Chris Tocq Quotes (11 Quotes)

This is the last hurrah for the current architecture. The next version of Microsoft's consumer operating system, Windows 2000, will be based on a Windows NT kernel. The business user transition from Windows 95 to NT Workstation is gradually emerging.

For instance, on a small business computer from Hewlett-Packard, the word 'Microsoft' may never appear on the screen.

Microsoft has been relatively less able over time, to persuade their installed base to make the switch. People are just happy with what they have already.

We're talking about something that's four-and-a-half years old. Although there are a lot of businesses that still have Office 97 running, getting free support so many years after, that's pressing your luck.

From Microsoft's standpoint, they need that revenue. People should become aware of the product lifecycle they should also become aware that Microsoft is changing its licensing model.

If you look at what the opportunity is for Microsoft, it's that it just starts to sell one thing instead of another -- it's not an increase for them. The revenue opportunity of the release of a consumer operating system is related to how much of the installed base you can get to upgrade by taking the new product and putting it over what they used to have.

Gates is still in charge, but I think he's happy about Ballmer taking care of his baby.

Microsoft would no longer have guaranteed placement on users' desktops. That would mean its ability to leverage the desktop in terms of selling other services would be severely reduced, or it would have to negotiate directly to get that leverage.

They've really done a 180 on this. The new fix that they have in Beta right now for Outlook completely removes programmability except as manually authorized in each case by the user. And this will break, frankly, a large number of corporate applications, but for the general user this is the right thing to do.

What the federation approach does is provide the capability, through Passport, to make a single administration point for internal and external sites.

What Microsoft is seeing is the proportion of their base that upgrades is not as high as it used to be. For a lot of people today, they buy their PC, they plug it in, it gives them access to the Internet and that's what they bought it for.