BILL GATES: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar [a desktop program with small windows of dynamic content], show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie, and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”
You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. Maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays security guys break the Mac every single day [so your Mac] can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on a Windows machine. So, yes, because of the security stuff, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user-interface-wise.
Well, people have said that at every major Windows release. Java was going to eliminate Windows programming, or thin clients were going to eliminate people buying PCs. Operating systems keep gettingbetter and richer, and they allow developers then to take advantage of that. We’re doing more innovation now at the operating-system level than we’ve ever done.
No, you’ll have big releases. When you go in and enable a new kind of application, you want to get your partners behind it, you want to get them building the hardware that’s related to that. It really simplifies things for people to think, OK, here’s what I got in Windows Vista, here’s what I’m going to get in this next major release. The more-avid users download the upgrades in between, but of XP users how many downloaded a browser that was more advanced than the one they had? I would say it’s less than 30 percent.
Absolutely. We’ll tell you how Vista just wasn’t good enough, and we’ll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don’t know that. Otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.
First of all, there’s tons of people who help make those decisions, so I wouldn’t overstate my role in the past. But I’ll have full involvement, the [same] involvement I’ve ever had in the key decisions for those products. What we decide over even the next nine months will really set the direction for those products.
Well, it will be more user-centric.
That means that right now when you move from one PC to another, you’ve got to install apps on each one, do upgrades on each one; moving information between them is very painful. We can use Live Services to know what you’re interested in. So even if you drop by a kiosk or somebody else’s PC, we can bring down your home page, your files, your fonts, your favorites and those things. So that’s kind of the user-centric thing that Live Services can enable. [Also] by the next release there will be a much bigger bet on speech and digital ink. So we’ve got a pretty good outline.
