Bill Gates on Charlie Rose
Bill Gates was on Charlie Rose tonight, and I managed to catch 20 last minutes of the interview. It was pretty packed with interesting information on Microsoft’s chairman views of competition. He derided the European Union and the lobbying competitors a bit for spending so much effort to make Microsoft ship a MediaPlayer-less version of Windows that no consumer wanted. Gates strongly believed shipping parental controls with Vista is worth it, even though a free version inside Windows sort of kills the cottage industry of paid parental control packages - in the end it’s better for consumer, and companies in that industry can always offer more added value on top of Microsoft’s controls.
He disagreed with Charlie Rose regarding any suspicions on Microsoft “tuning” the defaults in Vista to favor MSN Search. First off, there’s an entire branding going on inside the company, as far as switching to Live brand, and Microsoft as well as other search engine players will be fighting for the privilege to be the search engine of choice on user’s PC. Second off, most of the new computers sold today are reconfigured depending on who paid more payola to PC manufacturer, such as Google+Dell and Yahoo!+HP deals. So the competitive field is more or less leveled.
He things of Google as a strong competitor, primarily because
(a) they overlap in several markets
(b) Google is fundamentally a software company
(c) Google’s aggressive hiring of top talent is something Microsoft is seeing for the first time in the industry
With the Zune they don’t have success metrics, at least not the ones that Bill Gates is willing to divulge. He said that the market will hopefully appreciate the innovations such as wireless sharing. Meanwhile, he called iPod a phenomenal success.