A tired and drained looking Bill Gates arrived in London on Friday in the latest stop on his tour to promote his Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System book. In a thirty minute speech, during which he appeared to be having some trouble stringing sentences together, Gates added little to the concept of a Digital Nervous System – essentially trotting out the same ideas he has preached on conference stages around the world for the last two years.
However, he did have a few words to say about emerging internet standard eXensible Markup language (XML). He described XML as the hottest new standards work around. He said that XML gave standard ways to build business objects and was helping to push electronic data interchange (EDI) work onto the internet. Gates also updated the wallet PC concept he first unveiled in his previous book The Road Ahead. The device has now grown in size, being described as a tablet PC.
Curiously, the event, which was attended by around 600 people, was less of a book launch and more of a tightly controlled Microsoft product event. Gates was not accompanied by his editor or literary agent but by Microsoft UKÆs marketing manager.
