I’ve often wondered whether the opportunity of bringing increased intelligence to the grid might attract a company like Microsoft, which had a major role in creating smart phones, smart homes, smart networks and even smart cars. If the grid is moving towards a highly distributed Web of power sources that are connected, talk to each other and are self-repairing, wouldn’t it make sense that the world’s biggest software company wanted to play a role?

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was in Waterloo, Ont., this morning talking to computer science students at the local university. I had a chance to ask him directly about his thoughts on the move toward intelligent grids. Here’s his response:

“We tend to do things that are very horizontal, so when you get into something specific like controlling the electric grid we’d be much more of a partner. Certainly, their problems are very similar to the ones we face. They (need systems) that are extremely reliable, redundant, that can switch over and do things in different ways very, very rapidly. So there are some of the ideas that the software world can inform, but we ourselves won’t be doing that vertical, we’ll just enable other people to do it.”

Of course, with Microsoft you can never say never. I remember nearly 10 years ago when Microsoft was making a play in the telecom sector, which was transitioning from in-house proprietary systems based on flavours of Unix to a Windows world. It seems the utility industry will need to go through a similar transition. Microsoft’s role in that all depends on Bill’s definition of “enabling” and “partnering.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Main Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.