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Gates: Restricting IP rights is tantamount to communism

• Tags:
• Bill Gates,
• Longhorn

Michael Kanellos CNET News.com

Published: 06 Jan 2005 13:20 GMT

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Other browsers are making market share gains. When does this become a problem or an issue for you guys?
Well, people get confused about browsers. You can have as many browsers as you want on your PC, just like you can have tons of music players and things like that.
So when people say Firefox is being downloaded onto people's systems, that's true, but IE is also on those systems. Firefox is new, and people are trying it out. There's a certain percentage of people who do that -- it's very easy to download.
We need to keep IE the best. We need to innovate in IE, do more add-ons, do improvements. We have some very exciting plans there. Some percentage of users are going to try Firefox and IE side by side, and use the one that's best. So no big problem; it's not that people have stopped using IE, it's just we've got lots of good ideas that can match and move ahead. In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.

But some people have left because of security issues.
Well, no one invests more in security of their browser than what we do on IE. The key message we have for people is they should turn on auto update because if you turn on auto update, without you having to think about it and go through a bunch of user interface or know about this or that or the other thing, you can know that there are hundreds of very smart people who are constantly improving your browser and making sure that you're safe. And so with auto update and IE, you're getting the top security team and the quickest response team that there is anywhere.

Now onto the Google question. Why do you want to compete, or does Microsoft want to compete against them? Does Microsoft want to build up MSN to be a general search engine?
Absolutely. We were in the search business even before Google was around. The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board. And if you look at the Microsoft Research things that we've had breakthroughs in -- natural language, document analysis, personalisation, image analysis, language translation--our research agenda will allow us to take today's search from ourselves and Google, and make what we have today look like a joke. And a lot of that will be built into applications like Office or the Windows shell. I see our desktop search offering -- I think every review I've seen has rated it far better than what Google is coming out with.
 
When you get to Longhorn, it will even have deeper integration, and we'll have the same index format. So anybody who wants a smooth transition to Longhorn where you don't have dual indexers and everything -- the commitment we're making at our desktop search is that same indexing, same format, and we'll make that very smooth for people.
 
So we want to compete on the desktop because that's a key innovation area for Windows. We want to compete in the cloud because we think the competition between ourselves and Google and Yahoo will improve things.
 
If we thought somebody was doing the best possible job that could ever be done in search and there wasn't some big revenue out there, maybe we wouldn't do it, but quite to the contrary. Whether it's understanding maps or virtual worlds or document analysis, today's search is nothing, and we've got the software technology that will drive it to those new levels, as well as being a very significant business.
 

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