How do you feel about the technology race between Java vendors and Microsoft's .Net? Is it becoming clear where people will use one platform over the other?
Sitting where I am, I feel really, really good about the momentum and adoption behind .Net. More than 60 percent of the Fortune 100 companies have .Net applications developed and deployed running in production environment.
And on the development tools side?
Over the last 10 years or so, we have always had a leadership position on what I call the design tools or the IDE (integrated development environment). In some sense, I feel good that Sun Microsystems has realised the importance of developer tools and is investing in that. That is good for Sun.
Tools have traditionally focused on developer productivity. But I've spoken to some customers who think that the management of finished systems is at least as important. Is that something you're trying to address?
The lines between a tool to help you develop rich, complicated applications and a set of tools to help you manage that are getting blurred. If you look at it organisationally, there is a division at Microsoft that worries about a set of tools to build to help customers manage their environments, manage their applications that that are deployed. And then we have a division that is focused on tools that help people build applications.
What is the relationship between the developer division and the Windows division? How do the groups fit together?
If you look at Longhorn and think about WinFX (programming interfaces for Longhorn) being the new managed programming experience and environment that we are providing in the Longhorn time frame, that is the collection of technologies that come from different parts of the company organisationally. But all of these groups are really contributing to one product: Longhorn. There is a great relationship that cuts across the organisation boundaries, because we are focusing on one product and one set of programming experiences that we want to deliver to our developers and customers.
With so much new technology, I would think that taking existing applications to Longhorn and learning its innards would be a big jump.
Longhorn is in some sense a whole new programming environment, a managed environment. It's much richer in terms of the kinds of experiences that you can create.
We do think that application developers are going to take advantage of this functionality. Do I expect all developers to rewrite their applications completely Day 1? Absolutely not. There are going to be some developers who want to do that. There are going to be some who just want to get used to the platform and then start doing things over time. There will be other developers who will want to do a few things they wanted and then build on top of that.
