Gates talks education, Chrome and Project Natal

… in it. In any case, you should make them be concrete about what they're doing. It is kind of a typical thing. When Google is doing anything it gets this — the more vague they are, the more interesting it is.

There is the notion, though — and Microsoft Research has been looking at it, too — of whether the browser, because it's become so central to so much of our work, needs to take on more operating system-like characteristics.
It just shows the word 'browser' has become truly meaningless. Anyway, what's a browser, what's not a browser? If you're playing a movie, is that a browser or not a browser? If you're doing annotations, is that a browser or not a browser? If you're editing text, is that a browser or not a browser? In large part it's more an abuse of terminology than a real change.

What about on the question of how Microsoft is doing?
I'm always the one who thinks, gosh, why isn't Microsoft doing even more, because that's been my mindset — let's move fast, do new things very quickly. But, you have to say, whether it's Windows 7 that is a really excellent piece of work. I'd go so far as to say both compared to other operating systems, and compared to other generations of Windows, it's an extremely nice piece of work.

What they're doing in new versions of Office — I guess they showed a little bit of how the web piece fits into it recently, but there's a lot about the new version that will get talked about in the next nine months or so. The work on search, where people see Bing as a nice piece of work, really see us in the game, hiring really top people and willing to try to do things some different ways.

The part of Microsoft I stay up-to-date on the most is probably the research group. I was over at the Cambridge lab a few weeks ago, at the India lab as part of a trip I take this month, and that's really the sort of crown jewel in terms of always feeding neat new things into Microsoft.

I'd say a cool example of that, that you'll see is kind of stunning, in a little over a year, is this [depth-sensing] camera thing... not just for games, but for media consumption as a whole.

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If they connect it up to Windows PCs for interacting in terms of meetings, collaboration and communication, now it's a cool thing, and it's just an example where Microsoft Research did the original stuff to show, with the depth information, something great could be done. Then both the Xbox guys and the Windows guys latched onto that and now the idea of how it can be used in the office is getting much more concrete, and is pretty exciting.

So Microsoft is a very innovative company, but obviously in a hyper-competitive field, which is what makes it such a great field.

You're talking about cameras, about depth-sensing cameras that are in Natal?
Yes, exactly, Natal. The software libraries and applications we're doing around Natal.

And we'll basically see that in more than gaming? We'll see it in other scenarios, too?
Well, I think the value is as great if you're in the home, as you want to manage your movies, music, home system-type stuff, it's very cool there. And I think there's incredible value as we use that in the office connected to a Windows PC. So Microsoft Research and the product groups have a lot going on there, because you can use the cost reduction that will take place over the years to say: "Why shouldn't that be in most office environments?"