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MAY 5, 2005
Bill Gates, Longhorn Wrangler In Part 2 of of our Q&A, the Microsoft chief talks about what to expect from the new operating system, Apple's Tiger, and more On May 2, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates addressed the Society of American Business Editors' conference in Seattle. In an on-stage question-and-answer session with BusinessWeek Seattle Bureau Chief Jay Greene, Gates talked about blogging, the video-game market, the next version of Windows, and whether Microsoft (MSFT ) is a mature company. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow: Note: This is the second part of Greene's conversation with Gates. Click here to read Part 1 . Q: Let's move to Longhorn, the next version of Windows. You say it's supposed to be available by Christmas of next year. What are the features that will make folks feel really compelled to upgrade to Longhorn? A: I don't think, once we have Longhorn, we'll have that much trouble getting people excited about it. It's always hard to describe software. It's not like you say after you get a description, "Oh, of course, I want to use that." That happens when you sit down in front of it or you see a friend using it in a scenario. If I enumerate what it was, I'm not sure how excited that would make someone. Longhorn will be a very big deal. Just in the last few weeks we saw a lot of excitement about the new Apple (AAPL ) operating system. And because they're these super-small market-share guys, they get all these nice statements about them. But I actually thought that was great. Here it was, the general press writing about operating systems and saying that making it easy to find your information was a good thing, and advances in the security features was a good thing. Longhorn isn't the same as [Apple's new OS] Tiger, but there's a significant overlap in terms of what are the state-of-the-art things to take advantage of in the hardware and making it simpler and making it easier. Q: Will customers be confused if they look at Longhorn vs. Tiger? Have you even played with Tiger? A: Oh sure, there are public releases. You can always tell when you're on a Mac or when you're on a PC. Just take your applications and stick them in there and see if they run. Q: Are you worried that they're coming out early? You know Steve Jobs likes to say how he's coming out earlier, and he has a lot of the features that are going to be in Longhorn. A: No, not really. They do a good job in a lot of things. That's a great thing. We write software for that system as well. And it sells well. We like that. It's good. We're both working hard. Q: Let's talk about some of the bigger corporate issues. Some folks say that Microsoft is mature. It has issued a dividend. It pays workers in stock awards rather than options. You grew revenues at 5% in the most recent quarter. Do you think Microsoft is mature? A: Well, I don't think I'm going to sit up here and say, "No, we are immature. We started out mature, but as time went on, we got tired of it." We're a big company. If you had to pick one company in the world whose R&D is going to have the most impact on education, business -- take any realm you want -- you would have to pick Microsoft. We're as big a change agent as any corporation is today, or ever has been. We're definitely a lot more sophisticated as a company about a lot of the things we do. I could explain to you at length why we probably never should have used stock options. But we got away from many of their ills because we happened to be in such a small stage of the company [when they were first offered]. But I actually regret that we ever used them. There's some benefit. But the approach we're taking now is just a better approach. So Microsoft is more dynamic and more innovative now than it ever has been. 
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