Mills: I don't believe that the past is prologue to the future. I think that there were unique conditions that led to the dominance of Windows and, even more particular, to the dominance of Microsoft Office. This is a $220 billion software industry. Last year, Microsoft's share of that was less then 10 percent. They're an important player to be sure, but there are lots of spaces and domains in this industry and a disproportionate percent of all of Microsoft's total revenues comes from these unique franchises in Windows and Office.

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When you look beyond that, you find that they are a much smaller player in all the other critical spaces--transactions, databases, true line-of-business applications. It's disproportionately skewed to … literally two [products] if you think of Office and Windows as products. Some 99 percent of all systems that use a desktop productivity suite run Office. It's a bigger franchise than their Windows franchise. That's unique, but it's not going to repeat itself. This is not a market that seeks homogeneity; it's a market that seeks choice and only falls back to homogeneity when conditions force it. It's not inherently human nature to want one thing, one choice.

There are more servers on the Web that are not Windows servers. Most of the world's transactions do not run on Windows servers. They run on Unix servers and IBM mainframes. So, the preponderance of real, valuable activity is not occurring in the Windows world. It's occurring in other worlds.

Microsoft wants to play in these other worlds and to get a piece of that, it's going to have to deal with using open standards for identity and authentication and data access and all these other pieces. Otherwise, their business is isolated to that entry point of the client, and businesses are not going to allow Microsoft to control their relationships with their customers. Customer identity is a relationship that you as a bank or a retailer have with me. My relationship is with you, not Microsoft. We need to have standards and structures that make it possible for me to have that relationship with you and vice versa and extend it and so on. It's not going to be vendor-controlled. It's just not going to happen that way.

Tech Update: What are your customers saying?

Mills: They're not going to do it. It's not going to happen that way. So there will be a move toward open standards in this space. It's just a matter of how long it takes and how many iterations we must go through to get there.

I think Microsoft is going to play a key role in whether it settles out quickly or not. The Liberty Alliance obviously serves as a catalyst. It throws down the gauntlet. Just look at the name. The gauntlet has been thrown down to say, "No, no, there is not going to be a proprietary way--there is going to be an open way." This is going to be a very interesting year to see how this evolves.

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