GATES ON GOOGLE

Interesting interview by CNet.

Well, I guess that's what you have to combat, right? They are in this phase, and when Google does anything, they get attention.
Gates: 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 competitors in their honeymoon phase. But I'd say, in some ways, this is the biggest honeymoon I've ever seen.

Is that a long-term threat for Microsoft? People like Google come along and they have this Web development idea and they popularize that notion and people listen?
Gates: Developers are not building on some Google thing at this point. The idea that the computing industry can simplify its offerings dramatically by having this server-equals-service approach, and having richer services, absolutely I believe in that, and we need to be at the forefront of that. The idea that management can be more automatic and software updating can be more automatic, state-replication more automatic--there are some big things here that can drive the industry forward. They are very complex, because we have to make things very reliable and very secure if you are going to do this. It's just now that we have the maturity of XML and the Web Services protocols that we can start to do (this).

So Google is not offering development capabilities yet. Of course, I expect they will. But they're not in that game at all today. In fact, they have this slogan that they are going to organize the world's information. Our slogan is that we are going to give people tools to let them organize the world's information. It's a slightly different approach, based on the platform-ization of all of our capabilities and not thinking of ourselves as the organizer. (full interview)