Malcolm: Should Microsoft be broken into two, three or even more little companies, or should it remain as the one entity it is now?

Janine: I think Microsoft should be broken up into smaller companies because I think the service would improve and they would be able to talk to each other on a better level, rather than all working for the same company. Their attitudes would change towards each other and towards the product. At the moment they've got the attitude of 'we've got the product so we don't have to make it work'. That's my opinion.

Malcolm: Andrew, how do you feel?

Andrew: I also think they should be broken up, it will create more competition. Looking at their biggest competitor at the moment - Oracle - they too will be coming under the spotlight because they seem to be capturing the database-specific market. I think that by splitting up Microsoft, both companies are going to be head to head in competition.

Malcolm: Interesting. I don't know. Harry, how do you feel about it?

Harry: It's all about shareholder value. Everybody asks how Mr Welsh at General Electric (GE) makes it happen. There are about 47 divisions of GE and it is the most amazing company. What they do have is a central philosophy that everyone shares and uses, but each individual CEO of a division runs that division as his company. And they compete, but they compete under a philosophy of winning and proving that they're the best. The do it highly successfully and it's a very non-chauvinistic thing. Mr Gates and some of his other senior executives are very powerful people with large shoulder pads and ego pads on top of them. When you can get past that, you do have shareholder value. If Microsoft was a three-entity business with a very core focused unit that was R&D-specific, it would probably be an absolute killer. South Africa could teach them to do the old pyramid company structure thing that we're now told is a no-go. But if you ask Anglo and Barlows how they made it, I'm sure that the shareholder values for Mr Gates would actually increase.

Malcolm: I'm sure you're right, but what does this mean for the consumer - not in terms of price, but in terms of service. Is the separation of these products going to mean that they're going to start being isolated from each other - the software against the platform.

Harry: No, because today they're really inseparable. It really doesn't matter which is yours. If you see what IBM did and how they just about died because they were so constricted and focused in one direction. When mainframes suddenly stopped being de rigor and PCs became the thing, they nearly lost it. So, in that environment you have platforms, you have products and you have services. And, as we were talking about earlier with the guys from IS, when you have distributed services coming down that's really the way it is. Microsoft, in its own interest should go ahead and do it. That would actually take the heat off everyone and stop the government in its tracks. I really hate the idea of the government trying to interfere with private enterprise. Microsoft itself should said say - okay guys we'll do it in the interests of ourselves, our shareholders and most importantly, our customers.