Ed Hansberry
12-14-2005, 04:00 PM
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/business/10extended.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/business/10extended.html</a><br /><br />Q. Microsoft has been a competitor in the past. How does it feel to partner with them now? <br /><br />A. When we first kind of signed the deal or whatever it blew our minds a little bit as you say. But I think it was a real natural kind of outcome of how the market’s evolved, frankly. Their platform has, I think, moved more in the direction of ease of use and some of the functionality about it that we care about it, and it got to a point of critical mass from our perspective relative to its capabilities and its execution from a user perspective. We felt that we could really make a great product on top of it. Ten years ago, I didn’t feel that way, so there’s been a lot of evolution in that platform to the point where it is today. <br /><br />And so I think that was a real important point. The second important point was that a key part of this relationship and a key part of this agreement was this issue of us being able to differentiate on top of it. And I think that’s a point that Microsoft came to. They said, “geez, these guys are really capable of making a compelling user experience and we’d like to leverage that and it would be better to partner with them than not, in the sense of creating great products that sell in the millions. And so let’s give them that ability.” So they created some platform elements that allowed us to do that differentiation. <br /><br />That was really critical. From our perspective, we didn’t want to be just another kind of clone product on that platform. We really wanted to create something that we could call our own.<br /><br />The interview also gets into open source efforts, the RIM lawsuit, competition with the iPod and more.