Given the state of IT spending and the current economic climate, some analysts say that Longhorn is a bold bet for Microsoft. Do you agree? What will drive businesses to adopt it?
Understand that for Microsoft it is not that IT spending will have to go up to take advantage of the new innovation. What Microsoft can do, because of our high-volume, low-price model, is put innovations in the software that not only simplify software development but reduce management costs, security add-on costs, directory management costs that an IT department has.
So our paradigm is very much that through software innovation, we simplify things that they are doing today; we surprise them by being able to simplify things, and that is where you get the opportunity for them to move forward with new hardware and new applications, using Web services, wireless, Tablet, things of that nature.
Longhorn is not built with the expectation of IT budgets going back where they were in the 1990s. The price of Longhorn is the same as the price of Windows today. The $6.8bn in R&D (research and development) we spend every year -- we provide that, and you just get it. That's what we have always done with Windows. So we are able to bring IT advances by having people save, and they will do a new generation of applications.
Some chief information officers I have spoken to in recent weeks say they want simpler desktop systems -- not more complex systems. How do you approach those customers when discussing Longhorn? What's in it for them?
Longhorn, in terms of unifying the way you do things, is about letting people get at more of the power and having more simplicity. If you are referring to network computers, those were tried and were the worst of all worlds, because they had a browser in them, and the browser didn't have enough memory, and it would get out of date, and you have to put in these ROMs and things.
Those things were thrown out because they weren't responsive or rich, nor did they stay up-to-date. If you want a thin client, we have that with Windows terminal server, and Longhorn will have terminal server capabilities so that you can project out the Longhorn richness onto thin clients.
