Guggenheimer: One of the things that I think that businesses are looking for is how do we build applications and use the technology [that we have] in our organizations to better [make decisions]. There was a recent study that said 77 percent of [senior executives are aware of IT people] making bad decisions. So one [project is about] helping people make better decisions faster, [and using] technology [to] do that. [But] there's so many different back ends, how do you just connect the systems and keep [it all in] place? percent' Five years ago, we started [by making] a bet on a data standard, [which is] XML. Then you make a bet on the transport, [which is] Web services, and then you build an API, which is .Net and you use .Net to make a sort of a service-oriented architecture within the organization. There are many companies either have moved to or are in the process of moving to service-oriented architecture within their organization. percent' And for us, that's based on the .Net platform, that's based on Windows Server 2003. A year ago, there was a study [that said] about 56 percent of companies are using .Net as their development platform and about 90-plus percent are actually trying it in some way or another within the organization. So we've made progress. I think a lot of companies have made progress.

InfoWorld: Do you think the people at Sun would agree with that 56 percent number?

Guggenheimer: It was a Forrester study, so we could pull the data out. I mean I don't know whether Sun would agree with it or not.

InfoWorld: Did Microsoft fund the study?

Guggenheimer: No, it was not one of our funded studies. We can get you the study. That one's over a year old now. So I think we have made good progress there, people do use the technology. With the release of these three products together, SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006 and Visual Studio 2005, they [are] released actually as part of our overall set of products we offer for the application platform. One of the things we work hard on at doing at Microsoft is ensuring that the APIs we have and the technologies and the products work well together in support of building and running and managing applications. And so for us the application platform is all the things we build that enable a company to use and run their own applications. On the server side of the house, the Windows Server System, we do a lot of work to make sure they work well together. When it comes to management, we use the Windows management interfaces for development and we use the management console for plugging in, so you can manage them in the same way. They're developed in the same way, so when you want to write code to them you can write code to them in the same way, via the APIs and the Common Language Runtime because they run in the same fashion. An application built will run in the same fashion. We look at security in a holistic manner so we can do security in a common way. There's a lot of things we do within the Windows server family to try to make those things easier to develop applications for and to manage. With these three releases, BizTalk, SQL Server and Visual Studio, we worked really hard on connecting systems together, to better connect people to the information they need and in conjunction with the processes an organization will use.