Why don't you tell us where we are? Oh, okay, let's do that again. We're in Barcelona, Microsoft TechEd IT Forum. That's almost like a Tivoli product name, it's so long and messed up. How does this one rack up so far for all the past ones you've been through? The management, the MMSs, if you will. I think one of the things is just that there's a new... How would I call it? It used to be a little bit wild west. The Microsoft management strategy. You had products that didn't work that well. So you had organizations that had made these choices and they were perhaps struggling. I mean, like SMS, classic, you know, go back a few years. That was a real issue. Right. And so I think that there was a degree of, you know, while Microsoft was going, we're going to get there. And I think the community responds to that. It's like, okay, they didn't get it right, but we're going to get there. And we're all... Now it just... I think the debate has kind of moved on a little bit more and it's a bit more... Almost a bit more sort of professional. You can see the audience is perhaps a little bit older. Right, right. We're all a little bit greyer. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's... So the event is just... It's probably a little bit more mature and it's a little bit less wild west. I think that's... If I came away with any impression about the look of the audience and so on and the kind of people, it would probably be true. What's your take on the system center rebranding since you've lived through the bomb and SMS stuff? Oh, it couldn't have happened soon enough. I mean... Are you all for it? Yeah. I mean, really... And not to put too fine a point on it, I was pushing for this... Yeah. You know, years ago. I mean, when Michael Emanuel was doing some strategic work and... The thing about Microsoft, one of the other things that I'm just increasingly realized is how kind of oriental they are in their time frames. That they really do think in terms of like 10 to 15 years. Right. You're so used to software companies that can't think beyond, you know, the quarter and what their sales are.
2:02Microsoft is so willing to go, "Well, we're taking this longer-term view." So when I was bashing, you know, "You've got to change the name because everybody..." You know, I mean, well, Steven's a good example. Steven O'Grady, he's had to use SMS as it was and he... Well, as he said, I mean, he would certainly never use it again. Configuration manager, though. Oh, configuration manager, maybe. Maybe. So I think that what was funny was that I was pushing for this years ago and Michael was like, "Don't worry, we have a plan." I'm taking another tack. You know, people... Kind of the hot poker that you can stick in people at this event is VMware, right? Oh, yeah. The brand of that. And if I remember, there was some virtualization, some management that actually worked on ESX servers, I think we saw in the keynote the other day. And, I mean, what do you think is going to happen there? Like, is VMware trying to, like, make its own little island of IT or do you think, you know, things are going to work out, this whole standard of stuff? I mean, I'm always skeptical of the, uh, whatever, the VMH or whatever, we've got this virtual machine standard and then... Well, if I was going to... You end up having the jets and the sharks of standards and they just battle it out, right? Instead of, uh, all of them being in one gang. I think that's what's going to happen. Yeah. Um, you know, it's difficult to, you know, point what probability but, you know, let's chiggle the crystal balls. I mean, the simple fact is... Try again later. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, try again later. I mean, this industry thrives on, on confrontation. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, some of it is they just have to have people who want to kill at any given time. And so, for Microsoft right now, VMware and Red Hat are both companies that they desperately want to... Right. They don't want those companies to have franchises. They want to make sure they cut them off before that happens. And, you know, just very clearly to me, um, you know, in some ways you can sort of say that's just daft. When they stand up, and, and this was a statement, you know, quite recently, you know, there are only going to be two virtualization environments going forward. Xen and Microsoft Virtual Services.
4:03Right. I mean, the only problem is Xen has not necessarily fully risen to the challenge. Um, we'll see how that works out. So, it seems to me, I think, I, I think very clearly VMware is a franchise and it's going to be a long-term battle. This is not, this is not sort of, uh, again, this is not a quarter or two quarters. It's not like a Netscape maybe. No, exactly. So, you know, in an answer yesterday, what was that? Uh, in, in Hypervisor, uh, VMware probably has a, a two to four year lead. That's a big statement, but it's a very confident statement about how to address the challenge. So, yeah, no, I mean, it's just going to, they're not ever going to get along, I don't think. It is interesting because, you know, who, you know, who are going to be the friend makers? Is it, is it HP that would have all the environments in there? Right, right. Traditionally, you might have thought IBM, but IBM has really kind of moved out of that, uh, the Windows stuff. Right, right. So, you know, they support it, but... Yeah, they, they seem to be, uh, attempting to disengage from Microsoft at the moment, right? They do seem to be disengaging from Microsoft. I, I, I mean, they never explicitly say anything, but you've got Symphony and the, uh, the, um, you know, basically Office competitor. Mm-hm. That they're giving away for free and, and they're, uh, all, it's funny though, all their, all their executives still use PowerPoint and Word. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is weird, that is weird. But they still, they're, they're a little cooler on Microsoft than they used to be. Undoubtedly. Even like a year ago or so. So it's just a management, and that may be part of the thing, because they know that now Microsoft is stepping up to it. Right. I mean, they can't, the, the, the, some of the scalable technology that Microsoft is delivering, um, it's getting good now. I mean, it's like that when SQL Server stopped being, stopped being sucked. Right. You know, and that was a really critical moment, when SQL Server genuinely was enterprise scalable. Right. And, and, and, you know, in, in production environments, but also getting great TPCC and so on. I think we're beginning to see some of those maturity characters. What's TPPC? Oh, Transaction Processing Council. Ah, excellent. It's, uh, basically it's a measure of performance. Right, right, right. So, it, you know, they have the, the pissing match, all the server vendors. You know, we have the best TPCC.
6:04Right, right. And, you know, they, there are, there are a couple of different, they have one for data warehousing, one for transaction processing. And it, you know, it's really just vendor, vendor sports. But the point is that SQL Server became a real data. Yeah, and, and really working in production environments. Yeah. And I think we're beginning to see that in other areas. Yeah, yeah. And that, I mean, from an IBM perspective, you have to sort of say, well, you know, we can't really afford to, you know, be friends with these guys. Um, so I think, and, and not to be great friends, Jesus Christ. Um. Um, well, I, I, I mean, they, uh, they are the, uh, they have this weird, it's, I wouldn't say symbiotic, but sort of accidentally pseudo-parasitic relationship over the decades, right? Absolutely. Web services is the prime example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. WS. Well, I, I mean, all the way back to the PC and, I mean, they've, uh, basically been a weird dysfunctional marriage. Well, no, I think it's, it's not a dysfunctional marriage so much, it's almost more like a, a-- Maybe a normal marriage. No, no, I don't even think it's marriage. It's more like, it's, it's, it's, it's, I think it's more-- Neighbors. More oedipal than that. Ah, ah. I, I think it's more like, uh, a, a, a, you know, a dad and their kid. Ah, nice, nice. And, to begin with, the feisty kid is just growing fast and it's all good and-- Right, right. You know, but, but it gets just more and more oedipal all the time. Sure, sure. And then, the funny thing is, of course, that the kid eventually turns into the dad. Right, right. And I think Microsoft does get more like IBM all the time. Dude, this way, man. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got pushed over. You, uh-- I was dominating you. You, you, you could, so, you know, you got this hypervisor V thing. What was that again? That's right. That, this hypervisor V thing and the price is like 38 bucks. The low, low price. Something ridiculous, right? Or, as, as Eric Boyer actually said, freaking cheap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I, I mean, uh, I mean, what, what, what's your take on that? Like, as far as like, I mean, if it's 38 bucks, how much lower could the barriers be? A lot of people like to see code. Yeah. But that's coming at it from, uh, the perspective of somebody that is, you know, very open source oriented. Yeah, yeah. Um, a lot of other people just don't give a crap. Right. There's no reason, I mean, you know, Microsoft doesn't have to please the, the wing nuts.
8:04Right. You know, they need to please the vast majority of the market. And that vast majority of the market has continued to buy their products. So, yes, there's open source there and I think in management there's some. But look, we don't see, we don't see Tivoli, BMC, CA or any of these guys giving away or open sourcing all of their management stuff. No, not at all. And then we've got what you call the little four. Sure. So, you know, new, uh, little companies coming in, doing things slightly differently. But I, and I, I honestly, I mean, and again, hey, Redmonk, we're allowed to talk about IBM and Microsoft, I guess. They're converging. Right. In terms of their views on source code management and development and community development. I mean, we're seeing, you know, they're coming at it from slightly different angles. Right. And from, but, but IBM has sort of done the, hey, let's open source stuff kind of experiment. And now they're bringing it back and you look at Project Jazz and everything else. And much more, wait, let's control this. Let's make sure that we can make a margin on everything. It can't be just about the services. That didn't work as well as we expected. Meanwhile, Microsoft has done more and more in sort of open source. I think that convergence is, is, that's what the industry's all about. Right. I mean, everybody's doing shared source in some regards or other. So, five slapping good stuff. That's right. PowerShell. Yes. I think that is, it's funny. I mean, that's, that's what's under the covers here. But I think is, is the most important technology. I think that is the most important technology Microsoft has ever introduced. Right. In system management. Sure. That is to me, what makes it a serious, a serious player in systems management. That the ability to really do script different, script different, script different stuff in terms of managing the models. Yeah, yeah. That is hugely powerful. And the ability to, you know, just simple GUIs to build these scripts. Or you just deal with the script itself. That I think is, it's just a shame we don't have an open source implementation, right?
10:04Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, but, I mean to your point, the, I mean, that's, that's just a model of IT management that works. Is, is writing scripts for things. Yeah. It's, it's not always like ideal. And, I mean, there's all these exceptions, but if you were to, it seems like the, the, the worst of all evils. Right? Of course you want to have your automation stuff and all this stuff built on top of it to sort of reduce islands of control and, and you know, script chaos and everything. But, the fact of the matter is like, everyone has a unique IT, well, many people have unique IT setups that are just like, unique maybe only by a small variance. And having that ability to customize things through scripting is incredibly valuable. And that's, it's, it's what prevents IT from being a pain in the ass. It is. I mean, you're never going to get rid of, get rid of the bailing wire and chewing gum. Right, right. And post-it notes and so on that data centers run on. Right, right. So I think the only thing you can do is, is give really good bailing wire and chewing gum and post-it notes. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. And I think that, that PowerShell sort of has some of those characteristics. It's, it's like the awesome, the awesome bailing wire. There you go. For the data center. It's fantastic. Well, if the, if the pace that we've actually been, you know, in the same physical locale keeps up, I'll probably see you next week. Well, great. I've had such a good time. I think, I think it's been three weeks in a row, right? It is, it is, it is. It's awesome. I don't even remember what it was three weeks ago. I know we were in Stanford and, and we were, man. Well, we were with Adobe again, here quite recently. Yeah, but that was a long time. We have a bad case of travel, forgive me. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're just on the road all the time. Now, can Doppler help me out with this? Well, yeah. Does it have a history of places I've been? Of course it does. Fantastic. It's got a journal. Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's got journal functionality. Hard to go look it up in Doppler. Trip reports. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do all kinds of good shit. I mean, who knows what those guys, hey, of course, it's Redbook. We're in Big Doppler again. I didn't even start that. That's right. It's true. But, yeah, it will tell you where you've been. Right, right. Well, I'd better go look that up. But it won't tell you, oh, and it will even tell you where you're going.
12:05Oh, nice. But I realized I didn't put my German trip in next week, and I didn't tell Natalie either, which means I'm back in the shit. Oh, Christ. They fucked up. Let's get some coffee and don't think about it. *laughs*