Dana Gardner Quotations

Ten years ago when Microsoft came out with NT the worry was that there would be little choice at this point in time. But technology buyers have a great deal of choice. We still have multiple flavors of Unix. We have Sun with a mixture of open and commercial Unix, and we've got Linux.

Technologies are being developed at a faster and faster pace, and that disrupts companies and markets constantly. Companies will have to reinvent themselves, and they will have to do it in two years, not five. Things are better, but there will not be much of an opportunity for tech companies to sit on their laurels.

Companies should ask themselves, what should we do?

Building this kind of personalized information in order to target customers is the real importance of directories, ... By having robust directories, companies can target specific individuals and offer the services those people want.

People need to be given a compelling reason to change from where they are now with Web browsers. In enterprise environment, for example, distributing browsers is costly and time-consuming, so you need a huge step up in functionality to go through the pain.

You can start to apply process across systems much more easily.

This is going to be largely invisible to the end user.

One of the things that Microsoft plays on is that consumers will benefit from this. If you're the only player in town then how good is that for the consumers?

One of the things that has crept into the Microsoft discussion is usually Total Cost of Ownership. Microsoft likes to look at the long-term costs. They also like to look at the costs inherent in migrating from Microsoft to Linux, which is going to obviously be a complication.

The amount of XML traffic will accelerate rapidly and it's incumbent that vendors like SAP build, buy or partner in order to satisfy the optimization needs for XML performance. SAP recognizes the value of SOA internally and in a sense they're eating their own dog food first before taking it out into the marketplace and that's case with many of the larger software vendors.