Questions For Bill Gates
With this move, Microsoft will be setting itself up to face some new competitors, say Cisco for example. Is your channel ready to take on these new rivals?
GATES: I sure hope so. Our channel has done a fantastic job with not just Office but also with SharePoint and Exchange ... Our channel has gotten a lot more sophisticated at these high-demand, managed applications. In fact, they've become a great source of feedback for us in terms of how we prioritize our R&D work. There are some new skills here, but this is not a paradigm change. Our channel has been doing key, high-performance well-managed business infrastructure for some time. This is bringing them into the realtime piece, the telephony piece, in a big way. Now some of them have been doing telephony with other products and some of them we'll be bringing into the telephony space for the first time. Both of those are great with us.
Your detractors might say that Microsoft isn't necessarily known for getting its software right the first time, but particularly when you talk about VoIP, quality and reliability are essential. What's your response to those detractors?
GATES: Well, with enterprise software, we do a very careful rollout, even as part of the beta process. So at Microsoft, you have thousands of people that this is what they use every day. We have a huge number of customers that have been working with us, giving us feedback, some great channel partners who, of course, are themselves users of the technology and have it out in some of their customers, and so I think people should simply talk to people who have done similar installations of the software and hear about their experience. The kind of testing we've done here, the kind of logging infrastructure that it has, it's ready for prime time telephony usage.
How would you say using unified communications has impacted your own business life?
GATES: For me, say I want to get ahold of [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer. If he's busy, then I can just look at his calendar, and because of my connection where he's declared a relationship, I can see free time and schedule time. His presence is available to me. I tend to work odd hours, on the weekends. Sometimes I don't want to be interrupted, sometimes I'm just sitting doing e-mails, and if someone needs to call me, I can offer that. And presence is the tool that makes that very straightforward for me.