SPIEGEL Interview with Bill Gates: “The Bad Boys are also Terribly Clever” – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE: Bill Gates is interviewed by German Magazine Spiegel and once again handles himself really well. The interviewer seemed to have a fairly strong anti-Microsoft bias and the same old tired themes come up again and again, antitrust, open source, security, etc. and as usual Bill effectively shrugged them off and responded to these issues quite eloquently and effectively in my opinion.
Probably the part that I liked in the interview the most was when Bill was asked about unbundling Windows.
“SPIEGEL: In the court disputes in the USA you always say that one cannot tear apart Windows. But now its being done, isn’t it?
Gates: We are talking about bits. You can always separate everything from anything. You could amputate a leg, cut off an arm. I just don’t think it’s in the interests of our customers to be required to offer them a product that has less ability than it actually has. What we with Microsoft brought to the computer industry was a competition field that has never existed before in any industry in the world. With Windows we brought comparability. Who is the fastest, most secure, least expensive, most serviceable? This dynamic was and is an unbelievably strong motor …”
Although Bill didn’t mention Media Center specifically, he did bring up photos and music, “Just think about how e-mail contact or digital business with photos or music have developed world-wide.”
Hey he can’t plug Media Center 100% of the time… or can he?
Thanks, Scoble. Slashdot gives the interview the typical Slashdot workover here.