>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin this evening with the french elections, with bernard-henri leévy, alessia lefeébure, jane hartley and philippe corbeé. >> and may win eventually, but she needs a very low turnout, and i don't know if the attacks yesterday night will really lead the french people to stay at home sunday. i don't know. that's an important question, the turnout sunday. the other thing is, in fact, if she wants to win in two weeks, she wants to be, in fact, with fillon, not macron. if we can find the two conditions on sunday to give her the hope to win in two weeks, i think she's still trailing

behind mr. ma crob, and macron has not been defeated by the attack yesterday night. >> rose: we conclude with steve ballmer, former c.e.o. of microsoft who's initiated an interesting new project, a web site that will provide information about how the government spends your money. >> numbers don't know whether they're liberal or conservative, last time i checked. adjectives may but numbers don't know. we haven't actually informally shared our work, our annual report and some of the other domes with people who are clearly democrats or clearly republicans -- i e politicians -- >> rose: the french elections and steve ballmer's new idea when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the

following: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: we begin with politics the this evening, not american politics but french politics and european politics. french citizens will go to follows this sunday to cast their ballots in what could be the most highly contested presidential election in the country's history. the eleven candidates include emmanuel macron and ple marine le pen, running neck and neck. the french people are on high

alert following yesterday's terrorist attack. jane hartley, former u.s. ambassador to france. philippe corbeé, corredspondent for french radio rtl. alessia lefeébure, of columbia university. and from paris, our friend, philosopher, author and filmmaker bernard-henri leévy. i am pleased to have them here as we look forward to the first part of this election sunday. bernard, tell me what the mood is in france as you see it from paris and what's the prospect as we look at it this evening? >> the mood, first of all, is very sad. it is a mood of sorrow because of the terrorist attack of yesterday night and because of the death of this brave policeman and the two others who were heavily wounded. so there is a sort of veil of darkness on france and on paris today which you can really touch

with your hands. this is the mood. now the prospect is that mr. macron is still running ahead. not compel neck to neck. marine le pen is a few points behind him. so you have macron ahead, marine le pen number two, and very close to them in this hand handkerchief the extreme leftist mr. meélenchon and the classic liberal mr. fillon. >> rose: is anyone trending? does anyone have any momentum? >> yes, this seems to be a good question. this is a moment since one week in favor of meélenchon, and youh clearly matters with expectation in france.

this is the long trend in. one week momentum. since yesterday night, there is probably sort of momentum, but not so strong as it could have been expected for mrs. le pen. this attack yesterday was aimed at that. i.s.i.s. votes for le pen. i.s.i.s. and le pen are sort of twins, and the target of daesh yesterday night was clearly to improve the vote for le pen. i think i.s.i.s. failed, in a way, because the momentum is not as big as expected. >> rose: so what do you think the impact will be of this attack? >> well, i would say that madam le pen may win but with several conditions. may win eventually but she needs a very low turnout.

i don't know if the attacks yesterday night will lead the french people to stay at home sunday. i don't know. that's an important question, the turnout sunday. the other thing, is for the, if she wants to win in two weeks, she wants to be, in fact, with fillon, the conservative candidate and not macron. so there are two with conditions. i don't know if the two conditions are really -- if we can find the two conditions sunday to give her the hope the to win in two -- hope to win in two weeks. i think she's still trailing behind mr. macron, and macron has not been defeated by the attack yesterday night. >> rose: president obama called macron? >> yes, he did. >> rose: what impact might that have? >> you know, president obama made it quite clear he was not endorsing any candidate in this race. i do know, because when i was there and subsequently president obama is incredibly popular in

france and, at one point, there was a beginning of a write-in campaign, i think you may have seen it, with posters all over paris asking -- >> rose: at the same time, he went and campaigned in a way against brexit and it didn't have the kind of result partly because the appeal to the young people, either did not vote or -- >> i think it's a positive. i don't remember what one to have the previous guests said, but macron has been leading pretty consistently. it has been a very tight lead and he and le pen have been neck and neck, you know, a point or two apart. fillon has come back a lilt bit recently. i think the most positive poll showed him at 20, so three or four points behind, and meélenchon had some momentum which may have stopped and i think bernard is right that most recently macron in the last few days has the momemtum. and it's important, i think, as

you look at macrons a candidate and how he tried to portray himself, i worked with him quite a bit when i was over there, what will the future of france be. >> hope. it's hope. that's where it is similar to obama. it's optimism, it's hope. we obviously have to make some changes, but it's particularly addressed at some of the young people in terms of what he's going to do in terms of education, what he's going to do in terms of apprenticeships. and i don't think the attacks -- i mean, i have not seen a poll in the last day or so, but we had elections when i was there both after bataclan and after neese, the elections in france, it did not really move the needle. >> rose: meélenchon, who does he take votes from, this popularity, surprising litho he's been a long-time face in

politics. >> surprisingly he's taking votes with some of the young people. >> rose: he's sort of a bernie sanders, some said? >> some have said. i would personal disagree. of course, there is something like that, a senior politician, very experienced, but getting the votes of the young people. but, at the same time, if you look at his program, it has nothing to do with sanders. sanders would be more similar to socialists. meélenchon is strongly nationalist, so it's not a france of diversity, it's not a france of the minorities, it's not a france of tolerance. he's very hard core on the secularism in his conception of secularism. there is no religion at all. these things, i don't think we can make it closer to what sanders had in his program. at the same time, i would completely agree with jane, half of the young people, those who succeed, those who are all over the world in universities, those

in columbia, new york, they love macron. macron is the future, the start of technology, they embrace this kind of france that helps the momentum of these young people. the other half, those who feel a little bit threatened by the globalization, those who struggle with the employment, those who are scared about their future, those vote for meélenchon. there is no other alternative for them. >> rose: there is been some slippage in the campaign of le pen and her popularity. is it insignificant but, nevertheless, what caused it? >> one thing you have to remember is that one month ago marine le pen was ahead of the race. today, she's 20 percent or so. one month ago she was 30 percent. so she has a very negative momemtum since a few weeks. this is very important to know. she was losing till yesterday

night, till i.s.i.s. decided to vote for her, she was losing speed every day. this is one thing which is very important. number two, you asked about the phone call of barack obama to macron. in france, it is much better to be endorsed by president obama than by president trump. marine le pen is endorsed by president trump. not good for her. she's endorsed by putin and trump, and really it was very bad news for her both of the endorsement. macron is endorsed by obama, which is a much more decent endorsement. number three, one thing i would hike to say at the end of his cam -- this campaign is it was a terrible campaign. it was one -- probably the worst campaign i ever saw in france. maybe in america you know the sort of campaign, you saw that before us, when argument are

replaced by punch line, when the debate is considered a macho box or something. this campaign was not a delivery of the great republican and democratic spirit in france as your last campaign in america which was also hopeless. these other fundamentals of the campaign. in this devastated political landscape there is macron who is swimming up. >> rose: let me ask all of you this -- essentially, she's an anti-immigration candidate. she talks about what it means to be french as a campaign. she talks about her anti-european union philosophy. people talk about a french exit from the european union to follow brexit. can she seriously win this? does she have a real chance, unlike any national front candidate before?

>> well, let's say she may win. i don't want to say that she's going to win, but she may win. >> rose: she could win. she could win. we have to take into consideration the fact she could win, and what happened last night in paris is a way to remind us that a lot of things could happen in the next two weeks. so we don't know exactly what's going to be the mood to have the french voters next sunday and the sunday in two weeks, so she could win. but she is -- i'm not sure that her anti-euro, anti-european union brexit campaign has been really successful because she has tried as bernard-henri leévy said, she has tried to run with this platform. it didn't really work well. she came back in the last ten days and the core val yeahs of her campaign, immigration, security, islam, et cetera, because she realized that the only way to make the electorate stick around her is to bring back the far right basic of her

party. but when she tried to expand to the economic issue and the european issue, it didn't work that well, in fact. >> rose: she should win, though, and exits the european union, exits the euro. does it destroy both? >> i think it's a huge problem. first of all, i agree with you. i think just one point -- and bernard, i think, talked about it -- france is a different election because it has a second round. so it would be like if our election -- >> rose: no, i'm actually talking about if she wins the second round and becomes president. >> the second round makes it harder for her and that's what we've seen in other elections. i think it's a huge problem for europe if she wins. she's not only perhaps talking about leaving thein the european union, she's talking about going back to the frank. it's a huge problem for the european union and france,

economically. when i was there, france was probably our key partner in terms of counteri.s.i.l both on a military front and domestic security, intelligence, counterterrorism front. that would be a huge blow. france is very important in terms of what it does in the world, and what she would do is try to take france both economically, foreign policy, militarily out of the world. >> rose: the idea of europe came, in part, from the french. >> the polls, the last one, they say she could win only if she's against meélenchon, right, that she would not make it against macron or fillon. yet, if she doesn't win this time, a lot of people are worried she might win in five years from now, right. so i think the important lesson to keep for us is this election, the devastating campaign is showing that the political parties are meaningless to the people, the traditional

division, the left, the right, with the socialist, i mean, all this tradition, you have seen the score. the social asupreme court used to be very powerful in france. and even fillon is not doing as well as his predecessors, not only because of the scandals. i think people -- the traditional divide between the left, progressive and then social well fair and the right more conservative on the moral values and liberal on the economic point of view, this is not working anymore. so we have, as was said before, on the one hand a few candidates of the future, and the candidate of the nostalgia of the past, and this doesn't match the political party division. so i guess the important lesson, even if marine le pen is not elected now, is that we have to prepare for the next election. >> the turnout, though -- you

mentioned it and i know bernard mentioned it -- is key. because when we have surprises in these elections, it's when, usually, there's a low turnout. >> it's what's happening in 2002. >> they got into 16%. may i take a bet, charlie? >> rose: yes, offer the bet. i take the bet tonight that marine le pen will not be president of france. no chance, no way that she can become president of france. she's not perceived -- really, she is not perceived as a real candidate. she's not perceived as so different from her father than she pretends to be. number three, she's perceived more and more as having a very strange relationship with her own country. there is one thing which begins to enter into the minds of the voters which is that, since five

years, each time, our country, france, has to face an enemy in a diplomatic ground or a military ground. she systematically took the party of the enemy. when france had soldiers on the ground and in the air in libya, when france has special forces in syria, when france has a real arm wrestle with putin about ukraine, she's always on the camp of the enemy. at least the french are patriots and they know that she's not a patriot, that she's not so much -- >> rose: let me ask you this -- do you believe she'll make the second round? >> i think so, yes, probably, because to have the vote of daesh, because of what happened -- of what happened last night, but she will not be so much -- if there is a second round, she will not have such a big advance related to francois

fillon. francois fillon is not a bad candidate. francois fillon, i do not vote for him, but he has a good program. he would be a decent president and republican. so if she's in the second round it will be with short advance. >> rose: and macron would be the toughest person for her in terms of her possibilities in the second round? >> ma krone is beating her now, beating her in the second round by 20 points, at the moment. >> we'll see sunday night if she's 28, 29% of the vote and macron is 22, 23, it will be much more difficult. we don't know what the right-wing voters, the right-wing members of the conservative party might to. >> rose: these are people who might have supported fillon? >> some voters might vote for le pen. >> will they vote, or vote for none of the above. >> yeah.

>> rose: other than what we have talked about before in terms of immigration, what are the big issues of this campaign? what else are they talking about as issues? >> what they talk about or what the prerch want to hear about? >> rose: well, go ahead. because they have talked about meaningless things most of the time but the concerns of the french are not different than the concerns of the americans and europeans today, and i think it's sort of a whole package with all the threats related to the globalization. you put into this cultural identity islam, you put into this the euro, you put into this the european union perceived as a danger for the economics, you put into this all sorts of unemployment, the fact that the recession is still there. francois fillon does not -- francois hollande does not manage to change this. economic opportunities, jobs.

it's always the same. i think the french are like anybody else. >> rose: go ahead. during the campaign, it's the case everywhere in the world, when you are able to bring the conversation on your personal team, when you are setting the agenda, in fact, of the campaign, when you're the one who decides what's the conversation, we don't know exactly what the conversation in this campaign. i couldn't say, oh, the main topics -- the main topic of the campaign was this or that. we don't know because it's very difficult. the campaign was nasty. we talk about the price of the suit of the candidate of the conservative party. it's crazy. we don't know -- yeah. >> the biggest issue for sure. it's one to have the biggest issue. it's crazy. >> the biggest issue is to know when he gave back his suit to the tailor, the biggest issue was the know if it was the proper suit or others.

>> crazy. these were the issues, which is crazy. >> rose: mr. fillon accepted suits -- >> but the real deep issue underneath, because we are not completely lost in translation, thank god, we french, the biggest issue underneath are probably foreign policy issues. putin or not. i think they were governing secretly the debate. you have marine le pen, who is very favorable to putin, francois fillon, and you have mr. macron who knows more or less who is putin and how france has other allies than putin. >> she went to the kremlin. she was invited to the kremlin a few weeks before the election. you think that the president of russia is trying to say --

>> rose: you mean the russian president would try to affect the election of another country? >> that's very new! ( laughter ) >> i agree on the putin comment. i have been gone for a long time and, bernard, you're there, this is more on the role of france in the future and what will particularly be the economic role of france in the future and what will be the economic benefits or what changes because, as we know, the french people have been sitting with around 10% unemployment for a very long time, now and, you know, when president hollande decided not to run, it was all because of where the economy was, and it wouldn't budge. so if you look at these four candidates, they have very different visions of what they want to do on the economy and france. you know, with fillon and macron probably being the most similar

but macron definitely being more centrist. meélenchon and le pen are at boh ends but have some of the same policies. >> rose: and fillon. fillon -- macron is more centrist, fillon more center right. when i was there and we did quite a bit with ipsos, at the time, and it could have changed, a huge amount was what is the pe for france.e, what is thee >> how do we see ourselves. are we optimistic about the future? to we see the glass half empty or half full? do we have hope for greatness of france? do we believe europe is the best way to be strong again? it's like something -- >> rose: are the arguments made in his first run? >> all the campaigns, every five years, all the campaigns they are around unemployment and economics. >> rose: and the role of the

state in the economy. >> yes. but what makes this one very different, i think, and those who have been the to france recently, i guess they would agree, is that people are still under shock by both the immigration, the wavef migrants from syria, et cetera, and by the terrorist attack, and that's why i insist on the cultural identity threat. >> rose: thank you all. thank you, charlie. >> rose: we'll be right back with steve ballmer, former c.e.o. of microsoft with an interesting new idea to assess the data about government spending. stay with us. >> rose: steve ballmer, former c.e.o. of microsoft announced a new project this week. l.a. clippers owner and largest stockholder in microsoft launching "usa facts," comp hencetive, nonpartisans data platform that tracks government spending and performance. i sat down with him tuesday at the economic club of new york about his career and new

venture. let me start back to where you were. when you look for -- when you had the question that you wanted to answer, you know, how is government money spent, and you went looking for that, had anybody else tried to do this? >> you can find everything in our -- in our site, you can find someplace else. i mean, we didn't create anything original except the structure around the data. so the answer is yes on every topic. and there are actually some very good sites that pick certain of these topics and do them very well. i saw a great visualization the other day of how government money gets spent. that's super. you don't see many place where is people are adding together state, federal and local data. that's pretty rare because most governments present themselves government by government. but everything out there is available. part of the question is bringing it together. if you say how many jobs are in food preparation and service,

you will find the bureau of labor statistics web site. you may not navigate it very well with, and it may be hard to correlate that with other things going on in the chi. >> rose: who's -- going on in the economy. >> rose: who's going to use it? >> i hope what we get initially is people in the government field, journalists, i think, will benefit, and what i will call the most engaged part of the citizenry, people who read the kinds of publications that regularly cover things in some depth, in some use of numbers, and that would certainly point to the great national newspapers and magazines, the economist, the f.t., the "new york times," the "wall street journal," et cetera. >> rose: why do you feel better about how government money is being spent? >> i thought there were a lot of pockets where you could really -- you can debate the money is not being spent on your priorities. i thought we would find a lot of pockets where things looked very

expensive relative to output, and i don't think -- at least i didn't feel like i found that. take transfer payments. i think transfer payments are about 2.4 trillion, if i remember correctly, so that is medicare, medicaid, social security, snap and other stuff. 2.4 trillion to spend 5.4 trillion. you can agree or disagree about how much of that we should do, but the truth is you know that money goes straight through to purpose. people are eating the snap dollars. people are spending their social security money. i feel good about that. when you look at the people that work in government, i feel pretty good, actually, on what people were doing. i don't mind spending that money. government pensions? they look high. if you look at government pension costs compared to private sector pension costs or private sector 401k contributions, that looks a little bit different to me. so i went through sort of category by category in addition

to profession by profession, and i felt a little bit better about effective use of money and, as i say, reasonable people can disagree about what to spend on. >> rose: how do you ensure it's bipartisan? >> numbers don't know whether they're liberal or conservative, at least last time i checked. adjectives may, but numbers don't know. we haven't actually informally shared our work, our annual report in some of the other documents with people who are clearly democrats and people who are clearly republicans, i.e. politicians, and i got no feedback about this thing being partisan, none whatsoever, not from democrats nor republicans. >> rose: the idea of takeaway -- i mean, you talked about the fact the government is doing better than you imagined. other takeaways for you? >> yeah. and i'll be careful because it's surprises that are important.

i'm not going to give you my policy -- my personal policy views. they're not relevant. for today, in this work, i'm only partisan about three things. i'm partisan about the numbers. mygwife and i in philanthropy are clearly dedicated to try to find a way to have private and public money, giving opportunity to kids to live the american dream, and i have to say i sort of think, over the long term, balanced budgets are a good thing. i don't understand companies not making money, and i don't understand how you sustain yourself long-term. but whether that means increasen taxes -- increasing taxes, decreasing spending. the democracy should figure that out. that's mott the point of this work -- that's not the point of this work. so with that as context, i ran through a few things. i'll give you another one. we did an analysis of how much money it took, inflation

adjusted, to be in the middle quintile in 2000 versus today, 2015. it actually takes lower income to be in the middle quintile today than it did 15 years ago. that's probably not a very good thing. when people say the middle class is getting hollowed out, maybe that's what they're talking about. i don't know what the middle class really is. i'm a numbers guy. so i just say, hmm, this must have something to do with income quintiles. that would be another example of something that was surprising to me to see actually laid out numerically. >> rose: at this sage where do you think government money is being spent badly? >> again, badly depends on your political view. let me take the simplest one. i talked to you about -- >> rose: you have said you were pleasantly surprised you thought it was doing better. >> right. >> rose: why don't you be pleasantly disappointed because

you thought it was doing worse? >> that's based on my values. i don't want to complicate this discussion with my values. >> rose: i'm asking your values. >> i don't want to share them because it's not important to the dialogue. the dialogue is about what the numbers say, not what i happen to value. >> rose: can't you make a judgment about values? >> let me pick one you'd think everybody can agree on. let me pick it. so bridge quality has improved dramatically since 1980, dramatically. transportation -- investment in transportation infrastructure is up. somebody might say, oh! that's a great correlation! somebody might say -- and we haven't had that many bridge accidents, traffic fatalities are down, there is not a lot of bridge collapse fatalities. somebody might look at that and say let that continue to go, it's going well. some mother with their baby in

the back seat might say, i can't stand the fact that 9% of the bridges in the country are structurally deficient. i can't take that. that's way too hard for me because i value my baby. so is that a good or bad set of statistics? people have to decide. take the economy. we have a table and an annual report where i call it the knobs and dials chart. at the top, we have, like, ten things government can do to stimulate the economy. at the bottom we have a bunch of outcomes, and we do this stuff over time because oftentimes government stimulation can drive things up and then you will see a phase down or a decline. you can look at that chart and some people will say government action has a huge impact on the economy and some people may say it seems to be uncorrelated, and we've had people look at this table and say both. so value judgments by me are not that important. i'm not a politician. i'm not running for office.

i never will. i'm just a guy with a bunch of numbers trying to make sense of the world. >> rose: do the numbers tell you the government needs to do a better job, the government needs to do more and it needs to be a better divide between public-private contribution in a philanthropic way? >> well, we're focused very narrowly in our philanthropic work with. we are not medical research people. we are not hospital construction people. we do give to our alma maters, but i'll put that in a separate category. long live the university of oregon, long live harvard and stanford. >> rose: oregon is your wife and harvard is you. >> yeah, exactly. so great institutions that we'll support. but when you focus in on money that goes to support disadvantaged kids, in many if not most of all the not-for-profits we work with, 50

to 80 or 85% of their funding, which is still insufficient versus what they do, but it comes from government contracts. so, yeah, is it important? sure. dustry out there funded byg government to provide social services. so is that money well spent? on the philanthropic side we're very focused in on that. most government dollars are not spent, at least in h the social service sector, with a pay for performance mentality. you pay for the number of kids processed, not whether those kids are getting good outcomes through the system. you pay based upon the number of people who go to jail, not the number of people who stay out of jail. the notion of performance-based contracting we think is very important, but that deals specifically with our interests, the one i'm willing to cop to publicly, i think that money can be better spent. but i will cop to that one publicly. when i think about balancing the budget and blah blah blah, everybody here is an expert.

i'll just give you the numbers to make your case. >> rose: where is the human element in this? >> the two biggest things that we did human element was try to decide how to explain what government does, and that's where the constitution wound up helping us. >> rose: right. part of the problem with government databases is everybody's got a different taxonomy about what government does. you know, what are government's actions? then you wihd up going to all these databases and you think government does millions of things. in a way, it does, but, i in a way, it can be simplified. that's part of the human element. that's part of decisions we made. i think they're partial, nonpartisan and nonbiased but ich part of the populationsions should we study in term of how government impacts? we pick the family types, income levels, race and ethnicity is more obvious, we decided

65-plus. so we did make some let me call them "human decisions" before we presented the information and we presented it in a certain con context. we decided for the first version what's material and what's not material. somebody asked me can you tell me what was spent on the national park system? i didn't know we had it. i typed in national park spending. guess what? we don't have it. but we have the total number of acres in national parks, in national forests, et cetera. >> rose: so where will this be in five years? >> i hope you will have -- the most important thing i would hope is we have the same missions and submissions. so we have consistency in presentation and i hope we have a much broader set, much more data, but we continue testify a simplified way to present it, but with tools that let you just dig in and find exactly what you want.

what is reading proficiency for fourth graders in mississippi versus california? and you want to correlate that with education spent in, let's say, l.a., since we have a basketball team, versus oxford, mississippi. >> rose: called the lakers, i think. ( laughter ) >> i'm leaving! we're done now. god, that was a real cheap shot, charlie. >> rose: yeah, it was. the lamb l.a. clippers playing tonight against the utah jazz, go clips! to be precise. now you really got me off target. >> rose: what are you going in five years is, my question, and what are some things you have to have to accelerate the growth. for example, connection to a big search engine, that sort of thing. >> that's certainly one, connection to the search engines. literally you could go to bing, my favorite search engine, or gurgle, and literally pose the kind of question, how many

arrests made in a certain year. you would like those to come back as answers if we get well hooked up, so we have a lot of work to do. i think the most important thing we'll try the do between now and then is try to bring the data alive. wouldn't it be great to have a debate once a week or every two weeks on youtube or facebook live where you have somebody from the left and somebody from the right debating a topic but anchored. you've got to look at the same data. it's being vouched for, it's integrity, and people can't get away with saying things that are just not right or are framed in adjectives that are not supported by numbers. >> rose: let me talk about some other things, too, in the 15 minutes i have remaining. and let's talk about the clippers. is the joy of owning a basketball team an n.b.a. franchise, everything you thought it would be is this because you at the games are -- how do i say this -- a crazy man. >> it's everything i hoped for and more.

it is so cool. i'm actually sitting here at the table with glenn hutchins who i've known since we were in college. >> rose: connected to the celtics. >> owner of the boston celtics. we just made a deal that if the celtics and the clippers are in the finals we're sitting together. but i think glenn would agree with me, you know, losing is not fun. i gotta tell ya, losing at the buzzer to the jazz in our first playoff game, ahhh! that was not fun. but if you want to have the fun, you've got to take a little pain along with it. >> rose: when you at the board of microsoft decided you had different visions for the company and it was time for you to leave, how was that for you? i mean, you have been at this company, you built this company, you had remarkable success, you'd become amazingly rich, and now you can still be amazingly rich, but you weren't doing day-to-day what you had been doing all your adult life.

what do you go through? >> my life plan had been to work and then have a second phase of life. i always wanted a second phase of life i would hit before i was too old to really enjoy it. my plan had probably been to work another couple of years past when i worked. >> rose: mid '50s when you did this. >> yeah, and i planned to do this till my youngest son went to college two, or three years longer, but at the end of the day if we couldn't agree on strategy, it was time for me to go. that's fine. it's tumultuous to stop doing something you've done for 20 or 40 years. i had a principle that i was going to work hard to the last day. the last day i'm done and i haven't planned anything for the future. what the heck am i going to do? thank goodness my wife challenged me. i got involved

philanthropically. thank goodness this "usa facts" came to mind. at least from my perspective and maybe the fans, thank goodness the l.a. clippers was forced to be sold and i was there. i had already looked at three n.b.a. teams to buy, i knew how the math worked and it was like this manna from heaven that the clips became available. so i won't say it was quick. i probably had a tough year. >> rose: microsoft, it's done, many say, really well. stock prices have gone up, benefiting you as the largest stockholder. how to you assess why they have been so successful since you left? >> let me give three comments on that. ( laughter ) number one, i think they're doing a great job. >> rose: right. approve of your successor. >> yeah, i do approve of my successor and i think they're making the right strategic moves. they've got to make more, better faster but they're doing a good

job. >> rose: more, better, faster, strategic moves meaning they're not doing as much and not as fast. >> right, and i would have said more, better faster. more, better faster. i'll say that about my successor, more, better, faster, but i think they're doing a great job. >> rose: what keeps them from being more, better, faster? >> there is so much to do in any tech business you have to push yourself relentlessly. i'm not being critical even in the slightest but do i know the industry moves quickly and you better move quickly with it, so that's number one. number two, i think they've done a great job reestablishing the image of the company, how much's really changed versus how much's changed perceptually, i can't comment. one thing i did del the board when i was going was my successor will have a better opportunity to change the perception of the company including its stock price than i would. i have been doing what i have been doing 14 years. people weren't going to say, oh, everything changed overnight. i think that's an advantage my

successor had. >> rose: so he got a fresh look. >> yeah, and i think he's den a great job with that. it's different but how you're perceived is important to how well you do. that's number two. number three, i will point out that the hot products they're promoting today we all started on my watch. i feel pretty good about that. number four, i want to see mr. profit growth. profit really hasn't grown enough since i left, and i know in the tech world today not making money is cool and you get high market caps, but i'm still a big believer in profit growth. >> rose: is that the proudest thing you did in terms of, say, the last -- in terms of your tenure, how you made the huge lift in profits? >> i think i'd say yes, but i would also say, you know, we started xbox, we started bing, we started sur fas, azure and office 365 all on my watch, very proud of that, and the team in place today was largely the team we had in place when i left, and

my successor found those folks all worthy of staying in their jobs. he's a guy i identified as a high potential star within a year or two of him starting in the company, so those people, the the team, i have great pride, the profit, i have great pride, and the products, i have great pride. >> rose: greatest regret? greatest regret remains i think the company should have gotten into hardware sooner. >> rose: i thought so, yeah. that's my mistake. >> rose: why didn't you? people can disagree. apparently the board disagreed. >> rose: apparently bill disagreed. >> apparently, yeah. the company's still doing hardware. i think it's probably fair to say the biggest miss was our position in the phone business. i think the phone business, it's very hard to have a business case for doing phones just with the royalty. >> rose: right. google does it by forcing their search engine into the game. their search engine is a money

machine. apple does it have a gross margin. >> rose: right. i think our model, trying to reproduce the windows model in phones was flawed. i pursued it for a long time but it was fundamentally a flawed model. >> rose: you couldn't put windows into phone. >> you could put a derivation of windows into phones, you just couldn't get paid for it. >> rose: yeah. the question with a lot of these things isn't what should the product be, it's how to monetize the technology you build. apple and google had a montation approach, hardware and search. we never had a montation approach, which means we didn't invest in the right way, we couldn't get our product boot strapped and at high volume. i would approach it differently if i could do it again, but i can't. >> rose: yahoo, you were prepared to pay big dollars. >> i would look like a genius if we actually bought it. if you take a look at what i was willing to pay versus the value of the asset, touchdown.

>> rose: mainly because to have the investment of alibaba. >> absolutely. that would look like a perfectly good investment. >> rose: 40 billion, something like that? >> yeah, 30-something. 33 bucks a share, whatever that meant back then. but you put the two things together, there would have been loot of synergy and speed to market that took a lot more time and the cost benefits didn't accrue much to microsoft in the final partnership we did as they would have if we had acquired. so i think, with ten years of hindsight, because about ten years ago, i think, we first proposed the acquisition, it wouldn't have looked good five years ago, but with ten years having passed, i think that would have looked like a great acquisition. >> rose: when you look at the future, cloud has clearly been a huge part of microsoft success today, where do you see the future going? what is it that's going to be -- what are we going to be talking about? >> well, i think it's probably

fair to say i spent two and a half to three years working on "usa facts" because data wasn't very accessible. >> rose: yeah. but in a sense what you would really like to do is have technology tack express your interest in the topic, and the artificial intelligence that lives in the cloud is smart must have to say i'm not just going to bring back one data element the way search does, i'm going to bring back a picture of what's going on in this area, i'm going to understand intent, i'm going to work off intent. and whether that's preparing me for my visit to the economic club, looking up the bios of everybody at the head table because they were in my agenda, could have looked them up, presented them to me if it understood my intent. i'm interested in government spending. it doesn't take me to some random web site where i might find what i'm looking for. it actually brings back to me a picture of government spending. so the notion of technology

software understanding intent and being able to harness data to serve intent, however that comes about, there will be magic words, was machine learning, it's artificial intelligence, it will probably change two or three more times, but that's where i think there is a lot of opportunity. virtual reality, allmented reality, in a way, they're part of intent. i have on my little augmented reality glasses and i look at you and it shows me your biobecause it recognizes who you are. when i'm 85, i may not recognize who the heck you are but at least there is a laser shining into my eye assuming i can still see it and actually the laser will work wetter than my eyes because they can tune automatically to my vision. anyway, this notion of technology that recognizes intent and serves you based on that i think is super important. >> rose: we look at what elon musk is doing in driverless cars and we see where apple is going to make a big push into

driverless cars, we assume, they haven't spoken much about it, is that something microsoft would have been interested in? >> wow would have to ask current management. >> rose: i said might have been interested in because a lot of it is driven by software, as you know. >> yeah, i would say it is interesting but it's a little bit like the phone, you have to pick the right go-the-market approach. if all you're writing is some software that's in the back end that gets embedded in cars, there might not be a lot of money in there. you might spend a lot of time trying to convince automakers and get there slowly, but it might be the right approach or the right approach might be to build a car which is what tesla's done. shands like it's what apple would do. google might approach it differently. so there is two reasons to get the business model right. one is so you get paid and the two is so you get your product to market quickly. if you build a bunch of software and you're begging g.m. and ford and bmw and don't get to market quickly, the guy who builds their own car night get ahead of

you. on the other hand, tesla doesn't build many cars in the grand scheme of things. maybe that's not the best way to get there. >> rose: they've got a hell of a market cap, don't they? >> they sure do. >> rose: core competence, as we end here. core competence, steve jobs, what was it? >> i think steve had a unique ability to put together familiarity with technology, as well as a sort of understanding of what makes sense to consumers and conceptualizing product. i think that was a talent. in my world, anybody who can do one magic thing in business is great. most companies are not -- or startups -- let me call it, a single trick. they talk about a single trick pony. most businesses are zero trick ponies. successful businesses are at least a single trick pony and almost nobody does more than one

trick. steve jobs did more than one trick. he did do apple 2/mac and he did do let me just call it the iseries -- iphones, ipads, et cetera. that's amazing, two tricks. i think microsoft did two tricks and that's part of why microsoft is amazing. that was a great skill of steve jobs. >> rose: jeff bazos. his long term has pushed position into multiple areas. i marvel at the market cap they have, and i wonder about their long-term profit streams. i think what they're focused on is commoditizing a lot of industries, taking profit down and having them benefit from their huge scale, yet they haven't proved the benefits at least in terms of profitability from having that scale. >> rose: bill gates.

bill gates. super energetic businessman, able to comprehend and really see the market opportunities in himself. a doesn't product conceptualizer for sure and great at mobilizing technical talent. >> rose: i think steve jobs said bill was more rockefeller than edison. >> that was a way to kind of give a backhand compliment. i think that's way overstated. in the grand scheme of things, was bill a better businessman than steve jobs? probably. did steve spend more time on really product creation? probably. are they both incredibly amazing people who did amazing things? >> yes. so i'm not sure it's really important to debate whose rockefeller and who's einstein. if somebody said i was close to either one of them, i'd feel pretty good. >> rose: yes, exactly.

( applause ) all right, one last name. one last name. steve ballmer, core competency. reliance on data, we know that. >> yeah, i think my core competencies do have to do with i can really go through and try to form a simplified picture of a fairly complicated topic, that is the "usa facts" corps competency but also the core competency when i was writing microsoft which is probably the reason microsoft makes as much money as it does is the ability to see the opportunities through the numbers. another thing that's a core capability for me is bringing teams together, pointing them in a direction and getting them fired up. i think i'm pretty good at that. i've got a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm. to be good at that, you have to be good at simplifying things. i think i have the ability to simplify, you know, we're only going to have four goals, let's

follow them, let's go! of course, if you're pointing people the wrong direction, that's very bad. charismatic leaders who lead you over cliffs, you would be better off not being a charismatic leader. leadership is about being excited and firm and clear but also about getting the ideas right and i think that's what really helped at microsoft. bill was very helpful getting the ideas right and i was very good at bringing them to action. >> rose: thank you for coming to new york economic club. ( applause ) >> rose: for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh

access.wgbh.org >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> you're watching pbs.

♪ hello, and welcome to kqed "newsroom." i'm thuy vu. workers and h1v visas. president trump orders a full review. we take a look at the impact on bay area tech companies. plus, the lone republican. attorney and venture capitalist john cox is the only republican so far to declare he's running for governor. we'll talk with him about why he wants the state's top job. and reflections on civil disobedience. a bay area activist who's made protesting her life's work is the subject of a new film. first, we turn to berkeley where a pro-trump rally that included white nationalists turned violent last weekend. several people were injured, and at least 20 were arresd.