...to quickly look at a document, make some lightweight changes, and pass that document along without interrupting the fidelity of the document, being a part of the collaborative experience with others at Microsoft. There's a specific scenario where the web application played an important role.
Similarly, if you look in the mobile environment, there are scenarios related to, for example, taking a picture as part of some work that you're doing. You're unlikely to take a picture with a web browser, or a notebook computer.
The second part of the answer, though, is that while there are specific scenarios that are best advantaged within each of the different ways of delivering our technology, the best experience comes from the combination of all of those things.
So we think less about the web applications as standalone word processor things, and far more about it as a complement to the trio of the phone, the PC and the browser environment. We think about the best experience being the sum of those things working well together.
Your preference, and certainly the way you guys are investing in the web applications, is as an adjunct to the desktop, not a replacement. That said, how common do you think it will be that businesses license just the web applications for at least a portion of their employees?
Well, we hope that it's very common to the extent that there are, let's say, workers in a business [where] today a company has said, look, there's one PC for 100 employees on a shop floor, or something like that. To the extent that they now license those workers for a lightweight browser experience in some way, shape, or form, and they're now part of the Office family, that's a positive thing for us. It brings them into the whole environment of productivity that we're trying to deliver.
So, those scenarios we think will be relatively common. It could be factory floor workers, it could be retail employees, and outlets around the world, and there are all sorts of scenarios that we think have been under-served from participating in the productivity experiences that some of these applications will serve to support.
I guess the other piece of that question is whether you expect there will be a portion of customers that attempt to move some part of their workforce that has access to desktop Office to just browser-based versions?
I mean, by definition there will be some. Do I think it's a huge proportion? No, I don't. And the reason for that is because, particularly in that we're talking about the commercial setting, where we believe that the productivity experiences that we deliver in the rich client applications, with the web applications as a complement to that, is still going to be a compelling experience that people are going to be saying, hey, I want people participating, for example, in collaborative editing of documents, in collaborative sharing of PowerPoint presentations, as examples.
For example, our multi-user authoring feature. There are examples like that which we believe represent improvements in productivity for these customers that are delivered through the rich client application. So while you'll always be able to point to some examples of someone somewhere making that decision, we don't believe that's going to be the dominating force.
How often do customers bring up Google apps in meetings, and is it usually when you're talking about the product, or when you're talking about price?
Customers are aware of Google in different ways. Sometimes just from a search perspective, sometimes they're aware of things like Google Docs and so forth. And our experience is it may lead to a discussion around what is software plus services, what is Microsoft's view on it. And the tendency is not, obviously in our conversation, to dwell on their price versus our price, or things like that, because it's two very, very different things.
When you put side by side, for example, the full range of on-premise and in the cloud services like Exchange, SharePoint, (Office Communications Server), and so forth, the full range of rich client applications and soon web applications and so forth, combined with many years of enterprise support, of an understanding of how we're going to take care of mission-critical capabilities, it's a whole different conversation.
And so that's why in the context of a large-scale customer who is engaging these things I think there's tyre kicking, or they may look at these things, but there's a clear understanding that... enterprises have some very specific and far-reaching requirements that Microsoft over many years has figured out how to deliver.
Well, they're out of beta now, is that a significant move?
I don't know. I've heard that the word was dropped, I didn't notice that anything else had changed. So I don't know if the software suddenly got better, or they just changed the name. I couldn't interpret what it meant.
As someone who has been in this industry a long time, what do you make of Google's announcement that they're moving into the operating system realm with Chrome OS?
Well, let me just challenge the premise of your question. They've announced a couple of times now that they're moving into the operating system business, because there's the whole Android thing, and now there's Chrome.
We haven't seen it. We don't know anything other than what has been written in a blog. So it's very hard for us to know, without seeing what they're doing, to comment on it.
You have architected part of Office 2010 to run in the browser-based Office Web apps. If I'm not mistaken Chrome isn't one of the supported browsers, but it might, in fact, work in Chrome. Do you guys see Chrome as an important browser to develop for?
It depends on how you define important. From a market share perspective Chrome is very low. So I think we're driven by customers on these things. There are other browsers that have greater market share, and that's where we've concentrated our first efforts.
