Apathy Sketchpad

Apparently, Bill Gates, best known for announcing that nobody would ever need more than 640kB of RAM and then releasing an operating system that needs a gigabyte to run well, has said the days of the keyboard are numbered:

People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.”It’s one of the big bets we’re making,”

No.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

No. We’ll be typing.

For one thing, I work in a shared office. The last thing I need while I’m trying to write a document is to listen to another document that someone else is writing. I certainly don’t want them to hear my initial “zero’th draft” versions. The same applies to internet searches. I don’t want to be constantly announcing what I’m doing to anyone else who might be in the room at the time. Nor do I want to hear what they’re searching for. It’s totally impractical for the business user and I can’t imagine home users wanting it either. Aside from anything else, I rarely type a page of text in the order in which it will appear, and I wouldn’t have thought that it would be at all intuitive to speak in that way.

Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps everyone else would love to talk to their PC instead of typing. But I doubt it.