Hundreds of students from around the country tuned in Friday for a discussion with Microsoft executive Robbie Bach. As part of Microsoft's annual Minority Student Day, Bach and members of the Blacks at Microsoft employee group counseled the kids on how to pursue careers in technology.
By Benjamin J. Romano
Seattle Times technology reporter
Hundreds of students from around the country tuned in Friday for a discussion with Microsoft executive Robbie Bach.
As part of Microsoft's annual Minority Student Day, Bach and members of the Blacks at Microsoft employee group counseled the kids on how to pursue careers in technology.
"Here at Microsoft we hire a lot of engineers ... and we struggle to find people who are qualified in the engineering space," Bach said.
After a demonstration of the latest Xbox Live technology, Bach told the students that if they want to "help define the future of that entertainment, we'd love to have you here. But that involves making sure you do well in school ... making sure you're doing math and science."
But at the end of a half-hour Q&A with the students, Bach was ready to suggest careers in journalism for some of them. They asked on-point questions about the strategy and future of products in Bach's Entertainment and Devices Division.
"That was a press interview," Bach said afterward with reporters. "That was a press conference."
Here are highlights of Bach's conversation with the students:
Q: I was wondering if you plan on making a touch-screen Zune?
Bach: Ah, a question about whether we're going to make a touch-screen Zune. I won't talk about future product things that we're doing explicitly because that will get me in trouble with a lot of people.
I will say that some of the things I showed today — around touch and voice and cameras — you will start to see in a lot of places, not just in my division but across all of Microsoft. ... And once you have something like touch or voice to interact with, you wonder why you did it the old way.
Q: I'm going to throw the Apple iPod out there and the Zune. How are you going to deal with competition; what's your plan or strategy?
Bach: We've been doing Zune now for about three years and I would say that today if you took at Zune and an iPod, and you include iTunes and our marketplace and just looked at the whole product offering, we win about 40 to 50 percent of the reviews.
So from a product-quality and capability perspective, in some semiobjective sense, we think we have as good or a better product.
Now, it's not selling like that in the marketplace today; I mean, you can look at the data. Today, Apple has, depending on what month you look at, 70, 75 percent market share and, you know, ours is much less.
And that's a function of the fact that they have a very strong brand and they got to market four years earlier than we did, and so they have built up a very tough position for us to respond to, even with as good, or in some cases, a better product.
So you could say, "Well, Robbie, what are you doing about that?"
The thing that we're looking at, and I think what you'll see play out is, the stand-alone music-playing category is declining....
The portable device increasingly is going to become the phone and so I think what you're going to see is a lot of work on our part to take what we've built with Zune ... and use it in a lot of other places.
And again, I won't make any specific announcements, but you are going to see us think about the great software we've done as an asset that can be used across multiple screens as opposed to just on a dedicated Zune device.
The Zune devices will continue, but there will be other opportunities to experience music that I think will be very rich.
Q: I was wondering what would be the new features on Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile 6 is good, but I was wondering how the new ones are going to be used?
Bach: ... You should think that the next two generations of Windows Mobile are going to do some of the following things:
One, you'll get a different, what we would call a user experience; basically a different way to interact with the phone itself — things being much more touch organized, much better transitions, much richer.
It will look a lot less like a PC and a lot more like a fun experience on a phone. I think that will be a pretty dramatic change. ...
Today, our Windows Mobile devices are pretty business-oriented.
They look like something I would use, not something you would use — let's say it that way.
You're going to see that expand pretty dramatically, including music, video and some other capabilities in what we would call the consumer space, that I think will be super exciting.
The final thing I'll say, a bunch of changes in Windows Mobile aren't going to happen on the phone itself. One of the biggest trends ... is that people are going to be connected to services.
Because the phone now has 3G, which is a kind of broadband on a mobile phone, you can now connect to other services and have new capabilities.
(He listed Xbox Live, Facebook and Twitter as examples.)
You want to be able to connect to those things in a rich way. We're going to enable those services in a very cool way on our future Windows Mobile technology.
Benjamin J. Romano: 206-464-2149 or bromano@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company
