No conflicts here

How do you reconcile running what is pretty well the software company with producing content and being involved in communications ventures, like MSNBC?
Microsoft is a big believer in the Internet and we think that interactive content on the Internet is a new business. The audience isn't big enough yet; the rules aren't established enough yet to know exactly where it's going to go. We're entrepreneurial enough to see that we think that we can take some of our software expertise, some of the smart people that we have, our long-term approach, our willingness to invest, and our willingness to hire people with new skills--people like [former editor of The New Republic and current editor of a Microsoft's Slate] Michael Kinsley--and do something new in the interactive content area. We've always been doing computer games that are very content-driven. Even the Office product itself: the help, the thesaurus, the style guides, the templates...All of those things are content-driven.

We've had great successes, like in our encyclopedia Encarta, where we are the largest encyclopedia company in the world. That's a good money-making business, and so we've expanded that to five more languages and become the first global encyclopedia. Some of the things we are doing in interactive content won't succeed. Some of them will do very well.

It helps us to be a lot smarter about the building blocks: the authoring tools, the site management tools, the ad-handling tools. We use that in order to build platform products that we make available to everyone so that they too can come in and do interactive content.

So you don't see any conflicts?
Whenever you are in more than one business you can have more opportunities for people to do things. When we did MS-DOS we also did languages and applications, so we've never allowed ourselves to be defined as just a single product company: the MS-DOS company, the Windows company, the flight simulator company, or the mouse company. And our track record is that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote our platforms...That's why the great success stories of the software industry have been people who've built around our platforms.

There are many categories of software, some of which we are in and many that we're not suited to be in. Any technology company I can think of has more than one product and many that fit together. That's been a major source of our success.

So there is no conflict.
I don't know what you mean by conflict. We have many software developers who build on Windows.

I mean between your media companies [such as MSNBC] and software, providing the water and the pipe.
We do not provide the pipe. We are not in the communications business in any way. We work with cable and phone companies. We promote ISDN, ADSL, PC cable modems, you name it, and [those aren't] businesses that we understand or that you'll see us be part of.