Bill Gates doesn't think his company has been slow to crack the mobile phone market. He just thinks the little devices have yet to catch up to the power of his company's software.
Still, with mobile phones quickly gaining the power PCs had not that long ago, Microsoft's chairman sees a bright future, in which the company's operating system can quickly gain share from Symbian and others.
Gates spoke to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com on the eve of a speech announcing Windows Mobile 5.0, the next version of Microsoft's operating system for handhelds and mobile phones. In the chat, Gates outlined the company's mobile strategy, explained why Microsoft is steering clear of the portable-game market (for now) and described why he's happy that Microsoft is an underdog, for a change.
Q: Microsoft has been trying to crack the mobile-device market for some time. What makes this market so important?
Essentially, you find us in every device where software makes a big difference; Microsoft comes in and sees how we can make a contribution.
The mobile space, there are so many neat things that can go on if — for example — you use Outlook and our phone, if you use Office and a phone, if you use our mobile format and a phone. 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.
Microsoft did get off to a fairly slow start in the handheld and phone arenas. Why do you think that was?
If you take the handheld space, I wouldn't say we were slow there. It depends on if you have this expectation that we always get some gigantic market share overnight. We don't really have that expectation of ourselves except over a very long period of time.
We also bet on the hardware growing into what we are doing with the software... If the primary thing that people are doing is not data-oriented, our software — anybody's software — can't make that much difference. It's really only as data browsing, email and media and software applications have come in and become very important on the phone that people are seeing the uniqueness of what we are offering.
If you look at this two years ago, we basically had Orange, in Europe, shipping our devices. If you go back three years ago, we had nobody shipping any phones from us... Now, even before we were shipping... Windows Mobile 5.0, [we have signed with] 68 operators in 40-plus countries. We'd expect with Windows Mobile 5.0, between now and the end of the year that we'll expand that. Still, as a percentage of the market, compared to, say, Nokia, we're a small percentage. We expect our percentage to grow at quite a healthy clip.
Talkback
Hi
I find the questioning of Bill Gates to be very unprobing, unquestioning and indeed not in the spirit of critical journalism.
To make the point in the first paragraph why was no mention raised of the software bloat that Microsoft products all suffer from. And why was there no questioing of the reliability issues.
It is good to see Bill Gates interviewed but sad to see the opportunity passed by. I am sure that Bill is more than capable of standing up to a more critical questioning. This article comes acrossa s unpaid marketing for Microsoft.
Kind regards
Nigel