Finally, Vista Makes Its Debut. Now What?

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? Maybe you and the people you know all did, but most people don’t.

How many actually do?

I would say it's less than 30 percent. We’ve had this incredible desktop search [available for download] that won every review, and I’ll bet that less than 10 percent of Windows users went and got that. Now with Windows Vista, you get something better. For most users, it’s the first time they’ve seen it at all.

So you feel in 2010-2011 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.

You’re leaving your full time role at Microsoft in July 2008. What involvement are you going to have in the next operating system?