1.	Flipping it around, if I had Rosen's ear, here's what I would say.
2.	"Get thee into software." (Traveling in the east has brought out my inner-Quaker.)
3.	There's never been a better time to have strong plays in clients, workstations, servers and portals, and Compaq has strong positions in clients and servers and portals. What's missing is an offering for creative professionals, people who write, draw, animate, design and develop systems, in other words, developers. They surely sell the hardware that such people can use. But they can, in ways others can't, tie all those systems together.
4.	We've gotten a big lift from having industry standard software, but that direction has run its course. Now I think it's time for experimentation, without the oversight of the standards bodies. Entertain creative people with more options. The path is totally clear, just add back the power the web took away. There are lots of excellent starting points. Macromedia's Flash comes to mind. Work with game developers and encourage them to link their interfaces up to productivity aggregators and connectors running on Unix servers. Encourage Apple to port QuickDraw and the various user interface APIs on the Mac OS.
5.	What about Microsoft? NT didn't displace Unix, and some believe it didn't even displace Novell. They have no rabbit to chase in web browsers. Can Microsoft still strongarm the cloners? I don't know, but Rosen would. Microsoft still does the best job of responding to developers, but they haven't covered all the territory they need to. It's a good time to challenge Microsoft. There's room.
6.	The open space is user experience. Cast a thousand seeds and let the developers lead. Microsoft probably will never really do this. It's the option that Apple had and failed to grab. But Rosen knows the history. He saw first-hand how the cart could be upset, now can he do it again?