DG: We've noticed that. In fact, we've taken our very popular Book-of-the-Month club from PalmPower and we're running a similar column in Windows CE Power. Each month, we spotlight great works of literature and great references readers can download to their Windows CE devices. As you know, we also publish PalmPower, which is the leading publication for the Palm Computing Platform market. There's obviously the perception of comparison between the Palm devices and the Palm-sized PCs. And so sometimes we get a perception from those who compare just a Palm Computing device to a Palm-sized PC that the Windows CE based products are sometimes considered larger or slower or something like that. How would you compare the two and is there anything you want to say about those kinds of comments?

JR: First, I have a lot of respect for what the PalmPilot has been able to accomplish. I think it's an example of a very fine appliance. It is a smaller operating system. It's running on a Dragonball processor, which is a non-memory unit…you know, manager, processor with lower powered characteristics, etc., and it does some basic functions well.

Windows CE is a more powerful OS that runs on more powerful processors. The advantage of that, from our view, is that it's going to allow you to do more and more interesting things. If you take a look at advancements, the PalmPilot has advanced, in terms of industrial design, in pretty interesting ways. But it hasn't advanced that dramatically, frankly, in terms of software characteristics in terms of what they built into the system. Windows CE, on the other hand, has advanced somewhat radically in terms of what we built into the system and what its capability is. And that's why you're seeing things like color and MP3 in these new Palm-sized devices. So what we're in the process of doing is building interesting things into the system. Then the challenge is, of course, to make those things really meaningful and useful to the consumer so that they're able to do a few of those things really, really well. The equivalent would be kind of like the original Excel. We're pushing and moving the system forward so that people will be able to do things that they haven't been able to do before but things that they really want -- like Excel charting was a measurable advance over Lotus 1-2-3. That's sort of my perception of difference. There are some size-characteristic differences between the two and there are some significantly different power characteristics and extensibility characteristics as well.

DG: As somebody who actually used the old green MultiPlan [Microsoft's spreadsheet before Excel, circa early to mid-80's] from the CP/M days, I know there have been a lot of advancements.

JR: If you take a look, Windows CE a year ago…it's stunning to think about…was essentially a handheld PC. Within the last year, we had the AutoPC, we had the Dreamcast system with Sega, we've had all these new Palm-sized devices coming out, we've had kiosk devices coming out. And 150 other types of devices. So it's just a different approach. The Palm approach is more like the Apple approach. Where they control the whole stack. Whereas we're just in a different business.