Never let it be said that Bill Gates doesn't know his stuff.  Today at CES I had the opportunity to speak to him on a variety of issues.  His technical knowledge impressed the onlookers as he expertly detailed the transition from 32-bit computing to 64-bit computing and made the distinction between the bit-ness of the computing and the number of bits in addressing.

As some may recall, last year I talked about how users were quickly coming up against the 4 gigabyte limit in Windows XP (really 2 gigabytes as a practical matter).  This has to do with the 32-bit address space in today's 32-bit CPUs. Bill Gates said that is why 64-bit Windows is going to be so important going forward -- 64-bit addressing lets users access a lot more memory "and it'll be awhile before we hit that limit" said Mr. Gates.

Three points Mr. Gates brought up that I found of particular interest were:

1. He "guarantees"  that there will be a major new release of Windows in the next 2 to 4 years. This runs contrary to some of the analysts who have said that Windows Vista will be the last major release of Windows. 
    
2. Windows Vista has helped bring hardware and software together.  Microsoft has made a great effort to work with hardware vendors to make sure Windows Vista and new hardware devices work seamlessly together.  Historically, Microsoft had been at a disadvantage compared to Apple because Microsoft only controls half the platform.  But with Windows Vista, it has teamed up with hardware vendors to create a more seamless experience.
    
3. Microsoft made sure to get ahead of the memory limit curve this time. 32-bit Pentiums were 32-bit in addressing as well. It started the work during the XP time frame and even now, servers are moving to 64-bit platforms (WinCustomize.com runs 64-bit MS SQL Server on an AMD64 box).  The challenge of 64-bit computing right now is getting the driver support. And "Windows Vista is our way of pushing the hardware vendors to strengthen 64-bit support now rather than later."

One other interesting note, besides Mr. Gates being clearly familiar with the in-depth technical aspects of Windows Vista, his switch-over to foundation work in 2008 won't be the end of his involvement at Microsoft.  Mr. Gates explained that after 2008, he will be as involved in Microsoft post-2008 as he is involved with the Foundation today.