Gates: Cracking the mobile market

You've talked about a willingness to partner with competitors where you can to drive the industry. Is there more room for partnership with Linux vendors? I understand that [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer met with [Red Hat CEO] Matthew Szulik at the end of March. I'm curious if that relationship is evolving.
We're always talking to people about standards, like Web services standards or how we get systems to work better through interoperability. I don't think you can say anything about the open source community as a whole because there are so many different players in there with so many different products. There is 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 mobile phone space.
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.

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?
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 authorised 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?
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 email 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 smartphone?
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 recognised. 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 recognised 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.