Microsoft's past and its future were on a collision course. This week a federal judge in Washington appears ready to give the go-ahead to the government's plan to break up the software giant for its past antitrust violations. The timing of that bad news couldn't be worse for Bill Gates & Co.: in the other Washington, on the other coast, they had planned for this Thursday to be one of the most important, uplifting days in the history of Microsoft. That's when the Redmond giant was supposed to officially launch a massive strategic initiative called Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS), a companywide effort to make Microsoft the lingua franca of the coming Net-ready devices and services.
展开▼
