Laura DiDio Quotations

The percentage of customers who say they are actively looking to replace Microsoft has gone up. When it comes down to it, some people aren't going to be able to do it (migrate off of Windows and Office). But where Microsoft can be replaced, it's become a real fashionable thing to do.

With the new products, Sun is targeting about 20 percent of the market that has high-end servers. But they have a core constituency firmly in their camp.

Mainstream Linux deployments are on a steep upward trajectory. Although they will not replace Windows, co-existence will be the order of the day.

Security is an ongoing battle. Microsoft can never declare victory. But clearly, Microsoft has made great strides hardening the OS.

So far, the results have been less than stellar.

Now we'll all have to go cold turkey, given that the UI goes to the heart of all the applications we use, ... And it's going to take people some time to get used to all the changes.

China is the hotspot right now, obviously for its enormous market opportunity. If you're a technology company and you're not thinking about China, then you're already behind.

It brings us to the basic question of usability vs. security,

I think that the training benefits are the most valuable to customers because that's something that has been slashed out of budgets. Any time these folks can get out and mingle and talk to professionals and have it bundled in as a free service, that really does add to the value of a Microsoft license.

I see more and more small businesses running servers, even one-person offices. They allow you to get more bang for your technology buck.

Over the years, Microsoft has guarded its source code very carefully. It's been very measured in how it's approached complying with that particular part of the sanctions.

Like it or not, some people will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into this. In theory we would all get hands-on training sessions, but what's more likely to happen is you'll be lucky if you even get a half-day session.

I think Microsoft is doing what any company in its position or in a similar position would do; when seeing competition, you are going to react to it. But I don't think Microsoft is running scared. They are running smart, and they are right to be concerned.

I'm hoping we see the same type of rebound this year, but we had a couple of random acts that nobody could have forecasted.

Microsoft has shown it will dip into its huge cash reserves to settle the private cases that it can. Regulators have asked for Microsoft to let down its guard on what it considers its most valuable asset -- intellectual property.

Microsoft has been in the forefront of placing bounties on hackers and in filing lawsuits against software pirates.

Microsoft has been doing everything it can to ensure that customers are comfortable with its product. People need a reason to move to a new product. They don't need a reason to stay with an old one.

Microsoft can afford to make payments to end the private cases. But it has a long history of guarding its source code vigorously, and the change of philosophy required to throw it open -- and to competitors, at that -- is significant.

Microsoft and the EC came out swinging and then retired to their respective corners.

Microsoft and Apple have always had a love/hate relationship.

Microsoft's compelling financing option is especially relevant to small businesses with smaller purchasing budgets and very limited IT personnel. Businesses today should take advantage of the significant benefits available with the extended financing option. Partners that are not currently engaged with Microsoft Financing should seriously investigate this program for their customers.

You know all those extra lines of code that we sometimes refer to as bloatware. It's actually very important and efficient stuff. There is some very substantial functionality built into the operating system.

This will set up two environments, which will cost more to manage and integrate.

Even if you've got a homogenous Linux or Unix server environment, at some point you are going to have a business partner, a customer or a supplier that is using Windows and is going to touch your network. And if you haven't secured those environments, then that could be a backdoor for a worm or a virus to infect your Windows network.

At this point, it is impacting about 10 percent of the market. One of the questions industry has to answer is exactly how will corporations integrate the data they obtain through RSS feeds into their analysis processes.

Corporate customers want and are demanding that their vendors abandon divisive rhetoric and useless posturing and get on with the business of working together constructively,

Emerging countries don't have the same requirement for advanced functionality and therefore go for the baseline stuff with a low entry point. That's a concern for Microsoft, and is why it is launching 'Windows light' and 'Office light' versions for countries such as Thailand.

Office 12 will not be so totally different that you can't learn as you go. And there are always the Dummies books and the Microsoft technical support line to turn to.

After six years of development it ought to be ready by now.

Some things that Microsoft thinks will be great do have the potential of being annoying,

Novell has had a new product or marketing strategy every year for the last 13 or 14 years.

Novell doesn't want to do more work than they have to,

AOL's value is driven to the extreme merely because you had two industry giants fighting for it.

You're paying a lot for these licenses, but you're getting a lot, too. These are real, tangible benefits.

You put all these tools together and what is supposed to help users is going to add a big layer of complexity and expense.

This group feels that they are particularly hard hit and that they don't have much leverage.

They have a reputation for being very stingy with their APIs and code, but the key to any platform like MSN is applications and a rich developer network.

They are getting better on tools and things, and they can afford the best and the brightest. They're one of the few companies that has not had layoffs.

It's a different, more dangerous world. Technology is more sophisticated, but so are the software pirates. Consumers or businesses that deploy counterfeit software put their PCs and networks at peril for encountering tampered code, viruses and even credit card theft. In the end, the consumer and the corporation may suffer just as much, if not more, harm than the software vendors.

Does Sun still want customers to choose Solaris over OpenSolaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Absolutely. But like Steve Ballmer before him, McNealy realizes that he'll 'catch more flies with honey, than he will with vinegar',

It's better to fix the glitches before the release than after.

They'll definitely keep integrating it, whether through product development or acquisition.

They have to do this to survive, compete and thrive, because MSN is in a pitched battle with Yahoo, Google and AOL ( NYSE: AOL - news ), which have created their own Web developer platforms.

This is a typical 'Merging Business 101' tactic: prevent your adversaries from getting their foot in the door and a leg up on you by any means necessary.

on average 75 percent could not answer explicit questions.

The metamorphosis of Linux from a free, hobbyist software environment to a major revenue-producing operating system is occurring with the same surety and swiftness of a neighborhood undergoing gentrification,

I'm much more bullish on them this year than I was a year ago. They are making some very strong, bold, and decisive moves to get themselves back on track. 2006 is going to be very interesting.

If you don't have those estimates, how do you do a TCO? That's scary.

If you do not know what is on your network, if you cannot at least estimate the hourly, monthly or yearly cost of downtime, if you do not know how long it takes to recover from a security outage, if you cannot answer questions about the extent of your company's license compliance, then you cannot truly evaluate whether Linux , Windows or Unix is right for your business.

If you get the kids young, they are less likely to defect to Apple.

If you looked at the stock market last year, for the first three quarters the market was down and it made it all up in the fourth quarter,

I really like small companies that aren't public but they'd be ones I'd be watching when they do an IPO.

If I had a mixed environment, I would wait and see the effort it takes to deploy Active Directory and then see if Active Directory or NDS is best for my environment, ... Without redirect, users will have to choose.

For the past few years, the word proprietary has meant 'bad' software, ... But I think people are going to start thinking twice before building their own systems with open-source software in the next year or two.

The margin of error for them is minute.

The key to Vista is security, security, security.