Spoiling Google's honeymoon

Our money is where our mouth is. It's like IPTV. I said over a decade ago that would happen. It took longer than I expected, but I'm sure glad we got in early and put the money behind it. I feel the same way about speech. It will be mainstream.

Let's talk about WinFS for a second. That's a good idea. But sometimes these really big ideas are difficult to implement when you have a really large installed base of customers, as Microsoft does, using various versions of Windows. That legacy problem seems to be an impediment to bringing new technology online. Does that get in the way of sweeping changes you'd like to make to Windows?
Well, that's the real world. We're in a very good position because we understand a lot of what is out there and how we can make moving up to the next thing very straightforward with the least amount of discontinuity. I've always been a big champion of WinFS. I was never satisfied that we were bringing it out as a client-only technology, and I was worried about that. Now we've chosen to skip doing it as a client-only thing and to do it as a big-bang client and server release. There's still a lot of work to be done on that one and that's all wrapped up in this next release of SQL Server. Those things are hard. They are fantastic when you get to them, because they greatly simplify things. It's the kind of thing that takes a company with a long-term approach on these things and willing to do something quite risky. The Office 12 user interface you saw this morning is another good example of that. Microsoft was willing to take that 2D menu structure that things are kind of buried in and blow that up. Here's Office, the most used software of all time, people are familiar and comfortable with it. Particularly our Office group that wants things to be exactly right. They decided it was time to step back [and do that]. There will be some shock among users. But pretty quickly [people get used to it].

Looking at the open source world, there's this movement away from selling licences toward selling support. A lot of people are participating in that, and you have been sceptical. Why? Do you think that's fundamentally the wrong model?
The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software. So there will be a balance between those. I think that we are going to have a lot of both. There are some zealots that think there should be no software jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at night. Should you take some of those extreme views, I think it's easy to say that's not right. There are things like compatibility and 24-hour support and taking big leaps like IPTV or speech recognition. The painstaking work over a decade that you have to do, that costs hundreds of millions or even billons of dollars. That's the commercial side. It's good at hiring people and selling licenses and taking the risks that go with that.

I've always believed in low-cost, high-volume. It should be a cost that's so obvious that you should spend, because it saves you on personnel time, hardware, communications costs, which are gigantic when compared to the price of packaged software. That cost is almost a rounding error. The value you get out of the system is a lot larger than that. I don't just believe in a single model. There's a lot of neat things that can be done. But I don't think that someone who completely gives up license fees is ever going to have a substantial R&D budget and do the hard things, the things too hard to do in a university environment. But that's OK. There will be a commercial software industry, hopefully, with companies that take the long-term approach and make the investments that drive those new breakthroughs.