Bill Gates on hardware and web services

Bill Gates during Gartner symposium -

So 10 years out in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free. I mean, I'm not saying it will be absolutely free, but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the desktop machines, the network will not be a limiting factor, wireless technologies will have come in and created, whether it's in the consumer space or in the enterprise space, ways that you're connected all the time -- 802.11, Ultra Wideband.

Web services are super, super important.
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the action item is that anybody who does any development or thinks about architecture application, you've got to look at what's happened with XML and say, OK, databases will be XML, Office will be XML, and what sort of schemas are important to your organization, are they being standardized horizontally or just in your industry group or does your organization have to do extended schemas around those things.

Then you think, wow, can we publish our capabilities as Web service, can we connect up to other Web services. It's a whole mindset change that lets you compose things in a much richer way.

First prediction sounds very similar to Paul Saffo's argument that in future cars would come free and we would be paying for services inside the car. With some of the newer models having more than 10 CPUs who can argue with that. Cars of year 2015 (or for that matter any mobile machinery) will resemble like Data centers of year 2000 !