Exclusive: The Bill Gates Exit Interview - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

It's a pretty good interview with Bill Gates. The parts that are the most interesting to me are around the cloud and Windows future.

Microsoft has been putting a lot of efforts in the cloud. Take a look at the link, you can get 33GB out from various services. And they're only the services under "Live" brand. On the side of "Online" brand for enterprise, the efforts are equally big or even bigger. Guess many information will be shared by Ray Ozzie at this year's PDC.

About Windows future, still remember WinFS? He mentioned that “it will happen as part of the move to cloud storage”. With a very sexy cloud storage story, plus live and win7 tightly joined, plus online is getting richer and richer, plus I don't know, say a great ISV platform for services, say live services talking to each other more closely, ... I'm really looking forward to the coming changes.

The Empire Strikes Back: Our Analysis Of Microsoft Live Search Cashback

Seems like many people have negative comments, especially those articles from Baidu and Sina. Not sure why but probably it’s because of the name – cashback. From the name, people may be thinking Microsoft is so weak and losing confidence in improving search quality that it has to use money to lure searchers.

Well, the program is not only for end searchers, but also for advertisers. It’s an attempt to build a better ecosystem around search engine, advertisers and searchers. Google tried CPA before but don’t know why the dominate one is still CPC. The program looks like a win-win solution to all 3 parties, although Microsoft is now actually paying almost all back to the end customers, according to TechCrunch. Anyway, with only a tiny piece of the advertisement pie today, it really has nothing to lose.

By the way, I don’t think only improving search quality could take Google down today. Let’s wait and see.