"If you don't allow people to pay for software, you condemn software to be a by-product of some other investment''

He's been described variously as "the secretary of state of the United States of America" (by The Economist, no less) and "manic Mundie" by those not so fond of the company he works for: Microsoft. But few dispute the fact that Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer (CTO), is one of the most powerful people in the world of software technology. As the man responsible for Microsoft's advanced strategies and policies, it is his job to ensure that the company maintains its leadership (its critics would say, monopoly) in operating systems without antagonising users ranging from individuals to large corporations to governments. In India recently, Mundie, who reports to Chairman and Chief Architect Bill Gates, spoke to
BT's Kushan Mitra on open source and operating systems, among other things. Excerpts:

This is your third visit to India in about 12 months. Why this particular interest in the country?

Actually, I was in the neighbourhood this time. A few years ago, I was drawn into certain issues in China and I became the company's executive sponsor for China. And as I looked at China-and what looked like similarities between China and India, as well as the differences-along with other emerging markets, I began to push Microsoft towards having a much more aggressive approach in capitalising the business opportunities that existed in emerging economies. And clearly India is towards the top of that list. And so I made the personal commitment to extend my own activities to include India. I made that decision in the fall of 2003 and immediately came here for my first visit. I have been coming back now about every six months in order to personally learn about India, and ultimately get more people at Microsoft to aggressively chase the opportunities.

Would you consider yourself a sort of 'super CTO', in as much as the technology you visualise and develop will determine the way other CTOs act?

My job in Microsoft is several components and unique compared to other CTOs. Clearly, I have some involvement along with Bill Gates and other people in setting the long-term technical strategy for the company and the business strategy as it relates to the technology. In that sense your statement is correct, as the platforms we develop are the foundations on which other people build their houses. I have other areas of responsibility particularly in the area of technology policy on a global basis and while it might affect other people less in some immediate sense, I think the issues that we are working on are much longer term and based around infrastructure, education and intellectual property. These things will turn out to be critically important for all these people as well, because it is not just the platform but the entire environment in which the platform exists, operates and can be built upon that will really be critical in having a sustainable economy in software.

The future is not just the computer. All sorts of devices have operating systems nowadays from cellphones to washing machines. How does Microsoft view this proliferation of devices?

I am particularly fascinated about this question because 12 years ago I joined Microsoft and started all of our work in non-PC computing. In those first few years, we started all of the division whose products you see emerging today. So, I clearly agree that everything that is electric will be computerised and software will endow it with capabilities. That's nothing new to people. What has been unique in Microsoft's approach over the last 12 years is the idea that we will seek to create some uniformity in the platform architecture and some of the key applications, spanning across the array of future devices. Most other manufacturers have been manufacturing one class of device for several years, adding one feature at a time. Our view is that interoperability will be required across the various classes of devices, as well as the different instantations (read: types) of every device. However, that also has the potential of creating confusion in the consumer's experience.

So, Microsoft's attempt will not be to create a good product in every category but enough of a family resemblance as you move from one category to the next so that users will find that there is a symbiosis between the Microsoft versions of each of these products, and create an aura of usability and comfort that tends to minimise the complexity that would otherwise limit people's desire to use the technology. The telecom operator Orange noticed how people who use Microsoft-powered smart phones are more likely to use advanced services than users of other devices. So, this notion of very conscious transference of key concepts and key elements of the user interface turns out to be more than superficially nice in the branding and naming sense, but actually makes a meaningful difference to the lives of people.

"We are working on long-term issues based around infrastructure, education and intellectual property''

What is Microsoft's 'Trustworthy Computing' initiative all about?

The genesis of this is over four years old now, when I was asked to take on responsibility for both our Chief Security Officer and Chief Privacy Officer. As I heard them discuss ideas, I realised that while both of them were right, there were some fundamental tensions. For consumers, however, it wasn't a question of what they were thinking about-security or privacy. The real question for the consumer was if they trusted the computer. And ergo, did they trust the companies whose products and services they were buying? I spoke to other people in the company and said that we would have to raise our game and address this much larger question of how we can make computing something people trust.

There has been a cultural transformation within the company whenever we think of the broad issues related to 'trust'. We believe that there are four basic things that maintain trust: privacy, security, reliability on the technical side, and then there is the integrity of the relationship that people have. We have put programmes in place to provide training, guidance and testing to ensure that all the people in the company are increasingly more and more focussed on this set of attributes that would build and maintain trust in the technology. That has given us a vehicle to mobilise against the security issues. This initiative was started before the terror attacks, and before the major virus and worm attacks. I take some pride that we anticipated what will become the industry's biggest issue in the long term.

Would you argue against open source software or do you think there is enough space in the world for both open source and proprietary software?

First, let's deal with 'open source' as a term. The idea of sharing source code is a very valuable thing, but there are many differences in the vehicles and methods of sharing source code. The original notion of sharing source code-I grew up in the university environment, and sharing source in an intellectual community like a university is very valuable-Microsoft has always supported that, and continues to support that even today. Our shared source initiative, where we have dozens of licences now and where we share our source with everybody from governments to academic institutions, is another form of sharing sources and there is nothing bad in that in terms of belief.

People like Richard Stallman actually want software to be sold free.

That's a special branch of open source. They say that software should be free as a set of ideas and that you can sell software in conjunction with other things, and not make any money of the software itself. And that is something we don't believe will ultimately be shown to be a sustainable model. As software becomes more complex, the amount of investment you require goes up and up and up. So the real issue is that if you don't allow people to pay for software you condemn software to be a by-product of some other investment. And that moves it away from the scales of economy model, and the ability to invest long-term in the platforms.

"India has to spend as much time developing IP as it is in renting its IQ. And that balance has to be struck in a different way''

But isn't open source safer for companies to deploy?

There were several myths associated with the idea of open source as something that is good, and many people's decisions on this were often driven by misguided, or rather, not fact-based analysis. I think it is demonstrable now that just because you can see the source, doesn't mean that things are necessarily more secure. With the sophistication of the attacks that we have today, and the fact that there have been long latent bugs showing up repeatedly in the most popular open-source software, the question is not whether 'can anybody look at the code?' It is 'does anybody look at it?' and whether the person looking at it has any expertise in finding highly complicated security flaws. It has been shown that the community doesn't fix these things in a reliable way any quicker than proprietary systems get fixed. It has also been shown in a very high percentage of the cases that there is no long-term cost advantage because the acquisition cost of the software is only a small part in building and operating the computer infrastructure for a large corporate these days.

When one thinks of India in IT, particularly for large corporations like yours, the suspicion is that India is nothing more than a 'body shop'. What do you think?

Clearly, we don't think that is the case. We were drawn into India about 12 years ago, because there were a large number of people who wanted to use our products. We've been doing business here as a distributor of our own products for quite some time. But it was a little more than a few years ago we also began to think that there was a good opportunity to build core capability in India. And we opened the India Development Centre in Hyderabad and we have been building that capability up. We have also been expanding our business here in terms of support capability, and ultimately we expect more segments of our business to be here. There are a large number of Microsoft executives from Redmond here right now to spend a week in a sort of immersion within the Indian opportunity set, to learn about the country, the culture and all the business opportunities. This is with an eye towards a more holistic engagement between the company and India.

You will be meeting several government officials on this trip. What sort of issues will you raise with them?

One, of course, is intellectual property and getting it right. I do think there has to be some work done to get the Indian population at large more culturally acclimatised to the fact that intellectual property will be the key to their own success in the future. Ultimately, the model I have for India is that it has to spend as much time developing IP as it is in renting its IQ. And I believe that balance has to be struck in a different way than what it is today to get India where it wants to go in IT.