[Customers] want enterprise applications that are extremely easy to implement and maintain. They want technology companies to do most of the heavy lifting. One of the implications may be that less professional services will be required, and I think that's a good thing.
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I don't know why people assumed, when we have separate product lines tuned and optimized for certain markets and both companies on their own were profitable, that we would merge our code bases. I don't understand that at all. When Ford bought Jaguar, they didn't merge their product lines into a single car. They still build and sell Jaguars. They just add Ford technology that can make them better. I don't know why people are saying that it's a foregone conclusion that we're going to merge our code bases. It's ridiculous.
Microsoft has two operating systems, NT and Windows. They serve different markets. One's on the server, one's on the client. There's no reason for them to merge the code bases into one. Toyota has a car division and a truck division. It's the same difference.
It's rare to read comments from a CEO that are insightful and concrete enough to help form an executable technical vision for a company or product. I suspect part of Conway's ability to do this is that PeopleSoft has a very limited set of products: it's always easier to direct the work and direction for 10's of products, or less, rather than 100's. Nonetheless, the above are good comments for any "enterprise application" makin' coder.
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