Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Infrastructure Server Marketing
Last week we saw Paul Maritz, the CEO of VMware and a guy who knows Microsoft pretty well, proclaim that the server operating system is obsolete and his company will build a virtual data center OS to manage applications. How should we interpret his comments? Is there substance to his claim?
The death of Windows has been foretold many times. It's in their best interests to position it that way.
Secondly, as I told some internal folks the other day, I know Paul and he's a great guy. I don't envy him where he is right now, because he just entered into a hornet's nest. Not so much because of Microsoft; we treat virtualization as an enabler. It's a feature of the operating system, as it's always been in mainframes and as it is in Linux distributions. What he's just done is enter a space that's crowded by his partners, and I'll give you the one that's canonically challenging for him: Hewlett-Packard.
HP has spent, literally, billions of dollars buying companies that would allow them to be the governor of the data center. They bought Opsware, they bought EDS, they bought Neoware. They bought a whole bunch of interesting assets for themselves. VMware came out and said, "We want to displace them." That's a very tough spot to be in.
As they try to move out of what's quickly becoming a commoditized world, where all these very high margins go away, VMware has stomped into a space where all of their partners are scratching their heads. The buzz on the show floor last week was, "Oh, that's our stuff. That's what we do. Now they want to do this?" It's a fascinating thing, actually. I don't envy Paul.
The news coming out of Wall Street has been pretty grim lately. How does Microsoft view the economic situation? Do you see foresee a point where a worsening economy hurts user adoption of Windows Server 2008?
At the core of what we're trying to do is help customers deliver a whole new set of experiences at the lowest cost possible. The first job is help them strip out cost, because that's what they live with every day. We also have to help them deliver new capabilities, because that's what drives their business. Everything is about helping customers move from a high cost, maintenance-focused IT environment to a much more dynamic, business-responsive IT architecture.
When times get tough, customers are constantly on the path to do more with less. Software really delivers the best bang for the buck. Customers tell us when their IT department is strapped, they start asking whether this next machine, this next application or maintenance check is the right way to spend their IT dollars. Or should they move to the economic platform, the one that's actually driven the innovation over the last 10 or 15 years and get on that wave now?
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