And his media handler.

Oh, and he has brought along a couple of executives, too.

Above our heads is a long microphone, which, together with the small microphone on the table in front of us, feeds our conversation through a mixing desk to two cassette tapes. Next to me is our transcriber for the afternoon.

Gates will not be misquoted in this piece.

Dressed in a natty checked suit, Gates proceeds to drop witty, even sarcastic, quips into the conversation. He is in London to back the launch of Get Safe Online, a UK government-backed and Microsoft-backed campaign to increase security awareness among computer users.

Microsoft is spending record sums on innovating and developing new products and security features. But Gates has a wider vision.

He is looking forward to a near-paperless world where we won’t want magazines, students won’t need textbooks, and paper forms will be redundant. It is a vision we have been told about before — the paperless office was supposed to have been the norm by now — but Gates is adamant that we are nearing a turning point.

“We’re right on the verge of something that could become mainstream,” he says. “We’re the people who’ve been saying this for a decade, but now we’re finally saying it’s near.”

In the Microsoft chairman’s world we will all carry information on tablet computers, which can be held like a clipboard, with a flat screen on the front.

Forms, text books, magazines and newspapers will all go digital, he says, with a childlike eagerness for the possibilities that this heralds. “There’s a group of students that are going to college during this decade who, because they use the tablet in college, will, as they go into the workforce, think about the magazines they want to read and it will be obvious to them that digital is far superior,” he says.

Fiction, he concedes, will probably remain in book form, but we’re approaching a curtain call for other reading material: “The encyclopedia was the first book to go. It’s way cheaper, way more up-to-date. It doesn’t smell as good, but otherwise we’re a winner.”

As Microsoft’s chief software architect, the future is Gates’s job. The software giant has a new release on the horizon: Vista, the latest version of its Windows operating software. But while Microsoft dominates the operating software “platform”, the new platform is the internet. And on that front it faces a formidable competitor: Google.

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