The new enterprise has to do five things: respond and deliver to support demand; grow or shrink, based upon changes in demand; operate any time, anywhere, under any conditions; minimise asset and labour content per unit of production; and provide real-time transparency of operations, both internal and external. Those will be necessary to understand, as you build a software company. You can't go to the market now and say, "I've got a software package that will take a year to install." You need something that will install very quickly and update very easily.
Oracle's argument for taking over PeopleSoft and refuting the US Department of Justice lawsuit now seems to rest on identifying Microsoft as a competitor in the enterprise resource planning space. Do you agree with that?
Microsoft's customer base is very small businesses. The Justice Department has to go out and seek customers' opinions. Let the customers vote. I think that they will feel as if their options have been severely reduced if Oracle takes over PeopleSoft. But if the customers say, "it doesn't bother me," then the Justice Department has got to back off.
I would bet on the Oracle-PeopleSoft deal being dead. But you never know. We haven't yet heard from the European Commission, which tends to be tougher than the Justice Department.
Will Oracle go after BEA Systems? That's often been mentioned as a possible target.
Siebel Systems would obviously be a candidate, too, along with i2. Organically, Oracle has lost share in applications. It is losing ground. PeopleSoft is now No. 2. I agree that it makes sense from Oracle's perspective to buy PeopleSoft. But what it's doing is tarnishing its brand. Customers are angry at Oracle, and PeopleSoft is finding it easier to win deals. I don't think that Larry Ellison has ever gotten the application strategy right.
Will Linux continue to make inroads against proprietary software?
Open source will have a huge impact on the commercial-software industry. Customers desire to rationalise hardware -- use Intel-based Linux servers and save money. That trend won't stop with Linux. It will go up the stack to the Web server, like with Apache. BEA will get competition from Apache. The database will get competition from MySQL. There's all sorts of consolidation in the open-source stack for content management software competing against the commercial world.
Will Linux ever be a major factor at the desktop level?
Europe will be ahead of us there because of government pushes. We have one company, still in stealth mode, doing everything in open source. It's running open-source desktops.
What does Microsoft do to combat Linux, in your opinion?
Microsoft tries to scare the world by saying things like, "this open-source stuff gets you into licensing problems," or "it's a bunch of hackers," or "you can't build an enterprise, when you don't have anybody to go to for problem resolution."
Microsoft has to depend on the enterprise saying, "moving to Linux desktops isn't a high priority." For at least a period of time, the enterprise says, "we'll stick with what we have. But we might not go to Longhorn." If there's a legitimate alternative in open source, that might be the time to switch.
