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Q&A: Microsoft's Will Poole talks about digital home entertainment

By Brier Dudley
Seattle Times technology reporter

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Poole began running what the company calls its Windows Client division in February 2003. Before that, he led the group that made Windows Media Player the dominant software for playing digital music and videos on a PC.

Last week, Poole was in Los Angeles with Chairman Bill Gates to help launch the latest version of Windows XP Media Center Edition, the software that runs a new series of entertainment-focused PCs that record and play TV and can be operated via remote control.

In an interview with The Seattle Times, Poole discussed a number of subjects. Here's an edited transcript.

Q. I understand you set up your own network at home.

A. I do manage my home network. It's a way to make sure that I stay in touch with how PCs work for real people, and so I do all of my own updating and maintenance. My son managed to — I don't know how he did it — but he turned off the antivirus on his machine and so I spent 2½ hours getting spyware and other stuff off his machine a couple of weeks ago.

So I try to live the lifestyle of what everybody sees when they use Windows. Some parts of it I love. There are some parts of it that inspire me to make sure the team does more.

Q. Did Microsoft put you in charge of the client group because of your digital media experience?

A. I think Jim Allchin (Windows group vice president) needed somebody that had both the business experience as well as product vision. While I had never run a $11 billion business before, I did have some business experience having run startups and I worked at Sun Microsystems before that.

So I was the guy that had the product vision and the proven leadership in the area of new media, which is of course a very important area for the PC. So by putting the two of those together, it made sense to take up running the client.

Q. Sony, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have all announced big plans for digital entertainment in the past but they fell by the wayside, and now Microsoft's entertainment platform is emerging. Why is that?
 
A. There are a couple of things at play here. I think the fundamental vision that we have of digital entertainment anywhere is one that resonates with where consumers are today.

They want to be able to have their photos that they took last weekend of their kids in their back pocket when they go out to dinner with some friends. They want to be able to have the [recorded] TV show available to them on their laptop when they're on the airplane and they have time to watch it. They want to be able to quickly download the highlights from the Major League Baseball game yesterday and have it on their Portable Media Center to look at the bar with friends tonight.

That is the lifestyle where people have really brought digital media of all kinds into their life and now they want to make it easy and convenient to consume that media wherever they go.

There's no question that the Windows platform and the partners that we work with enable that better than anybody else simply by nature of the extensibility of the system. You can't go and extend a PlayStation; you can't go and add more features to a TiVo. You have to wait for TiVo to do it; you have to wait for Sony to do it.

Whereas somebody can go and build new experiences for a Media Center PC. ... The value of the platform is that the entire ecosystem can participate in the richness of the platform and delivering products to customers. And I think that puts Windows in a uniquely strong position to deliver on the vision of digital entertainment anywhere.

Q. Microsoft is also spending more than PC makers on research and development.

A. We're not doing it without an expectation of there being a return. We think there are very large new business opportunities both for our partners as well as for ourselves. We don't make any money on Windows unless HP makes some money selling a PC. And they've got to sell the PC first, so we have to continue to innovate and help them build more compelling experiences that are going to give a new PC purchaser the reason to buy something ... or give somebody that's already got one a reason to upgrade.

And the more that we can help make those experiences great and visibly different from what they had before, maybe the more likely they are to upgrade, or the more likely they are to say, "Hey I really do want a homework machine and a work-at-home machine and a digital photo machine, and the Media Center for $799 is the way to do that."

Q. You expect Media Center to account for about 20 percent of consumer PC sales in a few years. How is that going to affect Microsoft's effort to get its media and digital-rights-management technologies more widely used by Hollywood?

A. Hollywood has broadly embraced our media platform and DRM technologies to date, at least as much as they have anybody's. The bigger issue is how do you convince Hollywood that they should make content available in a digitally distributed and convenient form, using our technology or anybody else's, frankly. That's really the nature of a lot of the work that we do ... help them understand the business opportunity, for MLB to make last night's game available for download for $3.99 for your Portable Media Center.

For the guys in the major studios to say, "Hey, I might not get a whole lot of sales in doing a digital movie rental via Movielink or Cinemanow, but I'd much rather have it happen that way than have the users go and pirate the thing. So I'm better off fulfilling the demand and growing with the market, as opposed to watching the pirate market taking off."

Those are the kinds of decisions that we're trying to help them drive — to actually get in the market and address the consumer opportunity. We obviously need to have technology that's good enough for them to feel comfortable.

Q. When do you think the Windows Media platform is going to overtake Apple Computer in the music space?

A. That's a tall order. I'd say we'll be giving them a serious run for their money in the hard-drive space [hard-drive-based media devices] this Christmas that maybe they didn't expect to see quite as competitive as it will be.

It really means our partners — it means Samsung, it means Creative, Rio, all these guys that are building some very innovative products. All of them are looking for what is their edge over Apple. We're just helping them get that edge with our software. It would be hard for me to predict, though, when any one of them would beat Apple.

Q. By 2008 or 2010, will Media Center still be a premium product or will it become the standard consumer operating system?

A. Our lineup will change when we come out with Longhorn [in 2006], so it's hard to make predictions on this particular configuration because it will be different in Longhorn. I think if you ask the question of will Windows products that have value beyond [Windows XP] Home become a much higher percentage of the overall consumer PC purchase rate, north of 50 percent, the answer is yes.

Q. Will video recording features be standard features in Longhorn?

A. We haven't figured that all out yet. We're going to continue to add value along the lines of what you're seeing here in Windows configurations in general. I expect the added-value configurations to become a much higher and higher percentage of the mix of overall consumer PCs.

Q. How will Media Center affect the Windows TV business? It seems like one of your big competitors with Media Center is advanced set-top boxes.

A. I think ultimately the cable guys and satellite guys are going to say I can make more money by hooking up my digital pipes to the back of a Media Center PC and having customers pay an extra 50 cents or $1 to put something on their Portable Media Center as opposed to just watching it on the television.

They're going to say, "I can make more money if the customer buys the hardware instead of I buy the hardware." Instead of the satellite or cable company having to subsidize the hardware, the customer pays the full boat when it comes to the PC.

Q. What's the state of convergence between PCs and consumer electronics?

A. Convergence is happening from both directions. The PCs are becoming more like a consumer electronics device and the consumer electronics devices are becoming more like PCs.

I think our path is a little bit easier to follow, not that we don't both have challenges. But taking complexity and platform extensibility and all the rest of the things that PCs do and packaging that in a form factor and with a user interface that befits a consumer electronics device is a little bit easier than trying to start with something that's a fixed function device and trying to continually add capabilities to it.

So I think you're going to continue to see that convergence continuing to happen in a substantial way over the next couple of years. Certainly within five years the things that are in your living room are all going to be unbelievably capable by comparison to where they are today.

Q. Do you have to make a push like this to avoid PCs becoming irrelevant for consumer entertainment?

A. PCs are unbelievably relevant already for consumer and entertainment use. You don't do your digital photos on a PS2 [PlayStation2]. You don't play massive multiplayer games on a Nintendo. So PCs are relevant already and we want to increase their relevance.

Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com