The key is keeping as aggressive, keeping as focused on doing the right things, recognising that there are new things that we need to do. Frankly, we are in a world where responsiveness to certain kinds of issues is far more at a premium today than it would have been 10 years ago.
How so?
Ten years ago, there was much more premium on just generating new function, not on responding to issues in existing functions. I mean, nobody was talking about security problems in Netscape and IE in the middle of the browser wars. People would just say, "give me, give me, I need new features, new features." Well, we are in a different world.
We have other new expectations and responsibilities under the consent decree and all that came with it, so the key is to continue to be able to be bold and interesting and put new scenarios in front of people. The key is keeping as aggressive, keeping as focused on doing the right things, recognising there are new things that we need to do. We used to try to execute on one, maybe one-and-a-half fronts: the desktop and then maybe a little bit of a back end on the server. Now, we are trying to execute on six or seven fronts.
There was an interesting piece in the New York Times following the EU decision, in which the writer posited that Microsoft has basically become like an essential utility. The basic point was that with all these legal battles that you are constantly fighting, is it more of an issue of you saying, "OK, we are an essential utility." Is it a far-fetched idea that Microsoft should be regulated like a utility?
Well, I think it is a bit of an unusual principal, because the sovereign authority, the country in which we reside, has spoken. I mean, it is finished. The regime is clear. We have got pronouncements from the courts. We have got a consent decree. We have a framework in which we have to live. And the EU is another sovereign authority.
We would like sovereign authorities to kind of agree on what those rules are. We are hopeful for that. We tried to help provoke compromises that would allow the framework to live together, and we did not get there. We hope that through the appellate process in Europe, we can come to a regime that is common, at least on both sides of the Atlantic. I wish the EU had had more deference for the US regime, as set forth not only in the consent decree, but also in the pronouncements of the court.
