Serious Money; Bill Gates

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry Video 4 iserman Windows 3 is continued to surprise us and we've sold well over a million boxes through

dealers now, and this, accidentally sometimes the computer industry that the more people support something the more people who write programs for or learn how to train on it, the more attractive it gets, and people can see that it's becoming a new standard, and so people are rushing to do the best job they can with it, which means people building hardware that run windows very well, or windows applications, windows training. All those things have come together to bring windows to critical mass. Windows is pretty important because it changes the way you work with a computer to be very graphical, so you can see pictures and text in different sizes, and that makes it easier to work with a computer. There's less commands to learn, and all those things coming together created this phenomena that's led to these incredible sales. What percent of the market do you intend to get with Windows 3? Well, of the DOS market, we'd like to get 100 percent of it, so that would be 90 percent of the DOS tops, and I

can take several years before we get to that, but even in 1991, the majority of new business users, I think, will be using Windows. You have been developing with IBM, the OS2, an operating system for the high -end PCs, and that system has not been selling as well as Windows, and some people have said that has caused a rift with IBM. Is that, in fact, the case? Well, both IBM and Microsoft are very committed to us, too. In fact, it's kind of forced us to look hard at working together more efficiently and doing some more things. We haven't worked as closely on Windows, so that generates these press questions about, you know, are the two companies separate. When it comes to OS2, we have a common strategy. OS2 is, because it's more powerful, we actually make more money when that sells. So, when we can make it appropriate for lots and lots of people, we'll be glad to see it selling high volume the same way that IBM is hoping that. Recently, a plan merger between Lotus and Noval didn't go through.

Does Microsoft have any plans for acquisitions? We've done very few takeovers in our history. We bought a few small companies, primarily because we saw somebody very talented running the company and wanted them to come in and help us here. Our competitors have done quite a bit of buying of different companies to build up their product line. It's a little bit easier to have consistency and training if you develop it from the beginning and all the products using the same methodology. So, although I'm sure we'll do a few acquisitions, it won't be a major part of our strategy the way it has been for other people. You became the personal computer industry's first billionaire and yet you keep the same pace that you've had working nights, working weekends. What drives Bill Gates? Well, I enjoy running Microsoft a lot. I have smart people here who are fun to work with. This is a competitive industry. We're building

products that help people do their job better. Make jobs a lot more enjoyable. Let people get it information. So, it's my choice to stay here and do what I think is a great fun job. The goal I had in starting this company was not driven by some monetary target. Any reasonable monetary target was reached a long time ago. It was driven by this vision of a personal computer on every desk as essentially an information appliance and were long ways from achieving that goal. The computer has to improve a lot and we're doing it slowly but surely. Microsoft has seen after -tax margins as high as 24 percent, something like the highest in the industry. How do you plan to maintain that kind of margin? As far as margins go,

we've always said that it will be difficult and that margins are likely to come down. We've been saying that for quite some time and as various products have taken off, we've actually kept our margins very high but even now we continue to say that's unlikely to continue. The margins will come down. The market share will depend on how well we do it bringing out innovative products and so we spend a lot of time on our development efficiency and thinking about what's out in the future and I think we have a good chance of even increasing our market shares. What's going to be your leading edge technology for the 1990s? Well, there's a lot of things that will happen. For example, the computer, you'll have a notebook type computer that you can actually write on it and have it recognize your handwriting or we'll be able to take

the compact disk, the CD that you get music on today and put an encyclopedia on there and have pictures and sound and make it very interactive to move through that data. We'll make it so that it's easy to, if you've created a document on the computer, anything you remember about that document, some words that were in it or when you did it, make it easy to go back and get that data so that paper filing system that we can actually replace those.