I hope that John Foust had Dr. Whitten's permission to publish this apparently private mail. To the people who say that Whitten is arrogant or bitter, please read Joel's disrespectful comments first:
"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles
"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."