Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20170424

Rose welcome to the program. We begin this evening with the french elections, with bernardhenri leevy, alessia lefeebure, jane hartley and philippe corbee. And may win eventually, but she needs a very low turnout, and i dont know if the attacks yesterday night will really lead the french people to stay at home sunday. I dont know. Thats an important question, the turnout sunday. The other thing is, in fact, if she wants to win in two weeks, she wants to be, in fact, with fillon, not macron. If we can find the two conditions on sunday to give her the hope to win in two weeks, i think shes still trailing behind mr. Ma crob, and macron has not been defeated by the attack yesterday night. Rose we conclude with steve ballmer, former c. E. O. Of microsoft whos initiated an interesting new project, a web site that will provide information about how the government spends your money. Numbers dont know whether theyre liberal or conservative, last time i checked. Adjectives may but numbers dont know. We havent actually informally shared our work, our annual report and some of the other domes with people who are clearly democrats or clearly republicans e politicians rose the french elections and Steve Ballmers new idea when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by the following and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose we begin with politics the this evening, not american politics but french politics and european politics. French citizens will go to follows this sunday to cast their ballots in what could be the most highly contested president ial election in the countrys history. The eleven candidates include Emmanuel Macron and ple Marine Le Pen, running neck and neck. The french people are on high alert following yesterdays terrorist attack. Jane hartley, former u. S. Ambassador to france. Philippe corbee, corredspondent for french radio rtl. Alessia lefeebure, of columbia university. And from paris, our friend, philosopher, author and filmmaker bernardhenri leevy. I am pleased to have them here as we look forward to the first part of this election sunday. Bernard, tell me what the mood is in france as you see it from paris and whats the prospect as we look at it this evening . The mood, first of all, is very sad. It is a mood of sorrow because of the terrorist attack of yesterday night and because of the death of this brave policeman and the two others who were heavily wounded. So there is a sort of veil of darkness on france and on paris today which you can really touch with your hands. This is the mood. Now the prospect is that mr. Macron is still running ahead. Not compel neck to neck. Marine le pen is a few points behind him. So you have macron ahead, Marine Le Pen number two, and very close to them in this hand handkerchief the extreme leftist mr. Meelenchon and the classic liberal mr. Fillon. Rose is anyone trending . Does anyone have any momentum . Yes, this seems to be a good question. This is a moment since one week in favor of meelenchon, and youh clearly matters with expectation in france. This is the long trend in. One week momentum. Nce yesterday night, the is probably sort of momentum, but not so strong as it could have been expected for mrs. Le pen. This attack yesterday was aimed at that. I. S. I. S. Votes for le pen. I. S. I. S. And le pen are sort of twins, and the target of daesh yesterday night was clearly to improve the vote for le pen. I think i. S. I. S. Failed, in a way, because the momentum is not as big as expected. Rose so what do you think the impact will be of this attack . Well, i would say that madam le pen may win but with several conditions. May win eventually but she needs a very low turnout. I dont know if the attacks yesterday night will lead the french people to stay at home sunday. I dont know. Thats an important question, the turnout sunday. The other thing, is for the, if she wants to win in two weeks, she wants to be, in fact, with fillon, the conservative candidate and not macron. So there are two with conditions. I dont know if the two conditions are really if we can find the two conditions sunday to give her the hope the to win in two hope to win in two weeks. I think shes still trailing behind mr. Acro and macron has not been defeated by the attack yesterday night. Rose president obama called macron . Yes, he did. Rose what impact might that have . You know, president obama made it quite clear he was not endorsing any candidate in this race. I do know, because when i was there and subsequently president obama is incredibly popular in france and, at one point, there was a beginning of a writein campaign, i think you may have seen it, with posters all over paris asking rose at the same time, he went and campaigned in a way against brexit and it didnt have the kind of result partly because the appeal to the young people, either did not vote or i think its a positive. I dont remember what one to have the previous guests said, but macron has been leading pretty consistently. It has been a very tight lead and he and le pen have been neck and neck, you know, a point or two apart. Fillon has come back a lilt bit recently. I think the most positive poll showed him at 20, so three or four points behind, and meelenchon had some momentum which may have stopped and i think bernard is right that most recently macron in the last few days has the momemtum. And its important, i think, as you look at macrons a candidate and how he tried to portray himself, i worked with him quite a bit when i was over there, what will the future of france be. Hope. Its hope. Thats where it is similar to obama. Its optimism, its hpe. We obviously have to make some changes, but its particularly addressed at some of the young people in terms of what hes going to do in terms of education, what hes going to do in terms of apprenticeships. And i dont think the attacks i mean, i have not seen a poll in the last day or so, but we had elections when i was there both after bataclan and after neese, the elections in france, it did not really move the needle. Rose meelenchon, who does he take votes from, this popularity, surprising litho hes been a longtime face in politics. Surprisingly hes taking votes with some of the young people. Rose hes sort of a bernie sanders, some said . Some have said. I would personal disagree. Of course, there is Something Like that, a senior politician, very experienced, but getting the votes of the young people. But, at the same time, if you look at his program, it has nothing to do with sanders. Sanders would be more similar to socialists. Meelenchon is strongly nationalist, so its not a france of diversity, its not a france of the minorities, its not a france of tolerance. Hes very hard core on the secularism in his conception of secularism. There is no religion at all. These things, i dont think we can make it closer to what sanders had in his program. At the same time, i would completely agree with jane, half of the young people, those who succeed, those who are all over the world in universities, those in columbia, new york, they love macron. Macron is the future, the start of technology, they embrace this kind of france that helps the momentum of these young people. The other half, those who feel a little bit threatened by the globalization, those who struggle with the employment, those who are scared about their future, those vote for meelenchon. There is no other alternative for them. Rose there is been some slippage in the campaign of le pen and her popularity. Is it insignificant but, nevertheless, what caused it . One thing you have to remember is that one month ago Marine Le Pen was ahead of the race. Today, shes 20 percent or so. One month ago she was 30 percent. So she has a very negative momemtum since a few weeks. This is very important to know. She was losing till yesterday night, till i. S. I. S. Decided to vote for her, she was losing speed every day. This is one thing which is very important. Number two, you asked about the phone call of barack obama to macron. In france, it is much better to be endorsed by president obama than by president trump. Marine le pen is endorsed by president trump. Not good for her. Shes endorsed by putin and trump, and really it was very bad news for her both of the endorsement. Macron is endorsed by obama, which is a much more decent endorsement. Number three, one thing i would hike to say at the end of his cam this campaign is it was a terrible campaign. It was one probably the Worst Campaign i ever saw in france. Maybe in america you know the sort of campaign, you saw that before us, when argument are replaced by punch line, when the debate is considered a macho box or something. This campaign was not a delivery of the great republican and democratic spirit in france as your last campaign in america which was also hopeless. These other fundamentals of the campaign. In this devastated poliical landscape there is macron who is swimming up. Rose let me ask all of you this essentially, shes an antiimmigration candidate. She talks about what it means to be french as a campaign. She talks about her antiEuropean Union philosophy. People talk about a french exit from the European Union to follow brexit. Can she seriously win this . Does she have a real chance, unlike any National Front candidate before . Well, lets say she may win. I dont want to say that shes going to win, but she may win. Rose she could win. She could win. We have to take into consideration the fact she could win, and what happened last night in paris is a way to remind us that a lot of things could happen in the next two weeks. So we dont know exactly whats going to be the mood to have the french voters next sunday and the sunday in two weeks, so she could win. But she is im not sure that her antieuro, antiEuropean Union Brexit Campaign has been really successful because she has tried as bernardhenri leevy said, she has tried to run with this platform. It didnt really work well. She came back in the last ten days and the core val yeahs of her campaign, immigration, security, islam, et cetera, because she realized that the only way to make te electorate stick around her is to bring back the far right basic of her party. But when she tried to expand to the economic issue and the european issue, it didnt work that well, in fact. Rose she should win, though, and exits the European Union, exits the euro. Does it destroy both . I think its a huge problem. First of all, i agree with you. I think just one point and bernard, i think, talked about it france is a different election because it has a second round. So it would be like if our election rose no, im actually talking about if she wins the second round and becomes president. The second round makes it harder for her and thats what weve seen in other elections. I think its a huge problem for europe if she wins. Shes not only perhaps talking about leaving thein the European Union, shes talking about going back to the frank. Its a huge problem for the European Union and france, economically. When i was there, france was probably our key partner in terms of counteri. S. I. L both on a military front and domestic security, intelligence, counterterrorism front. That would be a huge blow. France is very important in terms of what it does in the world, and what she would do is try to take france both economically, Foreign Policy, militarily out of the world. Rose the idea of europe came, in part, from the french. The polls, the last one, they say she could win only if shes against meelenchon, right, that she would not make it against macron or fillon. Yet, if she doesnt win this time, a lot of people are worried she might win in five years from now, right. So i think the important lesson to keep for us is this election, the devastating campaign is showing that the Political Parties are meaningless to the people, the traditional division, the left, the right, with the socialist, i mean, all this tradition, you have seen the score. The social Asupreme Court used to be very powerful in france. And even fillon is not doing as well as his predecessors, not only because of the scandals. I think people the traditional divide between the left, progressive and then social well fair and the right more conservative on the moral values and liberal on the economic point of view, this is not working anymore. So we have, as was said before, on the one hand a few candidates of the future, and the candidate of the nostalgia of the past, and this doesnt match the Political Party division. So i guess the important lesson, even if Marine Le Pen is not elected now, is that we have to prepare for the next election. The turnout, though you mentioned it and i know bernard mentioned it is key. Because when we have surprises in these elections, its when, usually, theres a low turnout. Its whats happening in 2002. They got into 16 . May i take a bet, charlie . Rose yes, offer the bet. I take the bet tonight that Marine Le Pen will not be president of france. No chance, no way that she can become president of france. Shes not perceived really, she is not perceived as a real candidate. Shes not perceived as so different from her father than she pretends to be. Number three, shes perceived more and more as having a very strange relationship with her own country. There is one thing which begins to enter into the minds of the voters which is that, since five years, each time, ou country, france, has to face an enemy in a diplomatic ground or a military ground. She systematically took the party of the enemy. When france had soldiers on the ground and in the air in libya, when france has special forces in syria, when france has a real arm wrestle with putin about ukraine, shes always on the camp of the enemy. At least the french are patriots and they know that shes not a patriot, that shes not so much rose let me ask you this do you believe shell make the second round . I think so, yes, probably, because to have the vote of daesh, because of what happened of what happened last night, but she will not be so much if there is a second round, she will not have such a big advance related to francois fillon. Francois fillon is not a bad candidate. Francois fillon, i do not vote for him, but he has a good program. He would be a decent president and republican. So if shes in the second round it will be with short advance. Rose and macron would be the toughest person for her in terms of her possibilities in the second round . Ma krone is beating her now, beating her in the second round by 20 points, at the moment. Well see sunday night if shes 28, 29 of the vote and macron is 22, 23, it will be much more difficult. We dont know what the rightwing voters, the rightwing members of the conservative party might to. Rose these are people who might have supported fillon . Some voters might vote for le pen. Will they vote, or vote for none of the above. Yeah. Rose other than what we have talked about before in terms of immigration, what are the big issues of this campaign . What else are they talking about as issues . What they talk about or what the prerch want to hear about . Rose well, go ahead. Because they have talked about meaningless things most of the time but the concerns of the french are not different than the concerns of the americans and europeans today, and i think its sort of a whole package with all the threats related to the globalization. You put into this cultural identity islam, you put into this the euro, you put into this the European Union perceived as a danger for the economics, you put into this all sorts of unemployment, the fact that the recession is still there. Francois fillon does not Francois Hollande does not manage to change this. Economic opportunities, jobs. Its always the same. I think the french are like anybody else. Rose go ahead. During the campaign, its the case everywhere in the world, when you are able to bring the conversation on your personal team, when you are setting the agenda, in fact, of the campaign, when youre the on who decides whats the conversation, we dont know exactly what the conversation in this campaign. I couldnt say, oh, the main topics the main topic of the campaign was this or that. We dont know because its very difficult. The campaign was nasty. We talk about the price of the suit of the candidate of the conservative party. Its crazy. We dont know yeah. The Biggest Issue for sure. Its one to have the Biggest Issue. Its crazy. The Biggest Issue is to know when he gave back his suit to the tailor, the Biggest Issue was the know if it was the proper suit or others. Crazy. These were the issues, which is crazy. Rose mr. Fillon accepted suits but the real deep issue underneath, because we are not completely lost in translation, thank god, we french, the Biggest Issue underneath are probably Foreign Policy issues. Putin or not. I think they were governing secretly the debate. You have Marine Le Pen, who is very favorable to putin, francois fillon, and you have mr. Macron who knowsore or less whois putin and how france has other allies than putin. She went to the kremlin. She was invited to the kremlin a few weeks before the election. You think that the president of russia is trying to say rose you mean the russian president would try to affect the election of another country . Thats very new laughter i agree on the putin comment. I have been gone for a long time and, bernard, youre there, this is more on the role of france in the future and what will particularly be the economic role of france in the future and what will be the economic benefits or what changes because, as we know, the french people have been sitting with around 10 unemployment for a very long time, now and, you know, when president hollande decided not to run, it was all because of where the economy was, and it wouldnt budge. So if you look at these four candidates, they have very different visions of what they want to do on the economy and france. You know, with fillon and macron probably being the most similar but macron definitely being more centrist. Meelenchon and le pen are at boh ends but have some of the same policies. Rose and fillon. Fillon macron is more centrist, fillon more center right. When i was there and we did quite a bit with ipsos, at the timeand it could have changed, a huge amount was what is the pe for france. E, what is thee how do we see ourselves. Are we optimistic about the future . To we see the glass half empty or half full . Do we have hope for greatness of france . Do we believe europe is the best way to be strong again . Its like something rose are the arguments made in his first run . All the campaigns, every five years, all the campaigns they are around unemployment and economics. Rose and the role of the state in the economy. Yes. But what makes this one very different, i think, and those who have been the to france recently, i guess they would agree, is that people are still under shock by both the immigration, the wavef migrants from syria, et cetera, and by the terrorist attack, and thats why i insist on the cultural identity threat. Rose thank you all. Thank you, charlie. Rose well be right back with steve ballmer, former c. E. O. Of microsoft with an interesting new idea to assess the data about Government Spending. Stay with us. Rose steve ballmer, former c. E. O. Of microsoft announced a new project this week. L. A. Clippers owner and largest stockholder in microsoft launching usa facts, comp hencete, nonpaisans data atform that tracks Government Spending and performance. I sat down with him tuesday at the Economic Club of new york about his career and new venture. Let me start back to where you were. When you look for when you had the question that you wanted to answer, you know, how is government money spent, and you went looking for that, had anybody else tried to do this . You can find everything in our in our site, you can find someplace else. I mean, we didnt create anything original except the structure around the data. So the answer is yes on every topic. And there are actually some very good sites that pick certain of these topics and do them very well. I saw a great visualization the other day of how government money gets spent. Thats super. You dont see many place where is people are adding together state, federal and local data. Thats pretty rare because most governments present themselves government by government. But everything out there is available. Part of the question is bringing it together. If you say how many jobs are in food preparation and service, you will find the bureau of labor statistics web site. You may not navigate it very well with, and it may be hard to correlate that with other things going on in the chi. Rose whos going on in the economy. Rose whos going to use it . I hope what we get initially is people in the government field, journalists, i think, will benefit, and what i will call the most engaged part of the citizenry, people who read the kinds of publications that regularly cover things in some depth, in some use of numbers, and that would certainly point to the Great National newspapers and magazines, the economist, the f. T. , the new york times, the wall street journal, et cetera. Rose why do you feel better about how government money is being spent . I thought there were a lot of pockets where you could really you can debate the money is not being spent on your priorities. I thought we would find a lot of pockets where things looked very expensive relative to output, and i dont think at least i didnt feel like i found that. Take transfer payments. I think transfer payments are about 2. 4 trillion, if i remember correctly, so that is medicare, medicaid, Social Security, snap and other stuff. 2. 4 trillion to spend 5. 4 trillion. You can agree or disagree about how much of that we should do, but the truth is you know that money goes straight through to purpose. People are eating the snap dollars. People are spending their Social Security money. I feel good about that. When you look at the people that work in government, i feel pretty good, actually, on what people were doing. I dont mind spending that money. Government pensions . They look high. If you look at government pension costs compared to private sector pension costs or private sector 401k contributions, that looks a little bit different to me. So i went through sort of category by category in addition to profession by profession, and i felt a little bit better about effective use of money and, as i say, reasonable people can disagree about what to spend on. Rose how do you ensure its bipartisan . Numbers dont know whether theyre liberal or conservative, at least last time i checked. Adjectives may, but numbers dont know. We havent actually informally shared our work, our annual report in some of the other documents with people who are clearly democrats and people who are clearly republicans, i. E. Politicians, and i got no feedback about this thing being partisan, none whatsoever, not from democrats nor republicans. Rose the idea of takeaway i mean, you talked about the fact the government is doing better than you imagined. Other takeaways for you . Yeah. And ill be careful because its surprises that are important. Im not going to give you my policy my personal policy views. Theyre not relevant. For today, in this work, im only partisan about three things. Im partisan about the numbers. Mygwife and i in philanthropy are clearly dedicated to try to find a way to have private and public money, giving opportunity to kids to live the american dream, and i have to say i so of think, overhe long term, balanced budgets are a good thing. I dont understand companies not making money, and i dont understand how you sustain yourself longterm. But whether that means increasen taxes increasing taxes, decreasing spending. The democracy should figure that out. Thats mott the point of this work thats not the point of this work. So with that as context, i ran through a few things. Ill give you another one. We did an analysis of how much money it took, inflation adjusted, to be in the middle quintile in 2000 versus today, 2015. It actually takes lower income to be in the middle quintile today than it did 15 years ago. Thats probably not a very good thing. When people say the middle class is getting hollowed out, maybe thats what theyre talking about. I dont know what the middle class really is. Im a numbers guy. So i just say, hmm, this must have something to do with income quintiles. That would be another example of something that was surprising to me to see actually laid out numerically. Rose at this sage where do you think government money is being spent badly . Again, badly depends on your political view. Let me take the simplest one. I talked to you about rose you have said you were pleasantly surprised you thought it was doing better. Right. Rose why dont you be pleasantly disappointed because you thought it was doing worse . Thats based on my values. I dont want to complicate this discussion with my values. Rose im asking your values. I dont want to share them because its not important to the dialogue. The dialogue is about what the numbers say, not what i happen to value. Rose cant you make a judgment about values . Let me pick one youd think everybody can agree on. Let me pick it. So bridge quality has improved dramatically since 1980, dramatically. Transportation investment in transportation infrastruure is up. Somebody might say, oh thats a great correlation somebody might say and we havent had that many bridge accidents, traffic fatalities are down, there is not a lot of bridge collapse fatalities. Somebody might look at that and say let that continue to go, its going well. Some mother with their baby in the back seat might say, i cant stand the fact that 9 of the bridges in the country are structurally deficient. I cant take that. Thats way too hard for me because i value my baby. So is that a good or bad set of statistics . People have to decide. Take the economy. We have a table and an annual report where i call it the knobs and dials chart. At the top, we have, like, ten things government can do to stimulate the economy. At the bottom we have a bunch of outcomes, and we do this stuff over time because oftentimes government stimulation can drive things up and then you will see a phase down or a decline. You can look at that chart and some people will say Government Action has a huge impact on the economy and some people may say it seems to be uncorrelated, and weve had people look at this table and say both. So value judgments by me are not that important. Im not a politician. Im not running for office. I never will. Im just a guy with a bunch of numbers trying to make sense of the world. Rose do the numbers tell you the government needs to do a better job, the government needs to do more and it needs to be a better divide between publicprivate contribution in a philanthropic way . Well, were focused very narrowly in our philanthropic work with. We are not medical research people. We are not Hospital Construction people. We do give to our alma maters, but ill put that in a separate category. Long live the university of oregon, long live harvard and stanford. Rose oregon is your wife and harvard is you. Yeah, exactly. So great institutions that well support. But when you focus in on money that goes to support disadvantaged kids, in many if not most of all the notforprofits we work with, 50 to 80 or 85 of their funding, which is still insufficient versus what they do, but it comes from government contracts. So, yeah, is it important . Sure. Dustry out there funded byg government to provide social services. So is that money well spent . On the philanthropic side were very focused in on that. Most government dollars are not spent, at least in h the social service sector, with a pay for performance mentality. You pay for the number of kids processed, not whether those kids are getting good outcomes through the system. You pay based upon the number of people who go to jail, not the number of people who stay out of jail. The notion of performancebased contracting we think is very important, but that deals specifically with our interests, the one im willing to cop to publicly, i think that money can be better spent. But i will cop to that one publicly. When i think about balancing the dget and bl blah blah, everybody here is an expert. Ill just give you the numbers to make your case. Rose where is the Human Element in this . The two biggest things that we did Human Element was try to decide how to explain what government does, and thats where the constitution wound up helping us. Rose right. Part of the problem with government databases is everybodys got a different taxonomy about what government does. You know, what are governments actions . Then you wihd up going to all these databases and you think government does millions of things. In a way, it does, but, i in a way, it can be simplified. Thats part of the Human Element. Thats part of decisions we made. I think theyre partial, nonpartisan and nonbiased but ich part of the populationsions should we study in term of how government impacts . We pick the family types, income levels, race and ethnicity is more obvious, we decided 65plus. So we did make some let me call them human decisions before we presented the information and we presented it in a certain con context. We decided for the first version whats material and whats not material. Somebody asked me can you tell me what was spent on the National Park system . I didnt know we had it. I typed in National Park spending. Guess what . We dont have it. But we have the total number of acres in National Parks, in national forests, et cetera. Rose so where will this be in five years . I hope you will have the most important thing i would hope is we have the same missions and submissions. So we have consistency in presentation and i hope we have a much broader set, much more data, but we continue testify a simplified way to present it, but with tools that let you just dig in and find exactly what you want. What is reading proficiency for fourth graders in mississippi versus california . And you want to correlate that with education spent in, lets say, l. A. , since we have a Basketball Team, versus oxford, mississippi. Rose called the lakers, i think. laughter im leaving were done now. God, that was a real cheap shot, charlie. Rose yeah, it was. The lamb l. A. Clippers playing tonight against the utah jazz, go clips to be precise. Now you really got me off target. Rose what are you going in five years is, my question, and what are some things you have to have to accelerate the growth. For example, connection to a big Search Engine, that sort of thing. Thats certainly one, connection to the Search Engines. Literally you could go to bing, my favorite Search Engine, or gurgle, and literally pose the kind of question, how many arrests made in a certain year. You would like those to come back as answers if we get well hooked up, so we have a lot of work to do. I think the most important thing well try the do between now and then is try to bring the data alive. Wouldnt it be great to have a debate once a week or every two weeks on youtube or Facebook Live where you have somebody from the left and somebody from the right debating a topic but anchored. Youve got to look at the same data. Its being vouched for, its integrity, and people cant get away with saying things that are just not right or are framed in adjectives that are not suorted by numbers. Rose let me talk about some other things, too, in the 15 minutes i have remaining. And lets talk about the clippers. Is the joy of owning a Basketball Team an n. B. A. Franchise, everything you thought it would be is this because you at the games are how do i say this a crazy man. Its everything i hoped for and more. It is so cool. Im actually sitting here at the table with Glenn Hutchins who ive known since we were in college. Rose connected to the celtics. Owner of the boston celtics. We just made a deal that if the celtics and the clippers are in the finals were sitting together. But i think glenn would agree with me, you know, losing is not fun. I gotta tell ya, losing at the buzzer to the jazz in our first playoff game, ahhh that was not fun. But if you want to have the fun, youve got to take a little pain along with it. Rose when you at the board of microsoft decided you had different visions for the company and it was time for you to leave, how was that for you . I mean, you have been at this company, you built this company, you had remarkable success, youd become amazingly rich, and now you can still be amazingly rich, but you werent doing daytoday what you had been doing all your adult life. What do you go through . My life plan had been to work and then have a second phase of life. I always wanted a second phase of life i would hit before i was too old to really enjoy it. My plan had probably been to work another couple of years past when i worked. Rose mid 50s when you did this. Yeah, and i planned to do this till my youngest son went to college two, or three years longer, but at the end of the day if we couldnt agree on strategy, it was time for me to go. Thats fine. Its tumultuous to stop doing something youve done for 20 or 40 years. I had a principle that i was going to work hard to the last day. The last day im done and i havent planned anything for the future. What the heck am i going to do . Thank goodness my wife challenged me. I got involved philanthropically. Thank goodness this usa facts came to mind. At least from my perspective and maybe the fans, thank goodness the l. A. Clippers was forced to be sold and i was there. I had already looked at three n. B. A. Teams to buy, i knew how the math worked and it was like this manna from heaven that the clips became available. So i wont say it was quick. I probably had a tough year. Rose microsoft, its done, many say, really well. Stock prices have gone up, benefiting you as the largest stockholder. How to you assess why they have been so successful since you left . Let me give three comments on that. laughter number one, i think theyre doing a great job. Rose right. Approve of your successor. Yeah, i do approve of my successor and i think theyre making the right Strategic Moves. Theyve got to make more, better faster but theyre doing a good job. Rose more, better, faster, Strategic Moves meaning theyre not doing as much and not as fast. Right, and i would have said more, better faster. More, better faster. Ill say that about my successor, more, better, faster, but i think theyre doing a great job. Rose what keeps them from being more, better, faster . There is so much to do in any tech business you have to push yourself relentlessly. Im not being critical even in the slightest but do i know the industry moves quickly and you better move quickly with it, so thats number one. Number two, i think theyve done a great job reestablishing the image of the company, how muchs really changed versus how muchs changed perceptually, i cant comment. One thing i did del the board when i was going was my successor will have a better opportunity to change the perception of the Company Including its stock price than i would. I have been doing what i have been doing 14 years. People werent going to say, oh, everything changed overnight. I think thats an advantage my successor had. Rose so he got a fresh look. Yeah, and i think hes den a great job with that. Its different but how youre perceived is important to how well you do. Thats number two. Number three, i will point out that the hot products theyre promoting today we all started on my watch. I feel pretty good about that. Number four, i want to see mr. Profit growth. Profit really hasnt grown enough since i left, and i know in the tech world today not making money is cool and you get high market caps, but im still a big believer in profit growth. Rose is that the proudest thing you did in terms of, say, the last in terms of your tenure, how you made the huge lift in profits . I think id say yes, but i would also say, you know, we started xbox, we started bing, we started sur fas, azure and office 365 all on my watch, very proud of that, and the team in place today was largely the team we had in place when i left, and my successor found those folks all worthy of staying in their jobs. Hes a guy i identified as a high potential star within a year or two of him starting in the company, so those people, the the team, i have great pride, the profit, i have great pride, and the products, i have great pride. Rose greatest regret . Greatest regret remains i think the company should have gotten into hardware sooner. Rose i thought so, yeah. Thats my mistake. Rose why didnt you . People can disagree. Apparently the board disagreed. Rose apparently bill disagreed. Apparently, yeah. The companys still doing hardware. I think its probably fair to say the biggest miss was our position in the phone business. I think the phone business, its very hard to have a Business Case for doing phones just with the royalty. Rose right. Google does it by forcing their Search Engine into the game. Their Search Engine is a money machine. Apple does it have a gross margin. Rose right. I think our model, trying to reproduce the windows model in phones was flawed. I pursued it for a long time but it was fundamentally a flawed model. Rose you couldnt put windows into phone. You could put a derivation of windows into phones, you just couldnt get paid for it. Rose yeah. The question with a lot of these things isnt what should the product be, its how to monetize the technology you build. Apple and google had a montation approach, hardware and search. We never had a montation approach, which means we didnt invest in the right way, we couldnt get our product boot strapped and at high volume. I would approach it differently if i could do it again, but i cant. Rose yahoo, you were prepared to pay big dollars. I would look like a genius if we actually bought it. If you take a look at what i was willing to pay versus the value of the asset, touchdown. Rose mainly because to have the investment of alibaba. Absolutely. That would look like a perfectly good investment. Rose 40 billion, Something Like that . Yeah, 30something. 33 bucks a share, whatever that meant back then. But you put the two things together, there would have been loot of synergy and speed to market that took a lot more time and the cost benefits didnt accrue much to microsoft in the final partnership we did as they would have if we had acquired. So i think, with ten years of hindsight, because about ten years ago, i think, we first proposed the acquisition, it wouldnt have looked good five years ago, but with ten years having passed, i think that would have looked like a great acquisition. Rose when you look at the future, cloud has clearly been a huge part of microsoft success today, where do you see the future going . What is it thats going to be what are we going to be talking about . Well, i think its probably fair to say i spent two and a half to three years working on usa facts because data wasnt very accessible. Rose yeah. But in a sense what you would really like to do is have technology tack express your interest in the topic, and the Artificial Intelligence that lives in the cloud is smart must have to say im not just going to bring back one data element the way search does, im going to bring back a picture of whats going on in this area, im going to understand intent, im going to work off intent. And whether thats preparing me for my visit to the Economic Club, looking up the bios of everybody at the head table because they were in my agenda, could have looked them up, presented them to me if it understood my intent. Im interested in Government Spending. It doesnt take me to some random web site where i might find what im looking for. It actually brings back to me a picture of Government Spending. So the notion of Technology Software understanding intent and being able to harness data to serve intent, however that comes about, there will be magic words, was machine learning, its Artificial Intelligence, it will probably change two or three more times, but thats where i think there is a lot of opportunity. Virtual reality, allmented reality, in a way, theyre part of intent. I have on my little augmented reality glasses and i look at you and it shows me your biobecause it recognizes who you are. When im 85, i may not recognize who the heck you are but at least there is a laser shining into my eye assuming i can still see it and actually the laser will work wetter than my eyes because they can tune automatically to my vision. Anyway, this notion of technology that recognizes intent and serves you based on that i think is super important. Rose we look at what elon musk is doing in Driverless Cars and we see where apple is going to make a big push into Driverless Cars, we assume, they havent spoken much about it, is that something microsoft would have been interested in . Wow would have to ask current management. Rose i said might have been interested in because a lot of it is driven by software, as you know. Yeah, i would say it is interesting but its a little bit like the phone, you have to pick the right gothemarket approach. If all youre writing is some software thats in the back end that gets embedded in cars, there might not be a lot of money in there. You might spend a lot of time trying to convince automakers and get there slowly, but it might be the right approach or the right approach might be to build a car which is what teslas done. Shands like its what apple would do. Google might approach it differently. So there is two reasons to get the Business Model right. One is so you get paid and the two is so you get your product to market quickly. If you build a bunch of software and youre begging g. M. And ford and bmw and dont get to market quickly, the guy who builds their own car night get ahead of you. On the other hand, tesla doesnt build many cars in the grand scheme of things. Maybe thats not the best way to get there. Rose theyve got a hell of a market cap, dont they . They sure do. Rose core competence, as we end here. Core competence, steve jobs, what was it . I think steve had a unique ability to put together familiarity with technology, as well as a sort of understanding of what makes sense to consumers and conceptualizing product. I think that was a talent. In my world, anybody who can do one magic thing in business is great. Most companies are not or startups let me call it, a single trick. They talk about a single trick pony. Most businesses are zero trick ponies. Successful businesses are at least a single trick pony and almost nobody does more than one trick. Steve jobs did more than one trick. He did do apple 2 mac and he did do let me just call it the iseries iphones, ipads, et cetera. Thats amazing, two tricks. I think microsoft did two tricks and thats part of why microsoft is amazing. That was a great skill of steve jobs. Rose jeff bazos. His long term has pushed position into multiple areas. I marvel at the market cap they have, and i wonder about their longterm profit streams. I think what theyre focused on is commoditizing a lot of industries, taking profit down and having them benefit from their huge scale, yet they havent proved the benefits at least in terms of profitability from having that scale. Rose bill gates. Bill gates. Super energetic businessman, able to comprehend and really see the Market Opportunities in himself. A doesnt product conceptualizer for sure and great at mobilizing technical talent. Rose i think steve jobs said bill was more rockefeller than edison. That was a way to kind of give a backhand compliment. I think thats way overstated. In the grand scheme of things, was bill a better businessman than steve jobs . Probably. Did steve spend more time on really product creation . Probably. Are they both incredibly amazing people who did Amazing Things . Yes. So im not sure its really important to debate whose rockefeller and whos einstein. If somebody said i was close to either one of them, id feel pretty good. Rose yes, exactly. applause all right, one last name. One last name. Steve ballmer, core competency. Reliance on data, we know that. Yeah, i think my Core Competencies do have to do with i can really go through and try to form a simplified picture of a fairly complicated topic, that is the usa facts corps competency but also the core competency when i was writing microsoft which is probably the reason microsoft makes as much money as it does is the ability to see the opportunities through the numbers. Another thing thats a core capability for me is bringing teams together, pointing them in a direction and getting them fired up. I think im pretty good at that. Ive got a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm. To be good at that, you have to be good at simplifying things. I think i have the ability to simplify, you know, were only going to have four goals, lets follow them, lets go of course, if youre pointing people the wrong direction, thats very bad. Charismatic leaders who lead you over cliffs, you would be better off not being a charismatic leader. Leadership is about being excited and firm and clear but also about getting the ideas right and i think thats what really helped at microsoft. Bill was very helpful getting the ideas right and i was very good at bringing them to action. Rose thank you for coming to new york Economic Club. applause rose for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs. Org and charlierose. Com. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Youre watching pbs