Microsoft's Gates: Say Goodbye to VoIP As You Know It

Gates: I sure hope so. Our channel has done a fantastic job with not just Office but also with SharePoint and Exchange, and the skill sets you build up helping customers install SharePoint and Exchange in terms of the directory and the investment that needs to be made there to get that right, the network itself to make sure that you have a high-quality network and the right management tools to measure how well your network is working. People expect, basically, perfection in e-mail systems. Your work for productivity depends on it. And their SharePoint Web sites, people expect those to work every time.

So 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're 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 real-time 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.

Some of your detractors might say that Microsoft isn't necessarily known for getting their 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 significant are the security risks around VoIP and do you see those as real threats right now?

Gates: Well, the Internet itself has become a piece of critical infrastructure, so whether it's voice or not, if someone has succeeded in flooding the Internet or being able to take software flaws in the router and make packets go somewhere other than where they're meant to go, given the kinds of transactions and the things taking place on the Internet, that would be a huge problem. So it's an industry-wide problem to make sure that the robustness of the Internet itself and all of those standards continue to improve as the world -- whether its medical organizations or the government or business -- relies more and more on the Internet. I'd say that putting voice on the Internet doesn't add to that in some big way. That is, you've got to be able to have the Internet be reliable and secure, whether or you're running your voice conversations over the PSTN or not.

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