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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates admits that his company has been behind the 8-ball in plenty of markets – but they've always come up trumps in the end. The Chief Software Architect made his views known on Apple and other competitors in an interview with the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Look at companies like Novell, Lotus, Netscape and WordPerfect. Microsoft has beaten both, despite coming from a long way behind. Gates cites Sony as being ahead of XBox with Playstation, while Google is "way" ahead on internet search. And Apple, he says, "in music has done a fantastic job."

In the interview, Gates talks on a variety of topics – the Chinese market; Windows Vista (aka Longhorn) and trade liberalization. Office 12 is also on the agenda.

Gates also speaks about the Microsoft anti-trust settlement; it doesn't prevent MS from including new features in Vista. Security, says Gates, is the # 1 priority with Vista, while the company is also looking at phishing and ways to combat it.

Gates was showing off Office 12 for the first time today.

Analysis: One of MS's biggest failures – which Gates doesn't care to talk about – is Acrobat and PDF. In 1996, Gates sent around a memo asking, "What's our Acrobat competitor?" There wasn't an answer then and there isn't one now. And it's not a stretch to say that MS has not been successful in competing outside of its core markets: namely, Windows and Office. Virtually none of its divisions, outside the core software ones, make money. XBox hasn't driven growth and profits. Is MSN making real money out of advertising? Doubt it.

Gates' biggest challenge is to derive substantial revenues from the burgeoning Chinese market. And that won't be easy when the Chinese government is partnering with IBM and others to produce a variant of the Linux OS, because it doesn't want to be locked into a proprietary OS – which it would have to import. And we're sure that Chinese IT specialists have looked closely at perhaps the greatest failure of Japanese business: its inability to ever produce an OS that would compete commercially with either the Mac or Windows OS.

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