Spoiling Google's honeymoon

Would you buy Windows Vista?

For Bill Gates and Microsoft, that's the big question. This week at the software giant's Professional Developers Conference, Gates rallied the troops — software developers, Microsoft's most important audience — to build enthusiasm for Vista, the oft-delayed new version of Windows, and Office 12, an update to Microsoft's most profitable franchise.

Gates' mantra hasn't changed much in 20 years: the PC is the centre of the computing universe, and Windows, along with Office and other products, represents the best platform for new software development. What is new, and is much in evidence this week in Los Angeles, is the growing influence of Web-based development.

In that realm, Google has emerged as the poster child for a new wave of applications assembled from the piece-parts of several Web sites. No Windows necessary. Microsoft has its own ideas, of course.

Gates sat down with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com to talk about competitors old and new, why software hasn't fulfilled promises and the mixed blessing of controlling 90 percent of the world's PCs.

Q: More developers are becoming interested in building new applications using the Web as a platform, as opposed to the PC. Do you feel you're in competition with Google, Yahoo and other Web properties for developers' attention?
A :No, I don't think so. The architecture we are interested in we call server-equals-service, so that we will have the full Exchange capability that you can subscribe to, where we run it, or you can have it on-premise with the traditional licensing approach. At this conference, we do give out APIs for the MSN Search and the MSN Virtual Earth capability, so things that have been cloud-based services, you can have client applications that other services can connect to. So, I'd say the evolution is server to service, and bringing that symmetry in.

With Google, there are rumours about them being interested in that services piece, but they really haven't done that much. Our search API is way better than their search API. Clearly, they are working in that area. They haven't done as much on the server piece. They had a Google server, but it was very bad at corporate search. That did not work well at all. That's the only place where I think they have done any server-type piece. Yahoo doesn't think of themselves as a platform company. I don't think you will ever have the Yahoo PDC. Google, because they are in the honeymoon phase, people think that they do all things at all times in all ways.

Well, I guess that's what you have to combat, right? They are in this phase, and when Google does anything, they get attention.
Yeah. You do me-too Google Talk, and it's a big deal. But we had our honeymoon phase, and it was fun from maybe 1985 to 1995. And we've had lots of...

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