[ Thanks to Matt for
this link. ]
“Paul Flessner, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Server
Platform Division, this week sat down with CRN Editor In Chief
Michael Vizard and Industry Editor Barbara Darrow to discuss
developments at the software vendor’s Tech Ed 2003 conference here
as well as competitive challenges from IBM, Linux and Oracle…“CRN: At JavaOne, Sun Microsystems and the Java
guys will say that they own all of the data centers and will now
reach out all the way to handhelds and everything in between. One
could argue that Microsoft owns that space and is chipping away at
the data center. People in the marketplace listen to both arguments
and say ‘ho-hum.’ They are comfortable with the split between
Microsoft owning the collaboration/productivity front ends and Java
owning transactional back ends. Why would anyone want to
switch?“FLESSNER: I wouldn’t characterize Java as
owning the transactional world. Sun has a big presence in the data
center. We have a big presence in the data center. I think they’ve
run most mission-critical applications in the past, and we’re in
what I call tier two and tier three–with mainframes and high-end
Unix being tier one, [followed by] tiers two and three. The reality
is, Linux has had a far more devastating effect on Unix than it has
on Windows. The share for Linux is coming from Unix. We gained
share this year, and Unix lost as Linux picked up. It’s
uncomfortable for a CIO today to be sitting on a RISC environment.
The Intel platform has proven its economics and increasingly scaled
up and out to everywhere I need between Linux and Windows. I’m
totally fine competing in that kind of environment…”