In a recent LA Times op-ed, various executives and pundits are polled for tech sector stock tips. Steve Ballmer suspiciously boasts:

Many technologies have the potential to catch fire, including Internet television, mobile video devices and even robots.

Perhaps "robots" seemed like a random comment at the time.

Well, the long form of the story is told by Bill Gates in the December issue of Scientific American. Apparently, robots are a lot like personal computers, and they're finally poised for takeoff.

With childlike naïvety, Gates characterizes DARPA's sponsorship of both packet networking and autonomous vehicles as "intriguing."

Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC, Commodore 64, and many other systems. He wants Microsoft to "provide the same kind of common, low-level foundation for integrating hardware and software into robot designs."

I mentioned before that everyone in the LA Times piece was selling something. So, what is Gates pushing?

Microsoft Robotics Studio -- "Our goal for this release is to create an affordable, open platform that allows robot developers to readily integrate hardware and software into their designs."

In clever contrast to his comment about DARPA, Gates wraps up his futurist essay on "robots" by explaining that these robots won't look like those of science fiction -- so much so that you won't even call them robots. This is a nice way of insulating himself from being 'wrong' about the future.