Some rivals are offering Web services that compete with Microsofts core businesses, like word processing and spreadsheets. How big of a threat does that become for you guys?
Well, the Web doesn’t make products irrelevant or take away the goodness. Let’s just talk about Office for a minute. Office has been in a very competitive marketplace online and offline for a long time. And as those things move to the Web, you know, maybe that’s a thing that customers want to do. But right now, our strategy with a lot of the products that are desktop products today are the right strategies. We do things like Office Live (see BW Online, 11/02/06 “Why Microsoft Is Going ‘Live'”) that put the appropriate things on the Web that make sense, which is primarily people’s data, not necessarily just the application, and make that available in a powerful way. Folks always have concerns about Microsoft when it stares down on a new business and sees great opportunity. It’s a big company, and there’s a bit of a history that Microsoft has in terms of dominating businesses. European regulators recently raised alarms about some of the ties inside Vista to some of these new worlds. How
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