His take? U.S. citizens are reaping what was sewn more than ten years ago when the U.S. Patriot Act passed nearly unanimously in the wake of 9/11. In that deal and subsequently, we’ve given up more of our rights to privacy in return for better security from terrorist threats.

“I hope that people wake up, truly wake up, to what’s happening to society, from both a big brother perspective and little brother perspective,” Ozzie said according to a Boston.com report. From the passage of that law till now, we’ve seen an increasing ability of government agencies to gather data (or at least meta data) from cell phone records and social networks.

Update: Ozzie, who is traveling in Asia,  responded to my request to comment, reiterating his call for debate.He wrote:

“Watching this pan out from afar has been difficult – especially as some in our industry seemingly want to sweep it away and move on to the next news cycle.  I do hope it stays in-focus as long as possible and that people appreciate the importance and relevance of what’s transpiring.  [the Electronic Privacy Information Center and  [the Electronic Freedom Foundation] can help, but we all need to find a way to advance this discussion in a nonpartisan way.”

Before joining Microsoft, Ozzie shepherded the development of Lotus Notes collaboration and email software and had to navigate a tricky course between offering the most secure software possible — with 64-bit encryption — and laws that forbid the export of that technology outside the U.S. because it was too secure. A compromise was struck that allowed Lotus to offer a version of Notes that was more secure than other commercial offerings but met government export restrictions.

As a former Lotus exec explained it this weekend: “Lotus had the maximum security standard (64-bit encryption) for domestic distribution but only 40-bit for export … There was a public key deal with NSA that would essentially accelerate their process of decrypting messages – their key would unlock 24 bits of the 64, leaving 40 bits encrypted – conforming to the export restriction.”

In Hacker News, Ozzie said the difference between then and now was that when Lotus shipped that implementation, he also spoke at the RSA Conference to spell out what Lotus did. That transparency is lacking today, he wrote.

With the disclosures about NSA tab-keeping, it’s time for citizens to reconsider the deal they’ve struck with government, appears to be Ozzie’s takeaway. In short: If we’re ceding more of our rights to privacy we should at least talk about it first.

He wrote:

“Of course, the common man knows it’s common sense that there’s an inherent need for secrecy in conducting small scale covert operations. We do get it.

However, it’s also common sense that it’s inevitable that any complex large-scale long-term operation will ultimately come to light. And so it’s just common sense that any such broad-based operations that might be perceived as impacting our constitutional rights should be the subject of broad public debate.”

I’ve reached out to Ozzie, who is a board member of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), for comment and will update this if it’s forthcoming.

This story was updated at 6:03 a.m. PDT on July 10 with a more complete explanation of the Lotus encryption plan and again at 3:50 p.m. PDT with Ray Ozzie’s additional comment.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space

This makes me happy – not only because it’s a shot in the arm for the scene in Berlin, where I live, but also because I’ve been feeling quite down recently about the tech industry and the capacity of some elements to destroy rather than create value.

What ResearchGate is doing – and what it’s planning for the coming years – has reminded me how this industry can be a force for disruption in the most positive sense. Here’s why.

Fixing science

“I think science is broken,” Ijad Madisch, ResearchGate’s CEO and a former scientist himself, said at a small press event this morning. “If you’re doing research, you don’t publish the negative results. You only publish the positive results. But 97 percent of the things you’re doing are failed experiments – that’s raw data.”

Madisch’s solution, as we have detailed before, was to create a social network for researchers that would help them collaborate – not just by making it easier for them to become aware of each other’s published successes, but also by providing a platform through which they can share that raw data and learn from each other’s mistakes.

Compare this to the current system, where failures are buried despite the lessons that could be learned, and where even successes get filtered through a sometimes opaque and achingly slow peer review process. That’s not to say peer review is a bad thing – it’s crucial – but ResearchGate promises a different way of doing it.

“The current system needs months after you’ve sent a letter to the [journal's] editor, if it gets accepted,” Madisch said. “Right now it’s a pre-peer review. I would rather do a post-review through the network: you publish it and the network can then give feedback. We’re creating a peer review system in our network which takes care of that. No-one has tried that before… we have a RG score number we want to use to replace the current [metrics] of reputation.”

It’s not just the journals’ slow methodology that ResearchGate wants to shake up – Madisch and co-founders Sören Hofmayer and Horst Fickenscher want to get past the extreme specialization of these silos in order to stimulate cross-pollination of ideas.

“If I publish in the Journal of Virology, I’m already doing categorization,” Madisch explained. “That’s nonsense – every paper should be tagged with many different tags.” And to that end, he added, ResearchGate is currently developing a technique to automatically extract tags and keywords out of papers that are uploaded to the platform or published for the first time through it.

And with fresh funding…

This new round comes with the cachet of Bill Gates’s name and his probably unparalleled network of contacts across the technological and medical worlds. But of course, it’s also cash. (It should be noted that this is Gates’s personal money we’re talking about, not that of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

Photo: OnInnovation

So what’s that going to be used for? According to Madisch, the first task is to refine the product, particularly aspects such as its API. “This will be the interface to the outside world so people can build applications using our data,” he said. “We want to be the telephone for scientists, but we won’t be able to build all the different apps.”

ResearchGate already gives universities and specific departments the ability to set up their own pages on the platform. Madisch said the company now wants to build on this and its current private project functionality, providing the opportunity for universities and departments to establish their own private collaboration networks on ResearchGate. “We also want to extend the API to departmental and university pages, so they can create their own apps for problems they want to solve,” he added.

And then there’s monetization. When Benchmark’s Matt Cohler joined the board at the Series A stage, the first thing he did was tell Madisch and his co-founders to forget about revenue until the network was valuable enough to command it.

That time is now on the horizon. Madisch said ResearchGate would start experimenting with various options, the most obvious of which is its research jobs board – this carries 15,000 posts at the moment, and it’s all for free. Another possibility lies in a “marketplace for scientific products and services” – lab equipment and the like – where Madisch thinks ResearchGate can also introduce a new level of transparency and usefulness.

In terms of growth, Madisch reckons his market will top out at around 10 million people (right now there are around 3 million members) if you don’t count lab technicians and 20 million if you do – obviously this is a large but necessarily limited space to be playing in, especially as users can only sign up with an institutional email address.

The company employs around 100 people now and Madisch said the plan is to bring in another engineering team in the next 6-12 months, to help manage the exponential growth in datasets being uploaded to the platform (ResearchGate runs its own server farm) and link them to the relevant people.

Long-term play

ResearchGate isn’t the only platform trying this, of course – Mendeley, which recently got bought by Elsevier (see disclosure), is another. But Madisch used Wednesday’s event to provide his opinion on that purchase, saying Mendeley sold out “because they did not succeed”.

“Every time you get acquired, you just lost,” he said. “You don’t create an open science movement if you sell your company very early on in the process. Our ambition is to create a very long-lasting company. We want to create an independent force in the scientific world which will change what data is shared and how data is shared, in real-time, on a very wide scale.”

I asked Madisch, who is open about the fact that he wants to win a Nobel Prize one day, whether his company might float at some point. “I don’t know,” was the cautious reply.

Whether or not ResearchGate does end up taking the IPO route, it seems clear that this company will make a difference. Madisch can already point to examples of this, such as the linking-up of researchers from Italy and Nigeria to help identify a new type of infectious agent, but this is more than just an opportunity for scientists to make connections. This is a platform for collaboration on the raw data level.

This firm is trying to change mindsets in order to improve the quality of the world’s scientific output. It’s no wonder that Bill Gates – a man with polio, malaria and tuberculosis on his kill list – saw an opportunity to back a game-changer.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• What the utility of the future looks like
• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution

The Microsoft founder, who won back the title of world’s richest person last month, tends to invest in energy technologies these days, but ResearchGate arguably also falls into the category of “startups that can really change things.”  Like Mendeley in the UK, the Berlin-based ResearchGate provides a way for researchers around the world to contact and collaborate with each other and, importantly, to read each other’s research without worrying about publishers’ restrictions.

The promise of this sort of collaboration is extensive: if researchers can coordinate their efforts better, the idea goes, they can cut down on duplication, inspire one another and accelerate the pace of their scientific and technological advances. ResearchGate boasts just under 3 million users.

Neither Gates nor ResearchGate has commented on the WSJ Germany report, but it’s worth noting that ResearchGate has a funding-related press conference scheduled for later this week. This is unusual, as the company has traditionally remained fairly tight-lipped about its investment rounds – the latest tranche was only revealed thanks to an SEC filing. Investors from earlier rounds include Benchmark Capital, Accel Partners and Founders Fund.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The factory will be the first in the world building EcoMotor’s “opoc,” opposed piston, opposed cylinder engine, at a commercial scale. When it starts production in 2014, the factory will aim to produce 150,000 engines per year. There’s also an adjacent site that could expand production to 400,000 engines per year down the road.

Strategic deals with huge Chinese companies are becoming a valuable way for Valley cleantech startups to move into commercial production and actually have a chance at succeeding. In particular Khosla Ventures has been adept as of late at helping its companies navigate deals in China.

Chinese parts company Wanxiang invested $420 million into GreatPoint Energy – a company based in Cambridge, Mass. that converts coal into cleaner-burning natural gas — in order to commercialize GreatPoint’s technology in China. LanzaTech, which turns gases emitted from industrial processes into biofuels and biochemicals, is working with China’s largest steel producer, Baosteel, as well as Chinese coal producer Yankuang Group. Khosla Ventures has invested in both of these firms.

By partnering with a giant like Zhongding, EcoMotors doesn’t have to raise and spend a lot of money on infrastructure. In return, Zhongding will sell the engines domestically in China — these particular engines will be powerful ones used for generators, off-road vehicles and commercial vehicles. Chung called the strategy “cleantech done right.”

EcoMotors’ engine can be 20 to 50 percent more efficient, 20 to 25 percent lower in cost to buy, and half the size and half the weight of a traditional engine. For car manufacturers the capital savings are even greater — at 30 to 40 percent — when using EcoMotors engine to build an efficient vehicle. When placed in a passenger light weight vehicle, the engine could deliver a 100 MPG, 5-passener, car.

The Chinese car market, as well as the engine market, are the largest and fastest growing in the world. And the Chinese government has set very aggressive goals to reduce the country’s air pollution and carbon emissions.

EcoMotors is a particularly unusual investment for a venture capital firm because the internal combustion hasn’t seen much innovation in decades. But the global trends of needing this innovation are clear: more and more countries are pushing for lowered car emissions, air pollution is a massive problem throughout developing countries, and the cars that will catch on in the price conscious developing markets will be cars that use fuel efficiently and thus save their customers money. Other startups working on efficient engines include Pinnacle Engines, Achates Power, Grail Engine Technologies, and Transonic Combustion.

Updated at 3:00PM PST, April 9, with mention of the deal with Baosteel, China’s largest steel producer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010
• The growth and promise of the LED market
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Aquion Energy, based in Pittsburgh and founded in 2007, is using basic materials like sodium and water to build modular batteries that will be able to provide energy storage services for the power grid. The technology was developed out of Carnegie Mellon University by founder and chief technology officer Jay Whitacre.

The company’s battery pairs a carbon anode with a sodium-based cathode, and a water-based electrolyte shuttles ions between the two electrodes during charging and discharging. Many batteries have solvent-based electrolytes.

Aquion Energy employees assembling batteries at a rotary dial table

The purpose of using basic materials is to make a battery that is super low cost. That’s one reason why Aquion is focused on stationary applications, like the grid, where lower energy density can be an acceptable trade-off for lower costs and longer life. The battery can also withstand a wide range of temperatures without losing storage capacity, so could be installed alongside a solar installation without sapping a lot of energy for air conditioning to keep the batteries cool.

Aquion Energy has been planning on building a factory in Pennsylvania that could make its sodium batteries starting this year. About a year ago Aquion said it had leased a facility from the Regional Industrial Development Corporation in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and the company hopes the factory could create 400 jobs by the end of 2015.

Such a factory could cost between $75 million and $80 million to build, so it’s likely this funding will go towards moving into production. In the summer of 2011 Aquion raised $20 million. The Department of Energy has also supported Aquion’s technology development with a $5 million stimulus grant.

Kleiner Perkins’ David Wells played a key role in helping incubate this technology. Whitacre and Wells started talking in late 2007 and a year later Kleiner sponsored an incubator at Carnegie Mellon for Whitacre to develop the tech. Following that, Whitacre spun off the venture and began to work on commercializing the battery.

Bill Gates has also invested in battery startup Ambri (formerly called Liquid Metal Battery), which like Aquion is building a grid battery and looking to begin production in the coming years. Gates has backed at least 5 battery startups, according to a talk he gave back in 2010.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: the Fisker debacle and its implications on investing, innovation, and government incentives
• The next generation of battery technology
• Opportunities for the future of batteries

This spring marks YC’s 16th demo day, and compared to the first one I covered in August that featured more than 80 companies, today’s smaller batch of 47 looks is presenting at a slower pace that’s certainly easier for investors and the press to digest. But as YC co-founder Paul Graham noted, even if investors can focus a little more because the initial process was more selective, it won’t be that much easier for them to pick winners:

“It’s going to be just as hard to tell who’s good,” he said. “It’s not because of the format of demo day that it’s hard to tell who’s good. It’s because it’s actually hard to tell who’s good,” he said. “I mean, even we can’t tell who’s good,” he joked.

About one-third of the startups presenting on Tuesday were presented off the record, which means they’re still in stealth mode and the press agreed not to write about them. The rest of the companies are divided into two batches, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Here are my five picks from the morning batch that you should take a look at:

Airware

Airware is a building a platform for drone software that allows customers to to manage cost-effective, small aircraft. The company allows drone manufacturers to use its hardware and APIs and then focus on the software that’s specific to the industry that requires a drone. The company explains the idea on its website: “Our os-Series Autopilots integrate hardware, tailored to specific needs, with an open architecture. This combination gives our autopilots the flexibility to be used on both development and production aircraft platforms, enabling UAS manufacturers to rapidly develop diverse and innovative UAS for commercial and military applications, while creating and maintaining intellectual property.”

SimplyInsured

SimplyInsured aims to provide a Kayak-like service for small business owners who are looking to compare the cost of picking different insurance plans for employees. The company is looking to cut out the traditional insurance brokers who relied on paper, fax, and estimates, and replace that business with a digital process that would immediately provide business owners with quotes. The company is hoping to take advantage of new Obamacare regulations that limit the effect of health insurance brokers, and target businesses that are still in the under-50 employee size.

Bitnami

Bitnami describes itself as the “app store for server software,” letting IT buyers have an app store-like experience when purchasing software to run either on the desktop, on company servers, or in the cloud. The company lists employees from companies like MasterCard, General Electric, and Boeing as customers, and said the company is already bringing in “millions” in profit.

Microryza

Microryza wants to “turn everyone with a credit card into a modern day patron of science,” as co-founder Cindy Wu explained. The company has created a crowdsourcing platform that allows individuals to contribute money toward scientific research, bypassing the traditional pathways for funding tenured professors at universities, and instead opening it up to a wider audience of donors. Bill Gates wrote on his blog about the company’s efforts to support scientific research that would benefit developing countries. Wu highlighted several projects that have been funded through Microryza, including a paleontologist who will be doing an excavation and sharing his findings with backers along the way.

Watsi

Watsi is a particularly notable startup for Y Combinator because it’s the first (intentional, Graham noted) nonprofit startup to come through YC’s ranks. The company has built a platform where individuals can crowdfund medical treatment and surgeries for individuals, starting with a medical clinic in Nepal but quickly growing to other locations. So far, the site is now funding treatments for up to 17 patients per week.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution

Thursday, March 7th

• Here’s what cell phone coverage looks like for SXSW
• Bill Gates: education needs much more than just 1 percent of R&D spending

Friday, March 8th

• Liftoff! Your design plus a 3-D printer could power the next rockets in space
• The King of 3D printing kicks off a SXSW focused on the physical world
• Designing for health tech? Remember the 7 deadly sins

Saturday, March 9th

• A wish list for education technology
• The internet of weird things at SXSW: smart porta potties, light books and a robot zen gardener
• Anne-Marie Slaughter on female workplace equality: it’s about men, too
• Where WordPress is headed: Longform content, curation and maybe even native ads
• Eric Ries-backed Neo Innovation launches new fund focused on lean startups
• Elon Musk on his one regret from the NYT incident, spaceship scares & Russian missiles
• Dalton Caldwell on our software choices: You are what you eat
• Lean government? How HHS is following Silicon Valley’s lead

Sunday, March 10th

• 5 things I’ve learned in 24 hours as a SXSW newbie
• ‘E-mail’ is uncool, and other language lessons for the digital age
• “Finding out who your real friends are”: How David Carr views paid content
• Two good infrastructure considerations for the internet of things from SXSW
• How a bad fantasy baseball team turned Nate Silver into America’s top data nerd
• When it comes to getting news on Twitter, you are who you follow?

Monday, March 11th

• Why the pencil is still the most important tool for digital designers
• Meet the 12-year-old who’s pitching his app at SXSW
• Some of the weirdest marketing gimmicks we saw at SXSW

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration

But, speaking to a packed auditorium of educators and technologists at the SXSWedu education technology conference in Austin, Bill Gates said that given the impact of education on all other parts of society, investment in the sector is “absolutely not” enough.

“If you had to say what is the sector of the economy you’d like the most R&D, the most risk-taking in, because any improvement you make benefits all the other areas of the economy and, more from an equity point of view, allows the country to deliver on its promise of equal opportunity, you’d think that education would be a very high R&D sector. It never has been,” according to the co-founder of Microsoft and head of the multi-billion-dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  “We’re going to have to grow this.”

Advancements in computing, the growing penetration of technology (particularly mobile devices) and the rise of cloud storage have helped make this a “special time for technology in education,” Gates said.

But he also acknowledged that in the late 1990s and other periods, the industry similarly thought that technology could make a dent in improving education and the promised revolutionary advancements never happened.

“Obviously, it begs the question: is it like that time when we were kind of naïve? We can think through that those things weren’t very deep and now it’s pretty obvious that they weren’t going to do that much,” he said. “But there was this belief and so we have to check ourselves and say ‘is it really different this time?’ I think we have data from the early things that really show that it is. It’s just fundamentally very different technology.”

Digital divide still an issue

Gates also made the important point that while technology is pushing its way into the hands of more students, the uneven access of Internet access needs to be addressed.

“People talk about the hardware but, in fact, if we take any reasonable time period, even two years, you’re going to spend more on your Internet connection than you do on that hardware,” he said. “So making sure so that’s either pervasive in the home or public spaces that students have easy access to that becomes pretty important, particularly, if you’re going to expect a lot of ongoing activity outside the classroom.”

When Gates took the stage, many in the audience rose to give the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist a standing ovation. Over the past few years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has become a major player in education (clearly evident in the number of sponsored events, banners and panels related to the foundation at SXSWedu). But as the keynote continued, some of the commentary on Twitter turned more critical, highlighting the split composition of the conference attendees and a feeling that Gates didn’t go deep enough into issues that need more attention.

One ed tech thought leader wrote:

THIS MAN HAS NO IDEA WTF HE IS TALKING ABOUT #SXSWEDU

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) March 7, 2013

Another audience member said:

#sxswedu #edtech Agree with twittersphere on the @billgates talk. Cheerleading tech but no deep-diving into user (teacher/parent) challenges

— Nitya Narasimhan (@nitya) March 7, 2013

I agree that while he provided important context around why education technology is growing, I was hoping for more. He didn’t provide the bold statements or visionary messages one might expect from a concluding keynote speaker, and especially one who has supported technology in education as much as Gates and his foundation have.

But, the reaction to his speech really drove home that the conference, like ed tech at large, includes many stakeholders with different interests and perspectives. While those in the audience closer to technology may have found Gates’ comments lacking, educators who spend more of their time thinking about managing classrooms than big tech trends seemed to think it was a success. The media specialist next to me, for example, said she found Gates’ keynote “very inspiring.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Kempin, who left Microsoft in 2002, was the exec who ran the company’s cash cow OEM business. He was the guy who cut the deals with hardware makers who bundled Microsoft Windows and Office on their machines. Those negotiations were by most accounts brutal, leaving hardware partners like Dell and HP reeling. They also led some to call Kempin Microsoft’s Dark Angel. And now he’s peddling a book on Microsoft and is penning a series of blogs for ReadWrite.

Here are the some of his suggestions for Microsoft from his first post:

1: Microsoft needs a tech guru. 

Kempin writes:

“The company needs a bold and charismatic executive with bona fide technical credentials to head all of its product divisions. This dynamic leader must not only serve as the main spokesperson for all products, but he or she must also inspire and command the respect of developers. (Unfortunate Ray Ozzie did not survive in this role, and the one who came after him, Craig Mundie, was from the beginning the wrong person.)”

No kidding. This is true, and it was also true when Bill Gates started stepping back from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Even when he dubbed Ozzie his successor as chief software architect in 2006, many wondered why he didn’t go for a younger, new-age thinker; a response to the Google guys. No one doubted Ozzie’s tech vision, but by that time Microsoft had already “missed” the internet and had to make up for lost time. Ozzie was of the same generation as Gates and Ballmer. The feeling was Microsoft really needed an infusion of new blood. Ozzie was new to Microsoft but he was rooted in the same client-server world they came from. For what it’s worth, Microsoft is bleeding many of its long-time execs with Robbie Bach, J Allard and Steven Sinofsky all exiting over the past two years.

2: Go easy on the enterprise schtick

Kempin said Microsoft’s focus on enterprise customers was lucrative but hurt the company with consumers.

“… its reputation as an innovative tech leader deteriorated in the public eye. Once cool, today Microsoft is a well-oiled money machine, but the contagious excitement around the time when Windows 95 launched is long gone …. That torch has passed to the Apples, Googles, Twitters, and Facebooks of this world.”

My take: I’m not sure anyone ever thought of Microsoft as “cool.” The big flash-bang Windows 95 event was fun; but cool? Hardly. Jay Leno hosted and even in 1995 Leno was your father’s talk show host. Even many language and compiler geeks found Borland a much more amenable culture than Microsoft.

It’s true that Microsoft has gotten too enterprise-oriented. In fact, it appears hell-bent to replicate Oracle and IBM at a time when many question the relevance of those companies in a consumer IT focused world.  Even Microsoft Surface is painted with an “Office” paintbrush. Exceptions to this rule: Xbox and Kinect — which probably doesn’t carry the Microsoft brand on purpose. The reason companies update Windows and Office is to stay legal, not because of any compelling new features. Sad but true.

3: Microsoft needs to go back to school.

Kempin writes:

“The US school system is antiquated and needs to be brought into the 21st century. This presents an opportunity for Microsoft to engage and help teachers, parents, and children to excel.”

Assuming here that excel is not a pun, he has a point. Most students use Google Docs (and most of the students I know personally are using it on MacBooks.) And when is the last time you heard a student (or anyone) request a Dell (or HP or Acer) laptop running Windows?

Kempin thinks Microsoft (with help from its big cool philanthropic friend The Gates Foundation) should just underwrite a complete re-do of technology in the nation’s schools. It would be a bold move. But Microsoft still needs to make products that people want to buy, not products that they accept because they have to.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.