Gates admits 'mea culpa' with Internet Explorer, promises to be user-centric
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has admitted that the software giant messed up with Internet Explorer and had waited too long to release the latest version. This is the first time that Gates has talked at length about the Internet Explorer, which has been hit with a spate of malware attacks in recent times.
"In a sense we're doing a mea culpa, saying we waited too long for a browser release. I expect us to move very very rapidly there because we see great opportunities," the world's richest man said in a keynote address at Mix '06 in Las Vegas.
This is the first edition of a Microsoft conference that is aimed at developers who are creating online and mobile applications. "Everything we do now, we have to be user-centric, not device-centric," Gates pledged, adding that Microsoft was already working on the next two versions of the Internet Explorer, which will follow the debut of the IE 7.0.
The latter is set to come in a package with Redmond's newest operating system, the Windows Vista.
At the conference, Microsoft will explain the software and the technicalities behind the Live web services and invite developers to start building applications for the same in a variety of devices including desktop PCs, handhelds, mobiles, gaming devices and Media Center PCs.
"More and more activities are happening online. Whatever industry you look at, that's where people are spending time. Our latest web technologies [can be used] to drive better customer connections online," said Charles Fitzgerald, a general manager for platform technologies at Microsoft.
Apparently Redmond feels that the potential of reaching out to people who are now spending most of their time online cannot be left untapped. Gates also referred to the idea of "mash-ups" wherein developers take one part of a website and combine it with another part of a different website.
This is a powerful idea whose time has come, and we're really just at the beginning," he said. Gates then shifted to RSS and said it was the core of a programmable web, "You can think of RSS as the start of the programmable web. As websites start exposing their APIs, amazing things happen," he pointed out.
After he delivered the keynote, Gates sat down to an intimate one-on-one with Web 2.0 proponent and book publisher Tim O'Reilly, when he talked candidly about all things including Google, "You always have smarter and better competitors. The advertising model came along, and we underestimated how big that would be…so let's embrace what's been done well and go beyond that," Gates told O'Reilly in what was the most telling statement of the afternoon.
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