2006 is going to be a pivotal year for both companies. |
After six years of development it ought to be ready by now. |
AOL's value is driven to the extreme merely because you had two industry giants fighting for it. |
At this point, it is impacting about 10 percent of the market. One of the questions industry has to answer is exactly how will corporations integrate the data they obtain through RSS feeds into their analysis processes. |
China is the hotspot right now, obviously for its enormous market opportunity. If you're a technology company and you're not thinking about China, then you're already behind. |
Corporate customers want and are demanding that their vendors abandon divisive rhetoric and useless posturing and get on with the business of working together constructively, |
Does Sun still want customers to choose Solaris over OpenSolaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Absolutely. But like Steve Ballmer before him, McNealy realizes that he'll 'catch more flies with honey, than he will with vinegar', |
Emerging countries don't have the same requirement for advanced functionality and therefore go for the baseline stuff with a low entry point. That's a concern for Microsoft, and is why it is launching 'Windows light' and 'Office light' versions for countries such as Thailand. |
Even if you've got a homogenous Linux or Unix server environment, at some point you are going to have a business partner, a customer or a supplier that is using Windows and is going to touch your network. And if you haven't secured those environments, then that could be a backdoor for a worm or a virus to infect your Windows network. |
For the past few years, the word proprietary has meant 'bad' software, ... But I think people are going to start thinking twice before building their own systems with open-source software in the next year or two. |
I really like small companies that aren't public but they'd be ones I'd be watching when they do an IPO. |
I see more and more small businesses running servers, even one-person offices. They allow you to get more bang for your technology buck. |
I think Microsoft is doing what any company in its position or in a similar position would do; when seeing competition, you are going to react to it. But I don't think Microsoft is running scared. They are running smart, and they are right to be concerned. |
I think that the training benefits are the most valuable to customers because that's something that has been slashed out of budgets. Any time these folks can get out and mingle and talk to professionals and have it bundled in as a free service, that really does add to the value of a Microsoft license. |
I'm hoping we see the same type of rebound this year, but we had a couple of random acts that nobody could have forecasted. |