When Bill Gates speaks, the first thought in the minds of those analyzing the words of the Microsoft Corp chairman is: does it give any clues at to whose business he is after now? After hearing Gates address IDC’s European IT forum in Paris on Monday, John Gantz, senior vice president of IDC had no doubt who is now in Microsoft’s sights. They’ve seen off Netscape, they’ve seen off Novell. They’re now aiming at IBM. Gantz believes that IBM has many products that conflicted with Microsoft’s ambitions with Lotus Notes and its high profile electronic commerce initiative. Gates was quite clear that IBM was their biggest competitor. But he appeared to have nothing but scorn for its operations. IBM is still 10 times Microsoft’s size in terms of employment. They’ve still got that presence, but they are very conservative. But the thing that’s strange is, what is IBM’s (software) unique architectural initiative? I swear they will come up with one some time. There is a vacuum there that we are benefiting immensely from, Gates said. But Gantz is not so sure that Microsoft will win this battle. Microsoft likes to say that it is an integrated organization, but this is not quite as pure as it would like us to think. IBM has great strengths that Microsoft doesn’t have, said Gantz. Gates couldn’t resist the opportunity to jump up and down on the scarcely-breathing body of the network computer, as he and Oracle’s Larry Ellison had clashed over the subject at the Paris conference three years ago. Gates said the showcase NC customers had all come back to mainstream PC systems And he bracketed Java as being an idea of the same ilk as the NC. He said it seemed pretty mythical that people would rewrite every software application in the same language but we will have to see.
