Bill Gates Defends Google, Then Pans It

Bill Gates dropped by The New York Times on Monday to discuss his full-time job as head of the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy, especially its work in global health and development.

Mr. Gates was on his way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he is expected to announce an expansion of the foundation’s vaccine programs in poor nations.

But Mr. Gates is still the chairman and largest shareholder of Microsoft. And when asked, Mr. Gates had a few observations on the Internet search efforts of Microsoft and Google that were, by turns, acute, sardonic and tart.

Is Google a monopolist? “I wouldn’t call anyone a monopolist,” replied Mr. Gates, who has frequently been the target of that epithet over the years. He went on to say that historically companies that become “hyper-successful” invite government antitrust scrutiny, and he placed Google in that small, elite group of technology companies: AT&T, I.B.M. and Microsoft. Welcome to the club, Google. “If governments don’t care, that’s a bad sign,” Mr. Gates said.

Microsoft, the champion of the PC era, cemented its dominance because of “network effects” and “positive feedback loops,” economic terms that describe the snowballing benefits to front-runners in some markets.

Mr. Gates used those same terms to describe the challenge of trying to eat into Google’s big lead in Web search. The more people that use Google search, the more data the company has, and that data is the raw material for refining its search results further. And the greater its market share in search, the more advertisers want their ads placed on Google to reach the largest audience.

That, in turn, solidifies Google’s position as the dominant ad market, and strengthens its pricing power. “There are several positive feedback loops in this business, and they are particularly powerful,” Mr. Gates said.

Undaunted, Microsoft is investing heavily in search — “the last big investor” other than Google, Mr. Gates said, after Yahoo agreed last July to let Microsoft handle its search in return for payments. Gaining ground against Google, not catching it, is the current goal.

“We have brilliant people who dream of ways to increase our market share by 1 percentage point,” Mr. Gates said. (Google’s share of the American market was 66 percent in December, according to comScore, compared with under 11 percent for Microsoft.)

Mr. Gates declared himself unimpressed and a bit perplexed by Google’s recent threat to drop its search business in China to protest Chinese censorship of search after attacks apparently intended to spy on Gmail accounts of human-rights activists. “They’ve done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it,” Mr. Gates said.

One may or may not agree with the laws in China, he said, but nearly all countries have some controversial laws or policies, including the United States. “What point are they making?” Mr. Gates asked. “Now, if Google ever chooses to pull out of the United States, then I’d give them credit.”

相关中文报道：盖茨：微软搜索目标是站稳脚根（摘自中文业界资讯站）

比尔-盖茨在周一接受了《纽约时报》专访，在被问及Google是否是行业垄断者时，盖茨回答说：“我不会把任何公司叫做垄断者”。他认为，一般来说非常成功的公司才会遭到政府反垄断调查，而Google同AT&T、 I.B.M.和微软一样，属于最顶尖的技术公司，“如果政府忽略了这一点，就非常糟糕”。

微软是PC时代的成功者，很大程度上得益于“网络效应”(network effect)和“正反馈循环”(positive feedback loop)。这两个经济学术语意指某些市场的先驱者能够从雪球效应得益，从而拉大竞争差距。盖茨也用这两个术语来描述在网页搜索领域挑战Google的领先地位。使用Google的人越多，Google所掌握的数据就越多，而这些数据就是进一步改进搜索结果的基础。同时Google在搜索领域所占的市场份额越大，就有更多的广告主愿意在Google上打广告，以便有更大的受众基础。这反过来又巩固了Google在广告市场上的统治地位，增加了Google 的定价能力。盖茨认为：“这个行业中有许多正反馈循环，而且都很强劲。”

盖茨称，在去年七月雅虎同微软达成搜索交易后，微软在搜索引擎上投入了巨资。目前，微软的目标是站稳脚跟，而不奢望超越Google。“我们的人都很精明能干，大家都在研究如何将我们的市场份额提高哪怕一个百分点。”市场调查公司comScore的数据显示，去年12月，Google在美国搜索市场所占的百分比为66%，微软为11%。