will the IT staffs have no people in them at all? What will information workers’ desks look like? How will they communicate? And we write down those goals and we have offsites to discuss them and how they change. Take interactive TV…”

What is he talking about and what are Microsoft quests? Mary Jo Foley writes about them in her new book, stating that the company has 70 of these visions. The way Bill states them here, they seem more like questions than quests. Saving the Princess is a quest. Defeating terrorism, that’s a big quest. And putting a PC on every desktop, that is more than a quest, that’s a vision. But here, with Microsoft’s most senior decision-makers on stage, it’s very clear they don’t have an answer. Not a good one they can spin at least. That’s Ballmer’s problem now.

The only comparative thread I can see between the PC vision and what they’re doing in advertising is that they can compete in the biggest, most profitable markets they can find using their software expertise. Not quite as romantic as putting a PC on every desk, is it?

The liveblog ends and I fold my laptop into my bag and take a breath. I am looking forward to dinner.

Out of a dozen tables, I drop my bag down at an empty one next to the desserts. I come back after getting a plate of Louisiana steamed shrimp and find Craig Mundie and Bill Gates sitting across from me, and Ester Dyson sitting next to me. I am very very uncomfortable being around all this money, all this brainpower.

Gates is going on about ads as if he is sermonising himself in monotone, with his eyes rolling all over the place, maybe searching the night sky for some random pattern. It is maddening. He’s not listening to anyone and he’s talking about data mining and learning how to target ads in shifting profiles and Ester Dyson is trying to talk to him about reaching consumers in a more effective context, but she’s being drown out a bit by the noise. I just want to say, hey, you can get rich doing this, but no one I know has clicked on a fucking ad in years while rushing through a website. No one I think is smart, that is.

At this point, I’d been listening to Gates’ style of speaking for over 3 hours and I can’t parse it. I am not numeric. I am not super-random. I am not more logical than I am emotional. I am not roboto and I do not compute search, advertising or finance. Our minds are totally out of sync, and though you’d figure hey, it’s Bill, so I should listen, I instead get up and go for a walk. No one looks away from Bill as I slink away from the table, the least significant being in the immediate dining area.

I eat with a friend I bump into, and when I come back there’s a crowd. Bill Gates is there, and Dean Kamen is there, and Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, who looks like a viking version of John Hodgman. Esther is still there and so is Tim O’Reilly. Nathan is leading the talk about curing cancer by filtering the blood and random people from the crowd are shouting out guesses to his questions.

Suddenly, I notice a change in Bill. He is listening. He is speaking clearly. He’s focused, he’s engaged and nodding and leaning into the conversation. Dean Kamen suggests trying a filter he’s worked with before and a fresh treatment idea is born in front of our eyes. Gates nods. He’s looking at Nathan, into his eyes, and switching back to Dean and looking into his eyes and he’s 100% there. He hardly speaks but when he does, out come clear facts and arguments. Gates is making sense and is alive and happy—finally he gets to talk about his new vision. Forget advertising. He’s undoubtedly thinking of the way revolutionary cancer cures can be applied in developed nations and in the less fortunate other half of the world’s population, too. And he’s excited for it.

After all, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s goal–their vision–is to “Treat All Human Life Equally.”

It is at this moment I realise then that Bill already has his new, Big Hairy Vision. It’s Microsoft that still needs a new one.

[Bill Gates' Retirement Party on Giz]

Special thanks to Tim O’Reilly for asking that question

Mossberg asks what’s the difference between your work here and at Microsoft?
Melinda says that there’s a lot of crossover because of advances in tech that aren’t available to the developing worlds. The skill set is very transferable.
Mossberg: What’s the difference between your Foundation and others like it? More money?
Melinda Gates: We can take risks. There’s a market failure for Malaria vaccines, so no one’s done anything on this in awhile. (There’s a traveller’s market, only.) But if we can take on some of that risk and work with the pharmaceutical companies and then distribute through government. We show them that there is a market.

Melinda says they could tap their entire budget by attempting to fix the problems in the education system alone. Their mission is more to help take on that risk which governments cannot in fixing problems.

Mossberg: How do you work with countries with governments that are part of the problem (corrupt, poor) than part of the solution?

Mossberg: Are you applying business principles? More organised than others?
Melinda Gates: We take a very economic and business approach, which doesn’t mean we don’t pay attention to the social issues.

(Bill and Melinda go through a list of diseases and evaluate where they can be most effective.)

Mossberg: Do people tell you how to spend the money?
Bill Carried around a letter in his briefcase for a month about a kid who needed a new liver. It’s hard, but we try to treat all lives with equal value. And the world does not do that. So with that in mind, it’s easier to focus on that.

Melinda: Why does it take 25 years to put a vaccine’s technology in Bangladesh compared to here, today?
There’s no world fund for getting doses to the developing world. There’s a lot of infrastructure problems. And we’ve been adding new vaccines like tetanus and hepatitis. Several million kids die from measles a year, and now its less than 300k. (From the vaccines they’ve helped get out there.)

Bill and Melinda don’t want to do the day to day stuff, but they’ve had a lot of help from people like Bill Gates Senior. She spends a lot of time setting strategy with Bill junior.

Mossberg: Will having Bill around in 30 days full time be annoying? (Jokingly)
Melinda: I knew that Bill wouldn’t wear a tool belt around the house when he retired. He’ll take a sabbatical this summer, he’ll spend a day on special projects at Microsoft that Ballmer wants him to work on, and 2-3 days at the foundation a week. And some time being curious and learning about science, education, etc. We love working on the foundation together and not many days go by at home that we don’t talk about this. Vacations are huge for talking about the foundation, too.

RE education, the US loses a million or so as drop outs. The foundation worked on data measurement. For example, that million only counts senior year drop outs, while it should be measured from freshman year. The other problem is that many graduates aren’t ready for college.

Walt sends his kids to public school. It’s fine, but maybe that’s because of the affluent area.

Melinda: The top 10% of the kids do well in whatever school. The schools track them into their own curriculum. Those parents fight the change and ignore the remainder of the kids. There are parents who demand a better system, but they get no traction because of the money is going in the wrong direction. One of the things they learned is that you can’t just get a good urban school started without working with the city, district and state because the system will just pull it back down. (You can see how these successful people in tech have started applying similarly huge scale system thinking to the education and healthcare system problems —B.L.)

They are focusing in NY with Bloomberg and Joe Klein (who formerly led the case against Microsoft as a monopoly, I believe.) Because they’re willing to be bold and think of things in a business minded way and shut down schools that don’t work and rethink labour incentives. The best teachers are currently not treated well in the current school system.

They can’t change the minds here and make it change long term. They focus on changing the system, so the negotiation can’t happen at the labour level, but has to be the district level.

Questions from the crowd: What’s the time frame?
Melinda: We take this lesson from Microsoft: a long term approach. We’re saving lives today, but we have a long horizon. Once we get an HIV vaccine, we’ll try to distribute. Why not a 200 year perspective on helping the world? They believe that the wealth Bill and Melinda has will be gone in 50 years or so. And Warren Buffet stipulates in his will that 10 years after his death his money needs to be spent out. That’s so that they can give back to people now.

We’re working on banking for people who live on less than $2. As tech goes cheaper, this stuff will make a huge difference in the world.

Q from the crowd: How do you deal with violence in schools going from students to teachers?
Melinda says that comes from facelessness in big schools. She’s seen schools with 3 cop cars in front and 2 metal detectors. You can see the gangs going through schools and once the teachers recognise the kids, the kids act a lot better. Once the teachers know the kids’ names, these things fall into place. She’s seen schools that have fixed this in NY able to lose their metal detectors and graduation rates go up profoundly (up to 78%.)

Done!
[All Things D]

If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women…The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor.

I dunno, Apple. The way things have been going lately, maybe that giant head* on the big screen wasn’t to be feared after all.

Yes, before our commenters flip out, we realise the 1984 spot was a shot at IBM, not Microsoft. [cnn]