Rick Sherlund Microsoft Quotations

There is an increasing risk that Microsoft might atrophy on the PC platform as IBM did on the mainframe platform, while robust growth shifts to hand-held and wireless devices,

I see Microsoft today saying, 'We understand that. Here's our first step in that direction, and how we address it.' That's all I think you can conclude today, is they're taking their first steps. They've gotta do it.

Microsoft cannot easily be broken up. It is a unitary company with one management team, one headquarters, one set of sales and marketing offices, one sales force, one product support organization, one basic research unit, etc.

Microsoft needs to show all the 'eye candy' features that reside in Vista.

While not that material to the company, it is a step in the right direction. The bigger opportunity to Microsoft might be to encourage corporate customers in China to sign up for enterprise agreements to help better manage the implementation of new software such as Vista and Office 2007, although we see no reason to be encouraged at this stage.

We view this favorably for Red Hat, given our view that Red Hat will need to move up the infrastructure stack and add a database, application server, portal, and integration technology to deliver an open-source infrastructure stack to compete with that of BEA , Oracle , IBM and Microsoft .