Gates: Cracking the mobile market

We're seeing some interesting intersections of cellular and other wireless technologies. Where do you see Wi-Fi fitting into the mobile phone world?
One of the technological things we've done with the 5.0 platform is to make it easy for our hardware partners to plug in different radio stacks. This is the first time we've had a partner building a 3G phone around our software.

We also support Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. We have a number of partners who have talked with us about building phones that support both wide-area wireless and support Wi-Fi. It's up to them to announce how they are going to offer and price those products, but a number of operators are building those products.

Microsoft has crafted a lot of deals in the mobile world in recent months, in many cases partnering in one area with a rival from another area — companies like Symbian, Nokia and palmOne and RIM with a recent mobile instant-messaging deal. What is the strategy?
One is for us, by ourselves, to come out with new features. We do a vast amount of that. The second thing we do is take scenarios that require devices working together and participate in licensing or the creation of standards.

For example, in the case of music, music on the phone will be a very big scenario, both phones with solid-state storage or, eventually, disk-based storage. We took our Windows Media format and said let's make it available and very inexpensive. We hope that makes the music scenario grow up on the phone. We did license that to Nokia and others. Likewise, the whole scenario of mail on the phone is one we think has also been a little complex.

You have the IM group having to deal with RIM, and obviously they are a competitor to Windows Mobile in doing Exchange on mobile devices. Similarly, palmOne right now runs the rival Palm operating system, but Microsoft has crafted a deal so it can run your ActiveSync technology. It seems like a lot of different strategies.
Everything we do along these lines, certainly I'm involved in making sure we are coherent in how we do those things. Take our media formats — we've been licensing those to everyone in sight. Having some of the key technologies be available elsewhere drives those scenarios to critical Massachusetts What the Windows Mobile team does then is make sure they've got the best implementation. I can say with great confidence, even where we're licensing out all that technology very inexpensively, our share within this industry is going to grow quite significantly.