Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft"s Windows Server division, in an interview last week discussed the road map for future operating system releases, the competitive threat posed by Linux and the promise of 64-bit computing. Part 1 of the interview follows:
Q: How is Microsoft differentiating itself from the Linux competition?
I don"t really think that Linux itself is our competitor. I think Linux is a set of technologies, and open-source technologies in general are a set of technologies that competitors like Red Hat (Inc.) or Novell (Inc.) and IBM (Corp.) pull together to provide alternative competitive solutions for customers. Linux has evolved to be a commercial product. All the customers I sell to buy Linux-based products from companies like Red Hat or Novell. They put them together, stacks with other software, typically commercial software, like WebSphere. And if you look at a solution that exists in that space -- say, an IBM solution -- it"s certainly not free. The cost of acquiring that is actually quite comparable to the cost of acquiring a Microsoft solution.
We think our advantage here is the fact that we understand each of these workloads that our server and our server system is used for, and we can focus and optimize to make each workload best of breed. But then we can also work across workloads and do a better job of providing an integrated experience for the customer relative to our competitors.