[The Sun announcement] is one of the most important things we're going to see this year, ... Is it something IBM can't offer? Not really. But it will be perceived as being different enough that customers will look at it and consider it. |
A lot of companies need a reason to stay with NetWare. For the NetWare installed base, NetWare 5.1 is going to be a very attractive product. |
As usual, most enterprise customers will probably take a very cautious approach. Most won't rush in unless they absolutely have to for performance and scalability reasons, especially if it's a deep software stack on top of the operating system. They'll be too concerned about software incompatibilities. |
Business users typically have concerns about a new Microsoft product, and that concern was proven to be fairly meaningful when that UPnP bug was revealed. They want to wait for those things to happen and get fixed. |
But [with Vista], I think Microsoft has done a lot to improve the reliability of the OS. |
For Microsoft to get customers to move onto the most current product, they have to make migration easier and have a lot less touch required on the part of IT managers. |
How that actually transpires to units sold to consumers we don't have any visibility into, |
It's a small percentage but nevertheless, for 15 percent of its customers to be unhappy with a policy Microsoft is setting is not a good sign. |
Microsoft is now taking a viable approach, ... It's a more practical way to go about it. |
Most organizations have Unix servers installed, and they're prepared to manage Unix systems. The question is whether they're prepared to manage large blocks of Unix clients. |
Open is one of those convenient marketing terms. People bend it to meet their needs. |
Plans to use Active Directory are extremely high. The problem is that actually doing that is still sometimes difficult and time consuming. |
That's a lot of motivation. |
There is a huge installed base of customers (over 400 million) using Windows XP, and Microsoft would gain nothing by causing pain or concern among those customers to somehow manipulate their adoption plans for Windows Vista. |
There is a huge installed base of customers [over 400 million] using Windows XP, and Microsoft would gain nothing by causing pain or concern among those customers to somehow manipulate their adoption plans for Windows Vista. |