...who want that can download those things, because they don't affect compatibility. Whereas the file system or the scheduler, the rights-protection pieces, the device driver interfaces — those you're never going to modify more often than every three years or in many of those cases you want to leave those things alone for way longer than that.
Take device driver interfaces. You might let there be additional APIs, but you're going to still need to run most of the drivers that were written 10 years ago. So layering is the key here, and consumers may upgrade some of these things like the browser more often than businesses. That's hard to characterise. The one nice thing we've seen with consumers is they really use Auto Update, and so we're sort of their IT department in terms of updating. It's more complex for businesses, but even there the progress over the last four years of getting SMS (Systems Management Server) to be deployed and used and understood — how they take the updates in and when they pass them along to their systems — we've done super-well on that, but it's not as simple as somebody just choosing to have Auto Update come from us.
Shifting to the business software world and Microsoft Business Solutions, it's been about five years since the acquisition of Great Plains. How has the business software landscape changed since then?
Gates: Five years ago we saw both a great business opportunity and a chance to improve the other pieces of software. So we feel great about the architectural insight and the business insights that led us to get together and really build one of the big applications businesses. We do think over time there are things that — as we gain more and more momentum — the richness of add-ons that you get and the ability to invest in R&D, the ability to leverage these other pieces — we see it as a big growth business for us going ahead. In fact, if you took all our different businesses, we'd say we have more headroom and growth in MBS than almost any of our businesses. Some of our businesses in the consumer area where we're kind of new to them — then you can get radical growth rates. But of the things that are already pretty large, MBS still has so much more that it can do. We're super-happy with the growth we've had the last year — it's about 17 percent.
Originally, the goal was to get to a single code base underneath your business software. Is that still the goal? What parts of the software need to be common and what parts don't?
Gates: At the last Convergence we really clarified the road map of how we would be evolving the code bases to have more commonality over time — not setting the top priority on how much code is actually being shared, but rather on the continuity of [the] user interface, as we're publishing the Web services APIs, knowing what the commitment to compatibility for those things are. So the big expense in this industry is the cost of training developers to do add-ons, the work they do in those add-ons, and then people learning the user interface and the business processes that come out of those. Having a road map about how those things can stay the same is important for people as they invest far more than how many lines of code we have.
In terms of actually merging the code together, it's a reasonably conservative strategy because of this desire to preserve these other pieces and get moving very quickly so that all our customers have the new UI, which includes the role-based capability. The UI keeps... moving forward. Office and SharePoint have moved their UI forward a bit. So [the concern was] that there would be some big discontinuity. I think we've gotten past that, by and large. Certainly for the big customer bases — Axapta, Great Plains, Navision — they understand exactly how we're working with the code base.
Burgum: One of the things that Bill's worked closely with our teams on, too, is really thinking through how when we start addressing the commonality of the core business logic, of how we express that in a model-driven way back to the UI. We see (that) coming in the 2008 time frame, but we think that that's another big transformation. As Bill said, we're going to do that in a way where we preserve the business model for partners, preserve the investment to customers and get there in a very smart way.
Microsoft has always characterised its target market for business software as medium-size companies or departments with companies, not the Fortune 500. Has any of that thinking shifted as there's been consolidation in the industry? Oracle has been grabbing lots and lots of companies. Is it still realistic to have software that really targets the midmarket and doesn't target small businesses or large enterprises?
Gates: [Our] software can scale up to cover a super, super-high percentage of all businesses in the world. When [companies] want to pick a new software application base, we will be in there competing in 95 percent of the cases. Now... there will be a small number of cases where we'll say, no, our solution doesn't have the maturity for that, we won't be pushing for that. But it's very hard to characterise. And once somebody picks one of these applications, they tend to stay with it for a five-or-more-year period. And then we're also competing to say, OK, given that you have that, let's surround that with productivity software and the other things as well. And so...
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