“As Microsoft prepares to announce its Next Generation
Windows Services initiative this week, an influential computer
scientist is circulating a thesis that challenges William H.
Gates’s vision of the future.”
“It sounds as if Microsoft is scared and defensive,” the critic,
David Gelernter, said in a telephone interview last week.
“Microsoft has based its reputation on refusing to lead and always
following, and once again they’re behind the wave here,” said Mr.
Gelernter, a respected Yale University computer scientist.”
“Mr. Gelernter’s critique has some influential supporters,
including including Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who recently
left Walt Disney’s Imagineering research group to form a new
company, Applied Minds; David Ditzel, a computer designer who is
the founder of Transmeta Inc., a Silicon Valley microprocessor
company; and Rodney Brooks, director of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.”
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