Microsoft's Margo Day sounds off on software licensing
CRN.com | at | by Mike
CRN: How big of an opportunity is there with licensing for Office 2007 and Vista?
DAY: If you think about the SMB market, a fairly large percentage of those customers are on Office 2000 and Windows 2000. They never upgraded to the 2003 platform. From their point of view, what they had was good enough. It was stable, and it was good enough. We actually think there is a lot of benefit for them to move to 2003. But the reality is that a number of customers won't. They'll wait for 2007. Now what you have got is a very large installed base of customers that would be two versions back. For example, with Exchange, there is still 14 percent of our [installed] base on Exchange 5.5. So there is a tremendous opportunity in taking those Exchange 5.5 customers to 2003, at minimum. And then if they have Software Assurance, when we release the new version of Exchange, they will have the right to do that upgrade.