The large memory of 64-bit will be nice for database applications, but the apps that currently run on Linux don't need 64-bit.

It's not as bad as when there were a hundred different companies selling Unix. There are maybe six or eight Linux distributors we all know about. But given the size of the market, even though it's growing quickly, it's not clear that they will all exist three or four years from now.

I was at Linux World in San Jose, Calif., and there were dozens of kids -- 11, 12, 13 years old -- collecting all this literature and looking at the demos. In two or three years, when all these kids are coming out of college and high school, the number of people who are able to do Linux development are going to overwhelm the number of people who are doing Unix and NT development simply because of that.

There are people who would be more interested in buying a laptop that runs Linux if they could get it pre-installed. But the main reason people still aren't using Linux on the desktop is the lack of Microsoft Office.

IBM's integrated Unix/Linux strategy, which can support both simple and complex workloads, is designed to help customers make customer's choices the right one.

We cannot have a short memory on this one. It's going to go on for months and years.