Bill Gates predicts change for PCs in 5 years

LONDON: Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says that people will see a sea change in the way they interact with computers in the coming five years.

According to him, more intuitive and natural technologies, particularly touch, vision and speech interfaces, will become increasingly important to the world of computers by that time.

"This whole idea of what I call natural user interface is really redefining the experience," the BBC quoted him in an interview.

"We're adding the ability to touch and directly manipulate, we're adding vision so the computer can see what you're doing, we're adding the pen, we're adding speech," he added.

Gates unveiled the Microsoft Surface computer, a large table like machine with a multi-touch interface, during the interview.

"I'll be brave, in five years we'll have many tens of million of people sitting browsing their photos, browsing their music, organising their lives using this type of touch interface," he said.

He also hailed Google for its revolutionary search engine, but said that he hoped that Microsoft would also perform as good as the former one day.

"Google has done a good job. We expect to surprise people that we can match and even do better there - people should wait and see," he said.

Windows Vista might have been the firm's often often-criticised operating system, but Gates said that he considered it to be a great creation.

"I'm very proud of Vista. Like all of the products we ship, we hear how we could do this differently or that differently," he said He further said that the firm had received a lot of feedback from around that world, and that they were improving the software accordingly.

"We do downloads and improvements all of the time and of course there'll be a major new version coming along," he said.

Gates also revealed that he was keeping a number of PCs at home, but with clarification that none of them was his competitors' products. "There are a lot of PCs in my house, over 10," he said. "There are no Macs in my house," he added.