At the Convergence 2005 conference in San Diego Microsoft’s Bill Gates came across in back-handed agreement with those venture folks currently enamored with consumer technologies:
Now, we see when it comes to new software things are moving fairly rapidly, a little bit differently in the consumer space than in the business space. In the consumer space, it’s not as many issues about compatibility and aligning all those upgrades together, and so typically consumer type software is being updated on yearly or even sometimes a six-month basis, things like instant messaging and cloud-based capabilities. In the business space, it’s more a stair-step where you’ll get, say, a new version of Office and use that for two or three years and then get a major step up as opposed to that continual upgrade.
No installed base issues, rapid innovation, and six-month upgrade cycles? Sign me up.
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