Bill’s been talking a lot about Microsoft’s horizontal scalability [using a cluster of little machines to get performance rather than one big machine] strategy. But they can’t make it work. We’ve got horizontal scalability for every application ever written; they have horizontal scalability for one and only one application—their custom version of the TPC-C benchmark [an industry standard database performance test]! It’s amazing. And, it will take IBM and Microsoft a long, long time to catch up. Maybe ten years, but probably never.”
