Futurist Warns Bill Gates to Honor Java Industry, Not Intel

Source: The Seattle Times

The Seattle Times via Knight-Ridder/Tribune via Individual Inc. : By Paul
Andrews 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proprietary software based on the Intel instruction set, which I think is
obsolete."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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(c) 1996, The Seattle Times. Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business
News.