Why Bill Gates started Robotics Studio

The reason Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates decided that the company should come out with the Robotics Studio was because he was deeply impressed by the humanoid robot kits sold by Kondo Kagaku Co. when he saw them in spring of 2004, according to an article on Nikkei BP ITpro, Japan's leading IT news website. The article says that the CTO of Microsoft Japan, Shunichi Kajisa,revealed the anecdote during his keynote speech at WinHEC 2007 Tokyo on June 18.

Kajisa said that Mr. Gates, after seeing the Kondo robot kits, saw a future where every household will have a robot.  Microsoft is currently working on what it calls the "Concurrency and Coordination Runtime（CCR）" which is meant to enable the parallel processing of complicated tasks on the .NET Framework, and the Robotics Studio is the first development tool adopting CCR.

Books on the Robotics Studio have already been published in Japanese in Japan - the "world's first" according to Kajisa - despite the fact that the development tool currently comes in English only. How the Japanese robotics community will play a part in the future of Robotics Studio will be something to keep an eye on.