THERE’s a spoof video on You Tube that shows what would happen if Microsoft redesigned Apple’s iPod. It emerges as the iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition With Subscription. Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, does love its jargon and detail.

“Yes, it’s a very good video,” sighs Gordon Frazer, new boss of Microsoft UK, when I bring it up. “But it has been there for a year.”

And a year in tech-land, as we know, is a decade in real terms. I am so behind. Frazer, 41, but seeming younger with his gelled hair and fleshy good looks, just nods. “And I think you can say we have learnt our lessons — look at the packaging for the Zune.”

Ah, the Zune, Microsoft’s riposte to the iPod, a music player it launched in America last year and has yet to bring to Europe. Has he got one? “Yeah, I was given one by my boss at Christmas.” The Zune’s great selling point — see, I am up to date — is that it is wifi-enabled so users can swap songs wirelessly. If they can find other users. Has he found anyone?

“No, that’s the challenge,” he laughs. Frazer, chunkily built and 6ft tall, has such a light touch that you can see why he is one of Microsoft’s rising stars. He can talk away about servers, enterprise software, data-bases, application technology and business solutions — he started as a systems analyst — yet he never uses it as a conversational crutch. Irish-born, but brought up in South Africa since the age of 10, he switches unnervingly between Boer-style steeliness and light-hearted blarney. In a tough company that is trying hard to be nice, that’s a useful combination.

“Actually I was born in Cork, close to the Blarney stone,” he says, tickled by my interest in his roots. Plucked from heading Microsoft’s South African operation, he arrived in Britain only four months ago. He is, he adds, still finding his way round.

But sitting in a ground-floor meeting room at Microsoft’s central London base, he looks pretty much at home, epitomising the stretched personality that the software giant now shows. Hugely profitable as a supplier of software to companies and consumers, making $12 billion (£6.1 billion) on $44 billion revenue last year, Microsoft is one of the big wheels of modern capitalism.

But it is also fighting off regulators — antitrust campaigners who want it to open up to more competition — and rivals slicing up the business on two fronts. Firms such as Google (owner of You Tube) bestride the internet, while Apple and others push into consumer electronics, as all sorts of markets converge. Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console and the Zune may be indicators of just where it wants to fight the next battles. Or, worryingly, they may not.

And that is a stretch. Even over here, you can see it in Microsoft’s offices. There is a modern one outside Reading full of suits, then a funky one in Soho for its gamers and internet geeks, and a boffiny research arm in Cambridge, and more elsewhere for its 2,400 employees. Today we are in Soho in funky mode although, confusingly, Frazer is in his Reading suit and tie. No wonder Microsoft can seem a bit bipolar. It so desperately doesn’t want to become IBM.

Anyway, Frazer has more to worry about than image. This week his chairman, Bill Gates, flies in from Davos to plug the consumer launch of Windows Vista, the company’s new all-singing, all-dancing operating system that will be bundled into PCs from Tuesday. Frazer has been using Vista for months — it was launched to corporate customers in October — and promises that Windows users will love it, finding lots they recognise plus neat new stuff.

“We have a search box inside the window and a sidebar with applications running, like weather news, traffic, football. One of the companies we have done a deal with is Arsenal. Oh, you are not an Arsenal fan . . .”

No. Why has it taken five years — an eon in tech terms — to launch a new version of Windows? “Well, the short version of a long story is that arguably we were overambitious, we learnt some lessons along the way, now we understand a lot of the challenges — security, ease of use — and it won’t take us five years again.”

But won’t packages like Windows and Office be obsolete once users turn to programs on the internet? No, he says coolly. “In two years maybe we’ll do something different — but I don’t think this will be the last packaged application we will launch.”

The software is predicted to be a huge earner for Microsoft, boosting Windows revenue from $12 billion last year to $16 billion in 2007. How much of that will come from Britain — the company’s second-biggest overseas territory after Japan — is unclear, as Microsoft won’t break out the numbers.

But if you speculated that the British arm contributes about 7% of total revenues — matching the UK’s share of global IT spending — that would give it a £1.5 billion turnover last year. Word of mouth suggests it has not performed well recently. Suffice to say that heading up Microsoft UK, with its close relations to government and multinationals, is a key position, three rungs from the top.

“I report to the president of Microsoft International, who reports to the chief operating officer, who reports to the global chief executive,” smiles Frazer, when I ask. For a boss in a company that some see as tightly controlling, he can be candid when he wants. Later he tells me he has recently cut his weight from 120 kilos to 90 kilos with strenuous exercising and avoidance of Guinness. You suspect he will want the same sort of focus from his staff.

That determination runs in his genes. Frazer’s father worked in the Irish meat trade, and moved from Ireland to Britain, then South Africa in the 1970s, chasing jobs and dragging his family with him. Frazer was the eldest of three sons, old enough to remember the Soweto riots in 1976, a year after his family arrived. He attended local schools in Johannesburg and then studied at Rhodes, a mixed-race university in eastern Cape, before starting as a systems analyst at the Anglo American mining company. Later he worked at a software specialist. “I guess in those days I was a geek,” he says ruefully. “I have lost my geek credentials over time.”

He joined Microsoft’s South African subsidiary in 1995 when it had only 30 staff. The division was “told to hit numbers” and left to get on with it. By 2002 he was managing director, with an employee count heading towards 300, and business kept booming.

Customers say Frazer is a canny boss, and very client-focused. “He has been very successful in South Africa,” says Brian Nicholas, chief information officer at the brewer SAB Miller. “He’s shrewd, and he makes sure that expensive packages like Office work for businesses. But the UK is a big step up.”

Was he sent here with a mission? “No,” says Frazer. “My predecessor went off to do something different and I got a phone call asking if I would be interested.” So far, he says, he has just had a look at performance — “what we’re doing well, and what not so well” — and changed some of the top team members round.

Okay, what about the big questions? Is Microsoft becoming a consumer-electronics company? “No, we’re still a software company at heart. Xbox and Zune are founded round the software inside, and hardware is not a profit-generating business for us; they are a means to a software business.”

As for when Zune will launch here, he gestures upwards with his hands. Does he get to choose? “Bit of both. We have to understand what works in America and what will apply here. It’s selling well in America.” But, he implies, the Zune we get here may be a remodelled version.

Aha. But he can offer no more on that. We chat about convergence and search engines and business customers versus consumers. “We must make sure everyone has a great consumer experience,” he says, with fluid charm.

Well, yes but . . . time is up. Frazer says goodbye and his press officer signs me out at reception. “That’s a really interesting approach to an interview,” says the PR man, totally sincerely. What do you mean? I think he wanted more jargon and detail.

WORKING DAY

THE managing director of Microsoft UK wakes at 7am at his home in Windlesham, near the M3 in Surrey. “The relocation guy recommended it,” says Gordon Frazer. “Close to schools and halfway to Reading.”

He drives himself to Microsoft’s Reading office by 8.15am. “My day is full of meetings: projects, business reviews, direct reports from 14 different executives. Do I like to be reported to a lot? I believe in empowering people but I don’t like surprises.”

He finishes after 7pm, but is still getting used to our ways. “One inch of snow and the trains stop working — even the underground ones?”

VITAL STATISTICS

Born:November 16, 1965

Marital status:married, with two children

School:Northcliffe High School, Johannesburg

University:Rhodes, Grahamstown

First job:systems analyst at Anglo American

Salary package:not disclosed

Car:silver Mercedes CLS Homes:Windlesham in Surrey and Johannesburg

Favourite book:Long Walk To Freedom, by Nelson Mandela

Favourite music:U2

Favourite film:The Shawshank Redemption

Favourite gadget:MSN Instant Messenger

Last holiday:Austria

DOWNTIME

GORDON FRAZER has changed all his hobbies since moving to Britain from South Africa. “They used to be outdoors activities: water skiing, hiking, big game viewing. Tricky to do that in Surrey. So I’ve bought myself a rowing machine and I’m going on water when it warms up.”

He spends his money on holidays with the family — “we’ve just been skiing; the kids had never seen snow before” — and photography. “I’m a bit of a gadget guy. I’ve got a couple of cameras and I used to go out in the bush taking pictures. My favourite subject is leopards. Not many of them in Windlesham.”