Bill Gates had been interviewed many times over the last dozen-or-so years by the BBC regarding many aspects of his life and his business. This times things were a bit different however. For this time instead of asking them questions from BBC writers, they asked Gates questions from the gamers themselves in this video interview. Brilliant.

Here’s a breakdown of the interview - at least the part considering the 360 and/or Windows Vista. Notice how well versed Gates is on the companys standing on the different topics and how professionally he handles the questions. Wether or not people believe the actual words coming out of his mouth is another thing altogether - especially those who have a XBOX 360 or windows vista.

We’ve had a lot of questions from people who weren’t really happy with the kind of service they’ve been getting from Xbox in the last few years… What are you going to do to ensure that new consoles are more reliable than previous versions

Well we certainly had to apologize to our uses about a number of box that had to be replaced. We did that for free for all of those people, we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the way we handled it. We’ve got incredible reliability on the new work we’ve done. Our commitment is that it will be the most reliable video game box out there. People really love the Xbox because of the content, but we’ve got to make sure that the hardware never stands in the way of that.

Later in the interview he was asked about Vista and the possibility of releasing a version that would be no-frills, but still support game playing.

Any chance of a no-frills operating system? Just a system that plays PC games and a few basics. I hate the compatibility issues Vista has. And he ends “Help”

Ha ha. Well Vista has been a very successful product. Obviously because it is so broadly used and connects up to everything we get a lot of feedback. Things to improve, new things to work on. We’re hard at work on things ,we do downloads of improvements all of the time and of course there will be a major new version coming along. So Vista is very successful, ties into the new hardware advances, but we love getting the feedback. People are very passionate about their PC. They use it more than anything else.

Are you proud of Vista, because a lot of people are questioning whether you should be.

No, I’m very proud of Vista. Like all of the products we ship as soon as we get it out we hear how we could do this differently and that differently but it has been a very important product for the industry a lot of great things were done in Vista. Now we are hard at work on what comes next.

Having blown through several 360s myself (and there’s poor, poor Drunk Pandas), the thought of the 360 becoming the most reliable console is laughable. Is this after the next generation of XBOXs release? Because they’re off to a shitty start so far. Anyways.

Just a side note. If your interested, they have a blog on the interviewer for you to check out.

Durka.