Gates says Xbox 360 is a revolutionary product |
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Mon, 31 Oct 2005 10:05
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The founder and chairman of Microsoft and the world's richest man Bill Gates has rubbished speculation that the software giant's best days were behind it as the shares have been singularly lacklustre in their performance so far in the current year.
Gates spoke to The Sunday Times last week when he was in London and said that the company had grown at a faster clip since he stepped down six years ago. New strides had been made in speech recognition, language translation and robotics.
“We have a lot of breakthrough things and we are able to be ambitious because of the size of the company. In the past six years we have done more and moved faster," he observed. "We do not fear Google, but there is intense competition between us."
Speaking even as the latest figures from the Redmond stables were a bit on the slow side, Gates said that Microsoft was entering new areas like the gaming console business. He said that the Xbox 360 was a huge product from the company, "Two years from now you will know. We are going to expand the market with the way we have made it a digital-entertainment center. Xbox 360 is a revolutionary product.”
Microsoft's first quarter profits jumped 24 percent to $3.1 billion (£1.8 billion), but the forecasts are cautious primarily because Google is competing intensely and actually winning some battles. Microsoft's stock price has remained steady at $25 over the last seven years.
Gates refused to admit that this was worrisome, “We were the only people I know who said the stock market was crazy in the late 1990s. The valuation then was insane. When you are comparing something to insanity, you always get a very unusual comparison.” In Tel Aviv, Bill Gates acknowledged that China and India were the next big things as far as the software markets were concerned.
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