And speaking at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Bill Gates said computer giant IBM posed a much greater threat to Microsoft.

"IBM has always been our biggest competitor. The press just don't like to write about IBM," Bill Gates told the Reuters news agency.

Whatever Bill Gates says, however, Google is known to have been branching out from its core web search services and many of its recent e-mail and e-commerce offerings are believed to pose a challenge to Microsoft.

 But Bill Gates showed little concern and he predicted the media fascination with Google would change with time.