Two Companies at Odds Over the Internet's Future

"One year ago, almost to the day, Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive of I.B.M., delivered a speech in New York that sketched his company's vision of the future of computing, which he called 'on-demand computing.' Today in Los Angeles, Bill Gates, the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, will present his company's notion of where things are headed, which the software maker calls 'seamless computing.'"