"When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen"
About this Quote
Gates is selling a future by sounding like he is merely describing common sense. The line stacks three deliberately unglamorous chores homework, taxes, trip planning to make “full-size screen” feel less like a gadget preference and more like a requirement of adult competence. It’s a classic Gates move: frame computing not as entertainment but as infrastructure, the quiet desk you return to when life gets complicated.
The specific intent is defensive and strategic. In an era when smaller devices keep trying to replace the PC, he redraws the boundary of what counts as “real work.” “Need” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s not “nice” or “better,” it’s “you need,” a word that turns a market argument into an inevitability. The subtext: phones and tablets are fine for consumption, but the serious business of decisions, forms, and comparisons belongs to the kind of machine Microsoft historically dominates.
The rhetorical trick is the final clause: “see all the choices.” That’s not just about pixels; it’s about agency. A small screen implies hidden menus, truncated options, fewer tabs, fewer simultaneous views. A big screen becomes a metaphor for transparency and control, the idea that the world is legible if you have the right interface. Culturally, it lands in a moment of screen drift, when our lives migrate to handhelds and the PC looks old-fashioned. Gates reframes that nostalgia as responsibility: the desktop isn’t dead; it’s where adulthood still happens.
The specific intent is defensive and strategic. In an era when smaller devices keep trying to replace the PC, he redraws the boundary of what counts as “real work.” “Need” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s not “nice” or “better,” it’s “you need,” a word that turns a market argument into an inevitability. The subtext: phones and tablets are fine for consumption, but the serious business of decisions, forms, and comparisons belongs to the kind of machine Microsoft historically dominates.
The rhetorical trick is the final clause: “see all the choices.” That’s not just about pixels; it’s about agency. A small screen implies hidden menus, truncated options, fewer tabs, fewer simultaneous views. A big screen becomes a metaphor for transparency and control, the idea that the world is legible if you have the right interface. Culturally, it lands in a moment of screen drift, when our lives migrate to handhelds and the PC looks old-fashioned. Gates reframes that nostalgia as responsibility: the desktop isn’t dead; it’s where adulthood still happens.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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