Gates Keeps Up Push for Entertainment Dollars
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The Xbox video game console and software for viewing movies on TV screens have brought Microsoft Corp.  into customers' living rooms, Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday, and new partnerships will help the software maker expand outside the PC arena.
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Bill Gates may not have had much of a pay rise this year but he did manage to add $2bn to his fortune to bring it up to $48bn and stay on top of the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans.
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CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts  - Bill Gates attended to a bit of unfinished business on Thursday.
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When Steve Ballmer wants to make a stir he makes sure that he makes a big one. At the same venue where he spoke of Bill Gates receiving 4 million emails a day he also chose the meeting of Asian Government
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Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates contributed &#36;400,000 to the campaign backing a California ballot measure that would make billions of dollars available for human embryonic stem cell research and cloning projects in the state, according to campaign records.
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In his final CES keynote address, Gates is expected to reveal partnerships that will provide more video content and drive Microsoft's consumer entertainment strategy.
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The malware/adware threat is great enough, Gates said, that Microsoft is investing &quot;hundreds of millions&quot; of its $5 billion annual R&amp;D budget toward solving it.
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NEW YORK  - The video game sector will remain one of the above-average growth segments of the global entertainment industries through 2011, with global games spending set to exceed music spending this year, according to consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates has been giving keynote speeches at Las Vegas conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show and the now-defunct Comdex, for decades. Before his last&#160;CES keynote speech&#160;as a full-time company employee, he talked with IDG News Service Executive News Editor Marc Ferranti about his legacy as an innovator, the background behind some of the deals announced at CES this week, and directions for Microsoft.The following is an edited version of the interview:IDGNS: We&#39;ve been tracking your career for some 30 years. One bone of contention has been when people have said that Bill Gates is a business mastermind, but not really an innovator. Can you point out a couple of innovative things you&#39;re particularly proud of?Gates: In terms of what we&#39;re proud of, I think it&#39;s the personal computer that we&#39;re proud of. It was a crazy idea at the time, that we could take the microprocessor and create a software industry around it. There was no software industry. Computing was about big businesses, and what we did in 1975, with me dropping out of school, was to say that we could build an industry that was about empowering people. We could seek out partners to build the hardware. We&#39;d let anyone write software for the work we did, and everything we&#39;ve done, over these 30 years, has been about that vision of personal computing. We were first ones with that vision.And now we&#39;re tackling the new frontiers. We&#39;re bringing TV, we&#39;re bringing new educational experiences, health experiences, onto this device that empowers people in a new rich way. And so it&#39;s pretty broad, the PC industry and our innovations in it -- I don&#39;t think there&#39;s anything in the last 30 years that has had as much impact.IDGNS: In the consumer space, since we&#39;re at CES, can you point out some recent innovations Microsoft can leverage in the next couple of years.Gates: Well the dollars spent on games and Xbox in the U.S. is greater than Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii combined. Really, that&#39;s because of the innovation in Xbox Live -- connecting people up, letting players find each other, matching them, getting video online. It&#39;s a real breakthrough way of thinking about even the future of TV.We&#39;ve got a million people using our Mediaroom, which is TV delivered over the Internet. Companies like AT&amp;T and 19 other phone companies around the world bet their future on this being the new video platform. And what that means is when you think about news, and you go and use Mediaroom news, you see the things that you care about, the ads are targeted at you.Look at what we&#39;ve done with Surface, directly touching and manipulating things -- that&#39;s gonna be a centerpiece.I can go on and on, there&#39;s so much that has to do with making it natural, bringing these things together and integrating them. We&#39;re the company that&#39;s doing the walk -- a lot of business focus but enough consumer focus that, from the biggest game phenomenon in the world to the biggest instant messaging thing, we have a lot of success that represents the innovation we&#39;re put into it.IDGNS: With increasing competition from abroad, innovation is of increasing importance to American companies. What&#39;s your thinking around the link between innovation and intellectual property?Gates: Well, we&#39;re a company that&#39;s based in the United States, but obviously we&#39;re drawing on engineering talent from all over the world. We&#39;ve got an unbelievable research group in China, we&#39;ve got an unbelievable research group in India, and we&#39;re delivering to consumers all over the world as well. And we file for intellectual property in all of these countries. They&#39;re all in different stages in terms of copyright, or patents, and it tends to be a pretty complicated area.Other countries look at what&#39;s going on in the United States and they say they&#39;d like their engineers to have those same opportunities, those same incentive systems, and so there really is a sense of progress in that. It&#39;s just one of the elements that make sure people are willing to take risks and keep the innovation in this industry the fastest of any industry in the world.IDGNS: You&#39;re going to be talking here about new partnerships for Microsoft&#39;s MSN, Xbox Live and Mediaroom IPTV services that will provide more content to drive Microsoft&#39;s consumer entertainment strategy. Can you talk about what you needed to do -- on the technology side and on the business side -- to make these deals happen?Gates: XBox Live is attracting virtually all the content people because of the volume we&#39;ve got there, and they see this group of very engaged users spending a lot of hours and finding new media in that environment, so that&#39;s made it easy for us. Our announcement with NBC on the Olympics is about our innovations in Silverlight, where you can view interactive content, multiple video streams, so it&#39;s really a perfect match for the Olympics where you have all this different content and yet different people care about different parts of it.IDGNS: As your consumer entertainment strategy comes to fruition, how will your business model change from what it has been in the past? Can you quantify goals for advertising-generated revenue?Gates: We&#39;ve seen good growth in our advertising revenue. That&#39;s an area where Google&#39;s the leader and we need to be very innovative to drive the scale. A huge partnership with Viacom is helping us with that. We&#39;ll be signing up more partners around the world. Taking the advertising platform to scale is very valuable for things like the search property we offer.We participate in a lot of business models. We have consumer software like games that you buy on a one-time basis. We have things that you can pay as a monthly fee, that we run up in our servers, as more of a service type model. We have some software we give away for free. And so, ads are coming in as a big, strong component but I don&#39;t see it replacing the others. We need all modalities to be strong.IDGNS: In your philanthropic work, you&#39;ve focused on fundamental health issues for the developing world. In the tech sector, there have been efforts such as the OLPC, and Microsoft&#39;s efforts to reduce prices in developing countries. But there&#39;s been criticism about these efforts. People have been saying, well, a $200 laptop isn&#39;t going to do a kid much good if he doesn&#39;t live to age five. With this in mind what do you think technology companies -- that need to make profits -- can do to spur development in emerging markets?Gates: Companies make their contribution by both giving some cash to broad areas but also by having their products in their area of expertise be tailored and donated to people who are poor. So in the case of Microsoft, we went and got involved in putting PCs in libraries. We went to Chile to put PCs in the libraries there, so by having a really robust machine connected to the Internet, going through the training, working with the government, getting all the pieces right -- we learned how to do that in the United States -- those projects were incredibly successful.So while I admit for my Foundation the top priority is health, Microsoft is about software. It&#39;s got a product, that&#39;s what the company knows. And that&#39;s where, in its activities around the world, its helping educators, it&#39;s helping kids who have curiosity, and I think that&#39;s fantastic for Microsoft to do that.I&#39;m taking the success that Microsoft had and putting tens of billions of that into the basic needs where breakthroughs can be made -- and there, we&#39;ll be using software. We&#39;ll be using mobile phones, we&#39;ll doing data gathering, so we&#39;ll be using software as a tool to do it. I wish every company was doing as much as Microsoft is to take their expertise and look into that developing world and see what role they can play . We&#39;ve had great impact, great success, and it helps us attract better employees. It makes our employees feel good because we were founded on the idea of empowerment. We&#39;re not just talking about it, we&#39;re out in over a hundred countries delivering it in a significant way.
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Walt Disney Co.  will triple the amount of money it spends developing video games to benefit from strong growth prospects in the global market, the entertainment company's chief financial officer said on Friday.
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Clues point to the company developing a series of Web features -- including a Web browser. NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Move over Bill Gates.
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Even as he moves to part time, Microsoft chairman will continue pursuit of such technologies as tablet computing, speech recognition. Everything will be a computer, Gates says
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In this detailed interview, Gates talks about the background on deals announced at CES, new directions for Microsoft, and what he's proud of.
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LAS VEGAS/SEATTLE  - The Xbox video game player  and software for viewing movies on TV screens have brought  Microsoft Corp. into customers' living rooms, Chairman Bill  Gates said on Wednesday, and new partnerships will help the  software maker expand beyond the PC.
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Bill Gates has never taken himself as seriously as he does his company. So it was only fitting that it was with a humorous and star-studded video parody that he kicked off his final pre-show keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Sunday night in Las Vegas.Gates fictionally portrayed his last day of full-time work at CES in a video that had everyone from presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to The Daily Show host Jon Stewart turning him down for a job, and music mogul Jay-Z and film actor Matthew McConaughey patiently enduring his painful attempts at new extracurricular activities -- rapping and hitting the gym.When the laughs and well-received applause from a crowd of several thousand at The Venetian hotel and casino died down, Gates once again outlined his vision for a world of service-connected devices that allow for human interactions through speech and touch -- a vision he&#39;s been promoting for years from the CES stage.&quot;Getting the latest software, getting your data -- you&#39;ll just take that for granted,&quot; Gates said. &quot;When you take a photo it will show up in a place you like it to show up. That will be very simple.&quot;He added that eventually, devices also will know the context and location of the people using them, so location-based information from a device will be automatic.Gates&#39; vision for a connected world of devices and services has always been impressive. But as he makes his full-time exit from Microsoft, the company has yet to bring it to the mainstream user.Although some of the news in Gates&#39; keynote seems to suggest Microsoft is poised to change that, the company&#39;s strategy remains rooted in disparate product lines that haven&#39;t quite come together. And the company is facing increased pressure from competitors such as Apple and Google, which have turned ideas Microsoft has bandied about for years -- such as touch-screen technology and Web-based services -- into profits the software giant has not come close to achieving with its own efforts.Still, Microsoft introduced some new deals and services on stage Sunday that show the company is on the right track. In particular, Microsoft has struck some savvy deals with entertainment companies MGM and ABC to bring films and popular TV shows, respectively, to Xbox Live. That service and community, aimed at gamers using the Xbox console, has turned the Xbox into a viable television platform, tying together Microsoft&#39;s gaming strategy with its aim to provide premium entertainment. Along those lines, the company also announced a deal Sunday with British Telecom to deliver its IPTV service Mediaroom through the Xbox console.Other offerings that tie together multiple services and devices on display Sunday also showed that Gates&#39; connected services vision is coming into focus. A demo during the keynote showed how users can take photos from within a Windows Live hosted service and post them seamlessly to a blog or e-mail them to friends. Another showed how users can purchase movie tickets on a Windows Mobile device using voice commands and then text-message those tickets to other mobile devices.Microsoft also showed some progress on the Zune media player front, even though many still view the device as a poor competitor to Apple&#39;s enormously popular line of iPods. During the keynote Microsoft introduced Zune Social, an online community where Zune users can share playlists, track what their friends are listening to on their own devices and connect automatically to the Zune Marketplace to purchase songs.Toward the end of Gates&#39; keynote, he and Microsoft President Robbie Bach demonstrated a prototype device from Microsoft Research that seemed to represent the culmination of the company&#39;s connected-device strategy. The device used visual recognition to identify people and places in its line of &quot;sight,&quot; and remind a user of events related to them. For example, when Gates aimed the device at Bach, the device identified him and reminded Gates that Bach owed him $20. However, information neither Gates nor Bach could provide was how long it would take for such a device to be fully developed and released.When all was said and done on Sunday, Gates ended his CES legacy not with a bang but a whimper, allowing a special guest star to steal what would have been his final CES thunder.During what was poised to be a $20 contest between Gates and Bach on the popular Guitar Hero game, Gates instead introduced a ringer to take his place -- former Guns N&#39; Roses guitarist Slash. As the shaggy-haired guitarist played a loud riff from the band&#39;s song &quot;Welcome to the Jungle,&quot; Gates stood smiling on the stage and let Bach say the final goodbye, assuring attendees that he, at least, would be back again next year.
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SINGAPORE -- Bill Gates, the chairman and founder of Microsoft, receives millions of e-mail messages a day, said Steve Ballmer, the company&#39;s chief executive.
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Move over, Robin Hood. Bill Gates has a new plan.