  | |
. | |
T A B L E__T A L K How much are you willing to say to strangers online? Discuss the pros and cons of electronic confessions in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Return of the hex-crazed wargamers Results of Challenge No. 9 No future in Tomorrowland Interstellar fireworks One fine "Day"?
- - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
|
|
_______Bill's don ROGER NEEDHAM, THE BOSS OF MICROSOFT'S
_______BY KARLIN LILLINGTONCAMBRIDGE, England --Going by his reception last summer in England, Bill Gates must be the closest thing to royalty the Yanks have as far as the Brits are concerned -- especially if His Gatesness is in the mood to dispense alms in the form of 50 million pounds (roughly $80 million) for a Cambridge-based research lab. Stateside onlookers relishing the current combat between Microsoft and its U.S. government foes would have cringed at the gooey adulation and white-gloved politesse lavished on Gates when he arrived last summer in the venerable university town. Airlifted in by helicopter and disgorged onto one of Cambridge University's expansive, rolled lawns, Gates was carefully shielded from the press and whisked away for (literal) red-carpet treatment. Prime Minister Tony Blair -- famously inept with computers and the Internet -- fawned. The deal was solemnized, and the British newspapers gave the investment front-page coverage, proudly editorializing about Britain's new tech hipness. In the eye of the cyclone was Professor Roger Needham, the Cambridge academic and vice-chancellor appointed to head the lab, who calmly dispensed interviews to publications from London to San Jose. Needham was an astute choice as mouthpiece for the lab -- he's an unswayable, adept media handler used to the ferocious British press pack. He's also a geek's geek who has worked in the Silicon Valley labs that bring distant longing to the eyes of computer devotees, like Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Apparently, Needham is viewed as a bit of a loose cannon by Microsoft, which likes its spin as precisely modulated as possible. Accustomed to the far less constrained approach to public relations followed by Europeans (excluding, of course, the slick PR factory of Blair's Labour Party), Needham simply says what he thinks. And, interestingly, what he thinks right now is that last summer's media love-in with Microsoft was a catastrophe. "The announcement in London last June was, from a PR point of view, a disaster," he says. Certainly an odd sentiment given the story's wall-to-wall coverage and his own sudden popularity explaining odd details of computer theory to gushing television reporters. But he worries that the scale of the project and investment was blown out of proportion: "It gave people the idea that a very much bigger thing was being done." - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
