To All: Since we were talking about Gates et al. I thought this was a
humorus (interesting) piece. I promise I won't post anymore of this stuff after this <g>.
Joe...
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Futurist Warns Bill Gates to Honor Java Industry, Not Intel
Topic Matched: New World Wide Web Technologies
Comtex, December 5, 1996
By Paul Andrews, The Seattle Times
Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News
Dec. 5--Futurist George Gilder has spent the past year telling people
that Bill Gates is wrong about the future of the computer industry. Yesterday
at a Forbes Technology Symposium appearance he kicked more silicon in the
Redmond software giant's face.
Gates is wrong to resist the "Java revolution," Gilder told an audience
of 150 top technology officers gathered at the Bell Harbor Conference Center.
Java, a programming language promoted by Sun Microsystems and seen as a
"Windows buster" by Microsoft competitors, is growing in popularity so fast
that its sheer momentum will overcome its current deficiencies, Gilder
believes.
"Bill doesn't realize that the PC has become a peripheral (device) to
the network," said the Massachusetts-based Gilder, a senior fellow at
Seattle's Discovery Institute. "People today are spending more time accessing
the Internet than the hard drives on their computers."
Asked by panel moderator Bill Baldwin if his motivation wasn't simply to
prevent Gates from getting richer, Gilder responded:
"I'm delighted to have Bill Gates get richer. But I hope he gets richer
exploiting the Java model of platform-independent software rather than the
proprietary software based on the Intel instruction set, which I think is
obsolete."
Gilder also disparaged The Microsoft Network, which the company is
promoting in a $100 million fall advertising blitz. MSN is "just another of
millions of Web sites," Gilder said, with little to differentiate itself. The
author of a "Life After Television," a withering attack on TV, added that
Microsoft's collaboration with NBC is "pure lunacy."
When computer screens become capable of displaying text in print- like
resolutions, newspapers will render TV news obsolete, Gilder predicted.
"Newspapers will be able to exploit the fact that they actually do
collect the news and distribute it," Gilder said. "It's a hard job.
Newspapers and magazines dispatch thousands of reporters who actually do
legwork and assemble facts and interpret them and present them, while TV news
is a contradiction in terms."
Gilder said he was told by Microsoft executives at a Discovery Institute
meeting Tuesday evening that the company had attempted to collaborate with
newspapers, but the latter "were not interested."
"I think Microsoft is making a mistake collaborating with television and
moving into content production," Gilder said. But he credited Gates with
being "brilliant at transforming his company" in a short amount of time.
"If they do it well, perhaps their whole company will be transformed
into some sort of Web-content operation. At the moment they're sort of torn,
and maybe they're going to have to divide at some point into a content arm
and operating-software arm."
Gilder recently began publishing the Gilder Technology Report, a monthly
newsletter tracking industry trends. The November issue relates how a year
ago, in a meeting in Gates' Microsoft office, the Microsoft co-founder
challenged Gilder's backing of Java by demanding to know, "Who screwed your
head around?"
A week later, Gates announced at a Pearl Harbor Day address on Internet
strategy that Microsoft was licensing Java for incorporation into its
Internet browser, Explorer. The company today has several hundred programmers
working on Java-related assignments. Officially, however, the company is
skeptical about Java's "legs," Gilder said, and refers to the language as the
Monkees of computing software. The late '60s pop group made its reputation
imitating the Beatles' look and sound but had nowhere near a comparable
impact on rock music.
"I think they're going to come around," Gilder said of Gates and
Microsoft. "A good signal will be when they translate their basic programs,
their big Office suites that offer them 80 percent of their profits, into
Java.
"It will signify they are serious."
A leading Microsoft desktop-software competitor, Corel, is translating
its WordPerfect Office suite of programs into Java. Speculation on the eve of
next week's Internet World conference in New York City is that Microsoft is
about to follow suit with its suite -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.
Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi said yesterday that the company will
make "significant announcements" at Internet World, but he declined to say
whether Java conversion of Office would be among them.
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"Is your head screwed on tight, Bill?" |
