So I'm telling our teams, there's some stuff we're going to be doing that's coming on a six- and nine-month cycle, whether it's service packs or whatever. There's going to be stuff that'll ship on a two-year cycle, and there's stuff that probably won't ship but [on] a four-year cycle, when it's really big, hunky, thorny stuff.

Some SQL Server users who signed three-year contracts for your Software Assurance program may not have gotten an upgrade before the contracts expired. Is there any chance you'll guarantee a product release as part of a licensing deal? Certainly for our desktop products, people are anticipating a release. But we're very clear. We're going to try to give a value proposition that doesn't have an upgrade commitment. There's all kinds of complexity ' legal complexity, accounting complexity ' associated with that proposition.

At the server level, the biggest part of the value proposition for Software Assurance frankly isn't the upgrade. If you really take a look, do most people go back and upgrade a legacy server application? The answer is no. But they do want to make sure that they have the kind of support, patching [and] fixing to keep that thing in production and up and running.

The Enterprise Edition of Windows Vista will be available only to users who have Software Assurance. Some customers have said they'd like to get access to its full volume encryption feature, for instance. Is it possible that you'll change your mind about that? No. I think we like the decision that we've made. And the customers we talked to seem to like the decision. Essentially, what we're saying is there's a set of technology that is an extra-price option, and because that is a class of customer, the enterprise, that will care about that technology but will also care about Software Assurance, we've put that together in an interesting sort of integrated value proposition for the customer. I've heard essentially no significant negative feedback about that.

You mentioned at a financial analyst meeting that there will be a premium edition of Office. What's that going to be like? You're right. You'll have to wait until our Office guys are prepared to talk about that. We're trying to do value-add versions.