In a video interview posted on TechRepublic, Bill Gates discusses some of the ways that the standard telephone sitting on your desk with too many buttons and a tiny screen will change in the coming years. Only one in three people know how to successfully transfer a phone call to someone else in their office, according to Gates, who says that the desk phone has hardly evolved at all in recent times. Compared to a mobile phone or a Mac, he’s right–remember those four-inch floppy disks you used to use to save your Clarisworks files? In the next five years, Gates sees the phone evolving into an extension of the PC or a stand-alone phone with a larger touch screen, scrolling through transfer names, and other features foreign to the common desk phone. Speech recognition is in his crystal ball as well. Take a look at the video.
