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nothing monolithic about chaos. There is more variety of everything. There are some of those players that are looking at commercial type revenues. We'll certainly spend time with those people to see what we have in common and what we can do for customers together. I wouldn't say that there is some big new development.
As the commercial players in the Linux world evolve, it seems they become competitors, like you mentioned Nokia has in the cell phone space.
Gates: That's right, the people who do commercial stuff, we'll be in touch with all those people and have an ongoing dialogue, as well as competing with them in the marketplace.
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Gates makes play for Portable Media Center (Jan. 2005)What about security on mobile devices? Historically, going back a couple of years, many of these devices didn't even have password protection. Where are things today?
Gates: Security is a topic that spans a lot of things. There's quite a bit of things we've done, both in terms of letting operators set up authentication the way they want to and also making sure that the code that gets run on the phone is authorized code. That involves code signing and having the control there, so only the things they decide are going to be on that phone are on the phone.
Do you think we are going to start to see phones as a growing area from a threat standpoint?
Gates: Certainly in the area of spam and identity theft there are a number of countries that have seen that on mobile phones. They've had to start to think through some of the same things that have been critical to think through on the PC. Because there is less variety of software, some of the issues haven't been as acute. But some of the things--spam e-mail and identity theft--have actually, in some ways, been more acute. The bad guys will try and exploit any weaknesses in that network the same they will for any digital device.
You (have at times) mentioned speech recognition. When you look out a few years, what do you think is going to be possible on a high-end smart phone?
Gates: Even with Windows Mobile 5.0, we've got the beginnings of this with what we call integrated voice command capability. Obviously, it is a relatively finite vocabulary. Something like "What's my next appointment?" gets recognized. As we're being given even more memory and processing power, we can do a better and better job on speech recognition. Eventually, your whole profile of how your speech is recognized is another thing that will roam. As the phone (learns your voice), those bits roll up to your PC and (it) gets better, and vice versa.
One of the other areas that you guys have talked about, longer-term, is having more-detailed presence information, where you might have a phone that knows where your buddies are in relation to you.
Gates: One of the new things in the platform is what we call the location API (application programming interface). It gives the GPS location up to the software and then, if you have chosen to reveal your location, say, to your buddies...and if they decide to reveal to you, than we can use map-type displays and you can see where those people are.
That scenario, in particular, is one that we think is really explosive. It will become just common sense. It's obvious you ought to be able to push and see a map and there's the information.
Microsoft made an interesting choice when it was first trying to get into the cell phone market. There weren't a lot of tier-one cell phone makers lining up, but Microsoft went to some of the contract manufacturers that make PCs in Taiwan and elsewhere. It seems like early on Microsoft recognized that the carriers were the gatekeepers and found another way into the market.
Gates: We certainly had some very important relationships with the cell phone makers, and we've done some work (increasing) the number (of cell phone makers). Samsung is talking about their plans for this platform. But the highest volume, actually, has been an Asian company called HTC that has done a lot of different things; one of them is being so responsive to the carriers.
You're right that a good place to start is having the operators like you. In fact, that's an absolute requirement. A lot of their requests about customization used to take us a lot of hand work to do what they wanted.
With Windows Mobile 5.0, we've taken a lot of the customization and made it really trivial for them to do it--the way they brand things. We make it so they can do that very rapidly. Being a friend of the operators is part of the strategy.
(WIndows chief) Jim Allchin said a couple of weeks ago that he still sees Microsoft as the underdogs. Do you still feel that way about Microsoft in the mobile space?
Gates: Well, Nokia is the leader by far. We definitely prefer the press coverage we get when we are considered the underdog in a category. We're just an underdog, keeping the guys that are on top, keeping them honest. I'm not sure what the term (underdog) implies. We are a significant factor in the market even beyond our market share. There will always be many companies in this space and, at least for the foreseeable future, Nokia is the leader.
One area of mobiles that Microsoft hasn't gone after yet is portable gaming. Do you see that happening at some point?
Gates: It is very interesting, the increased amount of gaming taking place on these phone devices.
But in terms of consoles, you have the Xbox--a desktop console--but there is a pretty big portable console market. Is that something Microsoft is interested in?
Gates: Obviously, Nintendo is dominant in that market, and everybody is watching what Sony can do with the PSP. Speaking from Microsoft broadly, we like that Sony is off worrying about the PSP and thinking about that while we are worried about the TV-based console, the next generation of Xbox that we are moving forward on. There actually is a dedicated device that uses Windows CE. It's fairly cool. I've played around with it. But we don't have any current plans to be in there with a dedicated product. We'll keep making our phones good (starting places) for (gaming) and see how that space shakes out.
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"The richness of software on mobile devices is just at the beginning. We see certainly a decade's worth of work, where mobile devices can get richer and richer."
phone. And what MS does have to offer could easily turn out to be
a worse job of programming than Windows Whatever.
Just give me a cell phone that can communicate. I already have
other devices for the mickey mouse phone functions MS proposes.
where software makes a difference. More like they try to dominate
every device where software makes the difference. Am I the only
person who does not want my windows based washing machine to
get a virus?