WinInsider

Bill Gates was in Paris on February 8th. At this occasion, he has granted an exclusive interview with no concessions to our colleagues of Liberation, a well known french newspaper. The interview is obviously in French but we have translated the most interesting questions and answers.

Q:We should originally met in the Napoléon room. Despite we are in the Régence room, we have a special question comparing Microsoft to Napoleon: Microsoft is seen by lot of people as an empire whose's main objective is to dominate the software industry. What do you think of this analogy? Isn't Microsoft's empire too dominant, today?
Bill: This analogy is stupid. We are a company, we are employing smart people to write software, we are listening to what our consumers have to say, we are raising long term difficult challenges that nobody else is treating, like digital hand writing, speech recognition, computer's reliability. Those things demand a real reflection and breakthroughs. Today, in the United-States, who is really conducting research? If you put aside the pharmaceutical industry and the aerospace industry only IBM and Microsoft are strongly oriented R&D. We have an approach on the long term, many of our products have success, many fail, but this has nothing to do with the political power, with territorial possession, wars, etc. Heh! We're creating software and people can use them if they like them, or they can not use them if they aren't sastify. It's giving a bad favour to people who work at Microsoft and content themselves with writing good software, by comparing them to an army or everything else that is military related.