Gates in unusual underdog role at Vegas convention
lasvegassun.com
By John Markoff
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
REDMOND, Wash. -- The bearish news from the personal computer industry may
be sowing fear in Silicon Valley, but none of that anxiety is apparent on
the sprawling corporate campus of Microsoft, whose software fortunes were
built on the PC boom.
For even with domestic PC sales down 24 percent in December from a year
earlier -- and even as Microsoft is warning that its own revenues are likely
to falter as a consequence -- the frontier of consumer electronics is
increasingly seen here as the next big thing.
Indeed, Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who now calls himself chief
software architect, seems focused on an entirely different business as his
company prepares to introduce its X-Box video-game system, its first foray
into the high-stakes, high-risk consumer electronics business.
In Gates' mind, winning in consumer electronics simply requires applying the
same lessons the company has mastered in the computer arena.
"This is about great software, and it's about evangelization," he said today
in an interview in his office here. "Why did MS-DOS succeed and Microsoft
Office succeed? In all those things it was about evangelization, and it was
about getting great software engineers to put the pieces together. That's
still at the core of this thing."
Gates said he is becoming comfortable with his new role as the company's
software architect, a job he took last spring after he handed the chief
executive position to his longtime friend and partner Steven Ballmer.
Gates still has his office in the company's corporate suite. But he said he
spent his days working on a variety of new problems, among them building new
skills from the consumer electronics world.
Some days, he said, involve exploring problems like what happens when a
child pulls the new X-Box off the shelf and it bounces on a hard floor, or
the potential hazards in the sheaving of a cable that will come with the
machine.
"If you'd asked me three or four months ago I'd have said, 'Hmmm, I don't
know how I'm doing; I'm trying,"' he said. But he and Ballmer compared notes
after the holidays, he said, and he believes that he has figured out how to
be effective in his new capacity.
On Sunday Gates will travel to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics
Show in an unaccustomed role -- that of neophyte and underdog -- to
introduce the X-Box to an industry increasingly dominated by digital
appliances and gadgets, including the competing game consoles of Sony,
Nintendo and Sega. But he said the time for Microsoft's entry into the arena
was ripe.
"This year electronics driven by software is really starting to come into
the home in a big way," Gates said. "You see it with music, you see it with
photos, you see it with TV, you see it with the ways people are using PC's
as a creativity center."
Microsoft's new strategy is not without peril, and Gates acknowledged that
consumer electronics, like the PC business, is sensitive to the economic
tides.
"Certainly the economy will affect what portion of consumers can move in the
first year," he said. "Sure it will affect the volumes, and consumers are
price sensitive."
Gates also said he was not deeply concerned about the pending merger of Time
Warner and America Online, which is expected to receive final approval in
the next few days from the Federal Communications Commission.
Microsoft's opposition has been based in part on its challenge to America
Online in the field of instant messaging, an area in which the FCC may place
restrictions on the merged company. Gates said that the merger might
actually open new avenues for Microsoft to create strategic alliance with
other AOL Time Warner competitors, like the Walt Disney Co.
And even the Internet downturn has had an upside for Microsoft, he said:
increasing the availability of talent. About 100 people have returned to
Microsoft after leaving to join start-ups, he said.
"They saw the real world and returned," he said.
Despite his push into the gaming business, Gates confessed that he is by and
large not an active gamer - although he did confess to one 20-hour binge
with a recent Microsoft game called Pandora's Box, written by Alexey
Pajitnov, a designer of the popular game Tetris.
Still, Gates said he understood the game-playing psychology.
"When I was in college, for the games of that era, I was as hard core as
anyone was," he said. "I wouldn't say I outgrew it, but you always have to
have a finite number of addictions." |
