Wait Till the NEXT One!

Well, people have said that at every major Windows release. Java was going to eliminate Windows programming, or thin clients were going to eliminate people buying PCs. Operating systems keep gettingbetter and richer, and they allow developers then to take advantage of that. We're doing more innovation now at the operating-system level than we've ever done.

Are you thinking of rolling upgrades as opposed to big major releases?

No, you'll have big releases. When you go in and enable a new kind of application, you want to get your partners behind it, you want to get them building the hardware that's related to that. It really simplifies things for people to think, OK, here's what I got in Windows Vista, here's what I'm going to get in this next major release. The more-avid users download the upgrades in between, but of XP users how many downloaded a browser that was more advanced than the one they had? I would say it's less than 30 percent.

So you feel in 2010 or 2011 that Microsoft will be back with the next big one?

Absolutely. We'll tell you how Vista just wasn't good enough, and we'll know why, too. We need to wait and hear what consumers have to tell us. We don't know that. Otherwise, of course, we would have done it this time.

What involvement are you going to have in the next operating system?