In an interview with a college newspaper, he said, "The key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense of consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.

He added, "It's not the physical format that we have the issue with, it's that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that'd be fine.

"Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts."

Here are some highlights from a good interview with The Daily Princetonian…

On his 1995 predictions in 'The Road Ahead'

"A lot of the predictions [I made] were dead on in terms of talking about digital rights management, the arrival of broadband and things like that. Obviously if I wrote it again today, I could talk more about progress we've made in machine learning, speech recognition, vision, tablet computing and security.

Also, things like social networking have grown a lot since ["The Road Ahead"] was written. I talk a little bit about it, but it's a clear phenomenon today, more than it was back then.

On Microsoft's Mission

"Part of the key values at Microsoft are about empowerment — getting computing out to everyone. Our employees love what we're doing and we're pretty neat. There's no one else who's got agreements with [developing] countries, doing donations like we are.

"We believe that every kid should have access to a computer. First we go into the countries and get [computers and software] into the libraries — like we did in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile. We're doing that abroad in an increasing number of countries. Then we make sure it's in the schools. Then we make sure, eventually, it's cheap enough so everybody has it at home.

"Information technology is a leveler. It takes any political repression that people try and makes that virtually impossible. It lets curious kids have way more material that even I had as a very privileged student some time ago."

On Apple's Approach vs Microsoft's

"here's room for many cool companies. The software Microsoft is doing is cool. What Apple's doing is cool. The competition amongst all these companies leads to great products.

"We're a software company and if you want to do breakthroughs in artificial intelligence or new databases or speech recognition or tablet computing, there's a depth of software understanding and research at Microsoft you don't find anywhere else. We do research most other companies in the field don't. So, it's nothing to do with any particular company.

"I, throughout the history of Microsoft, have gone out and talked about the software frontiers. So, you know, I'm not doing anything new or different than what I've done for 30 years."