Microsoft's chairman is setting the company on a course to provide software and tools that will allow different forms of entertainment to blend. Its eyes ever set on the competition, Microsoft will continue to raise the stakes against Apple in the music industry and against Google and Yahoo in search.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Research is working on ways to reduce the cost of getting people in emerging nations hooked on the Internet. One idea: mesh networks that will let several families share connections.

Gates spoke with ZDNet UK's sister site CNET News.com on the eve of his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to discuss competing with Google, Apple and the threats posed by anti-patent and pro-open source campaigners.


In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamouring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned -- including the US patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system -- there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future

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