MICROSOFT Corp Chairman Bill Gates said the company expects to meet a target of getting its next version of Windows software, known as Vista, on store shelves by January.

"The chance that we will hit January for Vista looks to be 80 percent at this point," Gates told Microsoft clients in Cape Town, South Africa yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. "Even though the amount of investment we've put in over the various years is probably 8, 9 billion dollars," the release will be delayed if it isn't functioning optimally, he said.

Microsoft on June 29 said it had delayed release of its new Office 2007 word processing, e-mail and spreadsheet program from October until January, meaning it will coincide with the Vista release.

"The key thing about any product is not the date we release it, but rather how good is it," Gates said. "We have to get this thing absolutely right."

Microsoft software controls almost 95 percent of the world's personal computers. Gates, who plans to step down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft in two years to focus on philanthropy, is in South Africa to visit some of the projects his foundation helps fund.

Microsoft will spend more than US$7 billion this year on research and development, up from more than US$6 billion last year, Gates said.

This "makes us the biggest spender on R&D in the world," he said. "We are taking on very tough projects, like computer vision, computer speech recognition, better ink recognition. The latest version of Vista actually has very good speech recognition and speech synthesis."

Gates said he expects China to overtake the United States as the biggest personal computer market within about three years and to become the world's biggest broadband market within about two years. "The numbers are phenomenal," Gates said.

Source: Shanghai Daily