Fair and Balanced?
Bill Gates recently got together with Steve Mills from IBM and demonstrated some web services interoperability between our two companies’ products. It has taken awhile to get to this point, from the initial hype to the point where some of these key scenarios work without smoke and mirrors; so it is nice to see a “status report” like this.
The first response I saw came in the form of this shrill attack piece run on CNET. The author seems stuck in the last century, when people still bought the big lie about “write once run anywhere”. He fails to explain how “runs only on Java” is significantly different from “runs only on Windows”, and completely misses the point that most enterprises have to support both types of systems (and many more) and therefore place a high priority on interop.
The attack piece brought back fond memories of the days when Bob Metcalfe and Jai Singh (now managing editor at CNET) were together at the helm of Infoworld. Then I saw another analysis in CNET, covering the same interop event, but surprisingly balanced, at least in comparison to the first piece. Finally, I found yet another analysis on CNET, again covering the same event; and this one is positively glowingly accurate!
What to make of it? A single presentation by Bill Gates inspires three different pieces in CNET which cover the whole spectrum of opinion. Can’t complain about that.
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Tragically, politics shuts down John Poindexter’s data mining program. It seems that only Safeway is allowed to collect that sort of information about U.S. citizens.