Gates on user-created video, YouTube

Cory Bergman January 8th, 2007

KING 5 anchor Dennis Bounds, who was at CES today, was nice enough to let me squeeze in a question in his Bill Gates interview. The question: how important is user-created video to Microsoft’s success and do you consider YouTube to be a competitor?

Gates: “They’re a significant competitor in terms of all the Internet things they’re doing. That’s more on the consumer end. In business, in video for trainings and product things, we’ve always been the leader in giving people the tools to do that. But down on this consumer end, there’s a lot of hot activity, YouTube was part of that. We’re doing our best in providing options as well.”

Kind of a non-answer, but I was curious how he’d react. As you may know, Microsoft recently launched Soapbox, its first foray into user video.