By TODD BISHOP
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft Corp. is grappling with "a lot of smart competitors," including Google and Apple, who are ahead of the Redmond company in some key markets, Bill Gates acknowledges.
But the Microsoft chairman on Tuesday said his company remains the overall industry leader, and he compared the current rivalries to legendary ones with Lotus, Novell and WordPerfect -- situations in which the Redmond company ultimately overcame steep odds to prevail.
 | ||
| Gates | ||
"At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something," Gates said in an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, underscoring the fact that it wouldn't be unprecedented to come from behind now.
That was one of the subjects addressed by Gates during the interview at the company's Professional Developers Conference, where Microsoft is seeking to rally support for Windows Vista and Office 12, the next versions of its dominant PC software programs. Among other things, the company showed plans to shift away from traditional drop-down menus to a new "ribbon" of commands across the top of the widely used Office programs.
Gates answered questions on a wide range of topics, including Microsoft's growth prospects in the Seattle region, its ambitions in China, and efforts to shore up the security of its software. Edited excerpts from the interview:
Q: You showed Office 12 here for the first time today. How do you think users are going to react when they see such a different look?
Gates: Well, this is the world's most popular application, and people sit and use it hours and hours a day, and so any advance we make in Office can actually drive up global productivity in a significant way. For years we've had the user interface confined to just these 2-D menus.
As Office has gotten richer, we knew that was a very limiting thing. It just wasn't very visual and so now, what we've done, it is a big deal. If you're a Word user, it should only take you 10 or 15 minutes to see how those things are laid out, so it's not like you're starting over. All the same concepts are there. The capabilities are there, and you will find yourself using more of the product.
You'll hear some people say, "Yikes, this is a change," but pretty quickly you'll hear from people about what a timely and important change it is.
Q: Companies such as Google and Apple have taken the lead in some key areas. Are Windows Vista and Office 12 a chance for you to recapture some of that buzz, and show that Microsoft plans to remain a central figure in the software industry?
Gates: Well, if you look at software very broadly -- productivity software, software tools -- Microsoft is the leader in way more respects than anyone else. Driving the research that will give us speech recognition and vision, and all of those big hard things that you've got to take a long-term approach in.
At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something. Novell was the best at file servers. Lotus was the best at spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best at word processing.
Right now, because of the breadth of what we do, we have that in many areas. Nokia is way ahead of us in phones; we're closing the gap. Sony is ahead of us in video games. We're just on the verge of something (the Xbox 360) that will help us close the gap there. In Web search, Google is the far-away leader. Big honeymoon for them. Even if they do "me, too" type stuff, people think, "wow." And Apple in music has done a fantastic job.
We've got all these areas -- like tablet computing, this Internet connectivity, or taking presentation to a new level, office productivity -- where we're just out there in front and we just need to keep pushing the frontiers.
In those areas where somebody else has done well, that's great. We'll match what they do, we'll bring new things to it, do it better and integrate it in with other things. And so it's very healthy for the consumer. We see that in search, we see it in music. It's not new at all that that's out there.
Q: Are there any features of Windows Vista that the U.S. antitrust settlement is keeping you from including, that you would otherwise want to include?
Gates: We're not being prevented from including features, and that's the strength of the settlement that we reached with the Justice Department and others. There's quite a bit of process we go through to make sure that the way we're putting them in and exposing them to third parties, that we're meeting all the requirements of that. But it's not preventing us from being very, very innovative and making it as rich as we want to.
Q: I wondered, for example, if you might want to build in antivirus protections into Windows if not for the antitrust situation.
Gates: Well, there's a ton of security capability that we are building in to Windows Vista. The whole thing about spyware, malware, phishing, a lot of things that support antivirus. The actual capability of getting updated signatures, that's something you need on an ongoing basis, so you need to ship that separately from the operating system itself and so we will have a way that people sign up from that separate from the operating system.
Q: What will Windows Vista do for computer security, and for Microsoft's security reputation in general?
Gates: Ever since I put out the big security memo talking about that as our top priority, we've been gaining a lot of respect for how seriously we're taking it, and the steps we've taken. People have seen visible progress in terms of the ease of securing their systems, some reduction in the spam that's out there.
Now that doesn't mean that the bad guys aren't always trying to find something new. Phishing is the big thing they're doing right now. And so there will be constant innovation in these areas, invention, the need to educate customers how they set their systems up in the right way.
But in terms of making it something that doesn't really hold the industry back and Microsoft is viewed as a leader in terms of our investments, and our predictability and showing the framework for how we're doing this, we have made immense progress. We can see that when we go out and survey customers. They want more, and we're not done in any way, but they appreciate the progress and the attitude we're showing.
Q: Some people hold Microsoft most accountable for security problems, even though software flaws are exploited by "bad guys," as you said. Is that a fair criticism?
Gates: Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was some software that had this security capability and our software did not. As we use the Internet to connect everyone up, then the need to essentially have suspicion and only listen to certain other systems, and if flaws come up to have those updated very quickly, that became a new requirement.
Because Microsoft is the biggest software company and so successful, we should be held responsible for coming up with those things. We've got to push the state of the art, we've got to be the one to solve those problems.
Q: You've said that this will be the most significant release of Windows since 95. Do you have any hope or expectation of recapturing the consumer excitement that accompanied that particular launch?
Gates: I'm sure we'll have some of that. The PC is so broad now compared to back in 1995, it's not quite as radical. Everybody has got a PC. I don't know if we'll use the same kind of midnight madness type things. We're seeing a lot of that in our Xbox world, where when we do a new version of 'Halo,' we do this Xbox 360, because it's very consumer oriented, we see just such mass enthusiasm.
Q: The economy has been rebounding, and Microsoft's hiring has remained steady, but at pretty much the same pace over the past few years. Do you envision that hiring rebounding in the coming years in the Seattle area?
Gates: We have been hiring people in Seattle. We see that continuing, I'm not sure I'd say at any different level than it's been at. The constraints on how many great engineers are there out there to hire will always put a ceiling on that. We're glad that we're adding people, but I wouldn't say we're entering some significantly new phase.
Q: Is outsourcing playing a role there, in lessening the amount of growth in the Seattle area?
Gates: Well, the economy is a very complex thing. We sell way more of our software overseas than we sell internally. That is, the U.S. disproportionately gets our R&D activity relative to the amount of software we sell in the U.S. And so, why has Microsoft ever been able to hire people? Because of world trade. So if people don't believe in letting other countries get rich and buy more U.S. products, if trade liberalization freezes up or goes backwards, that's a very bad thing for an export-oriented company like Microsoft.
We like the idea that China is developing their economy. They've taken more people out of poverty than any country in history over just even the last 10 years. We view those as a good thing. It does mean the world is getting a lot more competitive. We will have competitors arising out of these Asian countries. That's fine.
So I think the advances in the world economy largely have been positive, and we see that in the increasing sales in Asia, and without those our hiring growth couldn't be maintained.
Q: Last week you were scheduled to meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao before his U.S. trip was canceled. How much will China figure into Microsoft's future, and how will you overcome challenges there, such as open source software and piracy?
Gates: China is an amazing country, and I was very disappointed that it didn't work out for the President to come last week. I fully understand why the leaders decided that made sense. I'm very hopeful he'll come back to Seattle. It's going to be great to sit down and talk with him. I got to know his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, and now he's leading China in this new era.
We've been investing there, it's our long-term approach. I think China will set the standard in some ways in terms of efficiency, driving a new wave of companies into the world economy.
Q: One of the big pieces of news this week was Oracle's plan to acquire Siebel Systems. How would that deal affect the competitive landscape for Microsoft?
Gates: We've always had a good relationship with Siebel, and we'll do our best to keep that strong as they become part of Oracle. Oracle we do some things with and obviously compete in the database area. I don't think that acquisition overnight is a dramatic thing. It is part of a trend toward some consolidation that people want to simplify the software they run in their companies.
© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
No comments:
Post a Comment