According to Bill Gates the traditional personal computer is dying and the mobile revolution is signalling a change to tablets and Metro applications instead of the traditional applications that all computer users are enjoying at the present time. But I believe that the standard computer form factor with a tower case, large screen and keyboard/mouse interface will be with us for a long time yet. We are not going to throw away that hardware for a long time, gaming seriously is best done on a standard computer. Many old games are best played on a desktop PC, the tablets and touch screens are sub-standard gaming platforms. There are just as many PC components being sold as ever, with the new technology available for fabrication of smaller and smaller components allowing 16 Gigabytes of RAM on one module. The tablet and touch device form factor will only have a limited lifespan and the price will drop over the near future. You can have an entire new industry in the next 2 years simply by purchasing components that can be used on the PCs available today.
No one is going to stand in the way that companies like Microsoft, Dell and HP invest millions in making sure new and better computers with greater capabilities than the PCs we already know, because they know that by investing in new models everyone who bought them will be happier and have more money that will pay for the hardware that will go with the new model of computing. So I think we will see what happens in the future. The traditional desktop form factor is not going anywhere. The Windows operating system is going to continue to exist in some form because it’s very powerful, so I don’t know what the next version of Windows is going to look like. Will Windows Store be one of the major drivers for Windows 10 sales growth, and what do you think Microsoft will focus on in the next two years to encourage more users to try Windows 10? I think we’re going to see a lot more consumer applications. Windows 10 is the culmination of an enormous amount of effort. The big three are apps, Bing and Windows Phone, and they are all different, but they create the same kind of experiences, so I think that there’s going to be demand for those different experiences.
The Microsoft Surface team has been pushing out apps on the Surface for some time. I know that for example the Kinect app for Windows 10 that’s available just as we speak in the App Store. Are you worried about Microsoft not having time and resources to make good use of these technologies, or could you imagine Microsoft investing some development resources into the future of Microsoft’s mobile efforts? I think the core focus needs to be what I call “Microsoft mobile.” We will invest a lot of resources into this next generation, and we’re going to see where that’s going. s Microsoft currently using Xamarin for some of its mobile app development? What are the next mobile platforms and devices that it might develop for? I think Microsoft’s mobile efforts are very focused on Windows 10 Pro and HoloLens. If the mobile efforts stay focused on Windows 10, it’s not going up the Microsoft brand tree. If we go back to Windows 8, we did invest quite a bit into Windows Phone and then focused quite a lot on Bing, and it wasn’t really a mobile effort. But if we go back to Windows Phone, we also invested quite a bit into Windows 8, and again went out of our way to build a mobile device to bridge the ecosystem between Microsoft Mobile and Windows Phone.
So we certainly have a very smart pipeline in the mobile space where there are plenty of Windows devices available for users and plenty of innovation.