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Bill, Thanks For The RSA Memories... And Laughs

I've had the pleasure of witnessing all four of Bill Gate's keynotes at the annual RSA Security Conference and now that he passing the torch on to Craig Mundie, I gotta say Bill, I'm gonna miss ya.

This week's keynote speech probably marks the last time we'll see the Microsoft icon grace the stage at the massive security gathering (15,000 heads this year).

Gates himself isn't giving up on security, it's that he's a short timer headed for the other world stage to promote solving the global AIDS epidemic and other assorted philanthropy with his Gates Foundation.

What makes this swan song interesting is that it comes nearly five years after the "Trustworthy Computing" memo. That's the one Gates sent out to employees -- and conveniently leaked to the press -- that Microsoft's focus would be on security. That one note had such an impact. It held up delivery of Windows Vista; it forced everyone to install Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows XP; it created the need for another version of Internet Explorer; and it sent Gates around the press junkets touting the security changes to Microsoft products, including annual stops at RSA.

And oh, what a jolly time it has been.

Back in 2004, against a backdrop of Chinese dancers, Gates pleaded with people to install SP2... ASAP. "SP2 is a release that is totally focused on security and in fact today that is the primary focus on the Windows team," Gates said. "We think this will be a very important release and we will ask people to install broadly."

And then he rambled on about how, over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords since people use the same password on different systems ... and they write them down. They're just not very secure.

That's fair. Microsoft was getting dinged right and left for having more holes in its operating system than Swiss cheese.

Then in 2005 -- in front of a stage set to look like 1920's Prohibition -- Gates revealed to the crowds how he fell victim to his own security blunder. Remember that memo he left on a table at world economic summit in Davos, Switzerland? Gates joked about other doodles, which said things like "Remind Melinda to record 24," and new password "BillGRullz2005." Hmmm. There's that password security breach again.

That was the keynote where Gates also noted that Microsoft needed to build IE 7 -- lots of bugs in its first release -- and that it was spending more than $2 billion on security research. Thank goodness Gates didn't spend it for notepaper on which to write a new password.

The 2006 keynote at RSA got even more bizarre. Surrounded by Indian architecture and elephants, Gates poked fun at Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Happy Valentine's Day. I'm really glad to be here at RSA. My other invitation was to go quail hunting with Dick Cheney. I'm feeling very safe right now."

That was the same year that Microsoft announced new security products, such as Windows OneCare Live and Microsoft Client Protection, as well as its "password replacement" InfoCard system -- now called CardSpace. The funny thing is that both InfoCard and CardSpace are attempts to revive Microsoft's largely failed Passport single sign-on service, which raised a few privacy eyebrows after it was unveiled in 1999.

"I don't pretend that we are going to move away from passwords overnight, but over three or four years, for corporate systems, this change can and should happen," Gates said.

So here we are now in 2007... and not much has changed. This week's RSA conference in San Francisco kicked off with about two dozen actors as Franciscan monks choreographed to the music of David Bowie and Queen's rock 'n' roll ballad "Under Pressure." Priceless.

Bill is still complaining about passwords:

"Passwords already are the weakest link in information protection," he said.

So, what have we learned in four years? You be the judge.

Seattle Times reporter Todd Bishop has a ditty about the most often used words by Gates during these RSA keynotes. Using Chirag Mehta's Tagline Generator, it turns out that Bill talked a great deal about computers, Windows, and firewalls in 2004. So much less so this year when his most frequent words were "capability" and "mechanisms."

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