Fast Company | Microsoft Skills Bill Gates is interviewed in Fast Company. One of the funny things about the interview is that he basically paints Microsoft as being an early innovator of the television/computing combo and yet here it is 2005 and the satellite providers, the cable providers and TiVo all have systems at market today that record HDTV while with Gate’s primary television solution, Microsoft Media Center Edition, you still can’t watch cable or satellite HDTV.
“We have a very unusual model in that if I say that something is going to be important . . . like I say that TV in the future will be delivered over an IP network — you know I said that 12 years ago. Well, about eight years went by and nothing happened. Microsoft was spending more than $100 million a year on that R&D;, and we were ahead of our time.”