Gates gets to grips with info overload

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates kicked off the company's annual CEO summit on Thursday by countering the popular notion that workers are universally overloaded with too much information.

Speaking to the crowd of gathered chief executives, Gates cited the need for access to even more data in areas such as sales results and corporate budgets.

"I'd say in all of these cases, we are really dealing with information underload," Gates said. "We still want a lot of information."

The problem, Gates said, is that the information exists but it is not in one place and cannot be easily viewed in a meaningful way using today's software.

"You have to seek the information out... it is spread across different systems," he said.

As expected, Gates also outlined the company's plans for Office 12, the next version of its flagship desktop software, which is due to arrive in the second half of next year.

Gates pointed to email as an area where the information is coming in too quickly to be properly evaluated.

"There is a real temptation that the thing that comes in the latest is the one you shift your attention to, even though that may be the least important," Gates said. The result, he said, is that people either have to leave everything "in one big bucket" or they have to spend a lot of time creating lots of folders. "That turns you into a filing clerk," he added.

In addition to making it easier for individuals to manage email, Gates said, Microsoft is working on technology that will allow companies to set policies to ensure different types of information are shared only with the right people and archived in a way that complies with legal strictures.

Gates also devoted a fair amount of time to the issue of search technology, an area in which the company has invested heavily to try and catch up to rivals such as Google and Yahoo!. He said there is still plenty of room for improvement.

"We really want to get to the point where you are getting direct answers," Gates said. The company's MSN Search already has that for a few areas, he said, demonstrating queries on "Which country has the second-largest GDP?" and "How many calories are there in spinach?" (The answers: "Japan" and "7 calories for 1 cup.")

Gates also showed off the Windows Desktop Search that Microsoft introduced earlier this week, demonstrating how it could show all his mail from "Steve" and even which documents were attached to those emails. "It's certainly the most interesting feature we've ever added in between major releases."

Searching for information within a corporation's own network is another area of focus - one for which traditional web-search methods do not work, Gates said.

Among the primary concerns in developing internal-search software is that not every worker should be permitted access to sensitive documents, such as financial data or personnel information. Also, web searches typically answer queries by ranking pages based on the number of links they have, a system that "doesn't work in a corporate environment". "There just aren't that many links done," he noted.

Ina Fried writes for CNET News.com