James F. Booth

For more than 25 years, James Booth has provided consulting and legal services to telecommunications carriers and to enterprise companies that manage their own telecommunications networks. Since June of 2009 he has also served as General Counsel of Spread Networks, LLC, which is the industry leader in the construction and operation of low latency high speed networks. Before joining Spread he was General Counsel for OnFiber Communications, a competitive telecommunications provider, and was the sole attorney for Qwest Communications International in support of its construction of an 18,800 mile fiber optic network spanning the United States. Earlier he was lead counsel for U S WEST in its wireless and cable television ventures in the United States, Europe and Hong Kong.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Bill Gates 2.0? Keep dreaming, Mr. Zuckerberg


If you came of age after Microsoft (MSFT) dominated the technology industry, you might well look at Bill Gates' philanthropic efforrs and call him a hero. Others who had to compete against the de facto monopoly that was Microsoft under Bill Gates might see things differently. To them, he was a vampiric force that fed on the lifeblood of software innovation. Then there are people who nostalgically call Gates a hero, not for what he's doing today, but for what he did back at Microsoft. Or at least there's one: Mark Zuckerberg. In September, Zuckerberg said at a conference that Gates was his hero when he was growing up. When his interviewer, Michael Arrington, compared Gates to Darth Vader, Zuckerberg disagreed, saying Gates is "one of the greatest visionaries that our industry has ever had."

Which raises the question: Now that Gates has moved on from the tech industry, can Zuckerberg become to our era what Gates was in his? Is Facebook (FB) the new Microsoft?

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/01/08/bill-gates-2-0-keep-dreaming-mr-zuckerberg/
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