This was written by someone who has no idea what a deposition is about, or is intentionally misrepresenting it. The USG's depositions were PR stunts, filmed on purpose to make Gates look bad.
If you've ever been deposed (and I have), then you know that Gates' approach was close to optimal when dealing with lawyers.
Bill's biggest mistake was having a terrible attitude and bad posture when answering questions. He made it too personal. Otherwise, the strict answers were mostly ideal and are often used as tutorials by attorneys to show those two things:
1) How not to have the posture/tone/etc in your voice when answering questions, but...
2) ...that this is an adversarial discussion and you should seek extreme clarity every single time.
Having followed these events closely at the time, the Gates/Boies deposition videos are fascinating in their entirety; I’m overdue for a rewatch.
Despite having been a mild OS/2 and Java partisan, I agree with the general consensus in this thread that Gates gets a bad rap for surely following his expensive lawyers’ advice on how to respond during a deposition. Boies’ strategy was to assume that as a competitive CEO and logically-minded programmer, Gates would indeed follow that advice to an extreme that could be made to look evasive and sinister. It’s not an accident that they spend so much time arguing over definitions of industry terms or what some Microsoft VP means by “ours”. Boies at any time could have accepted Gates’ understanding and moved on, but instead keeps calmly needling on subtle distinctions to rile him up.
EDIT: Yikes, now rewatching and I forgot that the first half hour of the deposition is Boies reading Gates carefully selected definitions out of the 1997 Microsoft Computer Dictionary and asking him if he accepts them as written. The idea that it was Gates who wanted to litigate terminology is nuts.
I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that.
Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire?
Now if Microsoft had restricted users from installing another browser in Windows, then I would agree it's anti-competitive. And this is much more akin to what Apple is doing.
The author wants to paint MS as hypocritical, but aside from being accused of anti-competitive practices, there are no similarities.
And second, I despise how one's deposition attitude plays so much into the media's narrative. It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude, agreeable or flippant, sloppy or well-dressed. The only that that matters are legal facts.
> For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire?
There was a reason it was browsers.
At the time there was rather a lot of software written against the Win32 API and nothing else. It was a moat. You needed that software, so you needed Windows. The web threatened to bridge the moat -- if people write web applications for Netscape, and Netscape runs on not only Windows but Mac and Solaris and everything else, no more moat.
So the strategy with Internet Explorer was to make it the dominant browser on Windows (which was 90% of desktops), and then add all kinds of IE-specific features and get web developers to use them, so their web pages only worked in IE. Then the user gets a dependency on a web page with an Active X control that runs on Wintel but not Mac/PowerPC or Solaris/SPARC, so they have to use Windows. And they have to use IE, which enables more web developers to target IE instead of open standards.
The problem wasn't that it was free. The problem was that it was free and non-standard and the non-standard bits were tied to Windows.
I agree. Microsoft's strongest argument was that the features of an "OS" are fluid, ever-evolving, and un-definable. OS'es were all text-based, until one day they weren't and the GUI dominated. Win 95 had no Winsock or TCP/IP stack built-in, 98 did. File Explorer. Start Button. And as you say, the presence of MS Paint and the Calculator and Solitaire show that exact inclusions/exclusions are arbitrary. MS could have argued that it was it's responsibility -- obligation even -- to add new features and abilities to its OSes. Force the govt to "prove" that a browser is definitely an application and somehow cannot be a core part of the OS (otherwise there's no "bundling"). They wouldn't have been able to do that.
Nearly everybody I know who lived through that trial and works in the internet biz has eventually concluded that MSFT did the right think bundling IE in the OS. (I've had that discussion with a lot of people after somebody asked me point blank exactly what was wrong with including a DLL that did HTTP GETs and showed the results graphically on screen in an OS).
Another thing I've learned is that modern CEOs are now expected to both be sucessfull businesspeople, and also humane enough to look good in a deposition and be skilled at deflecting questions.
He makes it very clear in that documentary how much he regrets that he wore his disdain for the antitrust suit on his sleeve, as it played directly into the prosecutor's hands.
Q: Okay. Let me ask you to look at Trial Exhibit 560. This is a message from you to Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Chase with a copy to Mr. Maritz and some other people also given copies dated August 15, 1997 at 4:07 p.m. on the subject of IBM and Netscape; correct?
A: Uh-huh
Q: BY MR. BOIES: And you type in here Importance: High."
A: No.
Q: No?
A: No, I didn't type that.
Q: Who typed in "High"?
A: A computer.
Q: A computer. Why did the computer type in "High"?
A: It's an attribute of the e-mail.
Q: And who set the attribute of the e-mail?
A: Usually the sender sends that attribute.
Q: Who is the sender here, Mr. Gates?
A: In this case it appears I'm the sender.
Eh, I think I can understand where he's coming from. There's a difference between choosing "high" from a drop down and manually typing out "Importance: High". The former is kinda throwaway, while the latter is more serious. He's definitely super awkward about it though.
> [...] Microsoft was now comfortable supporting the Davids of the tech industry.
This is a 29 year old company with a four-digit number of employees worth 17.3 Billion USD. Fortnite alone seems to have been a quite solid share of the App Store's gaming revenue. This is not a "David".
Sure, Apple, Google and Microsoft are worth one to two orders of magnitude more. But this is like seeing a small person fighting a bigger person from the perspective of an ant.
While there might or might not be questionable or illegal things that Bill Gates did, by himself or as the MS corporation at that time, the over-fixation of the article on how he is talking to the attorney in the deposition seems misguided and amateurish.
Boies: What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996?
Gates: I don’t know what you mean “concerned.”
Boies: What is it about the word “concerned” that you don’t understand?
Gates: I’m not sure what you mean by it.
Boies: Is—
Gates: Is there a document where I use that term?
Boies: Is the term “concerned” a term that you’re familiar with in the English language?
Gates: Yes.
Boies: Does it have a meaning that you’re familiar with?
Gates: Yes.
Isn't this how you are supposed to talk to lawyers? They make it their business to routinely try to force you into their own prepared lines of questioning and try to use your own words against you and make you appear to say things that you didn't really mean. This is their job.
If you are on the other side of this, it is your job to prevent this use of language and make sure that they don't manage to implicate yourself in any way, by nonchalant use of words. Being vigilant about your use of specific words in specific contents, and about querying what exactly they are trying to say by each question seems like a good default approach to the problem of not giving your opponent attorney more ammunition than they should fairly have. I imagine Mr. Gates was used to mistreatment by lawyers and simply speaks their language at that point.
Boies: Mr. Gates, is the term proprietary API a term that is commonly used in your business?
Gates: Let me give you …
Boies: all I’m trying to do is …
Gates: … the common meanings that those words could have and you can pick one of them and ask me a question about it
Boies: no
Gates: Do you want me to define proprietary API or not?
Boies: No, I don’t want you to define proprietary API. I didn’t ask you to define proprietary API. I asked you a simple question about whether the term proprietary API was commonly used in your business. Now I’m prepared to sit here as long as you want to to answer questions that I haven’t asked. But I have a certain number of questions that I am going to ask at the end of these other answers. Now this is a simple question. You can say yes, no, or it is used in lots of different ways. But then I can choose what to follow up on. Or you can simply make whatever statements you want and I’ll go back to my question afterwards. Now, is the term property API a term that is commonly used in your business?
Gates: I don’t know how common it is. It has many different meanings.
Maybe because I'm more technical, but it seems painfully obvious here that this could be an API without open implementation, without open standard or a private one and he avoided that one well and understandably. But I agree with the sibling comments, this was probably as much a PR campaign as an antitrust one.
If you haven’t been deposed this will look weird. But depositions are about “gotcha” moments, so your job as the person being deposed is to play the game and only answer questions with minimal information and force the attorney asking questions to really work for it. It’s about being purely logical. If they ask you what two plus two is, respond vaguely and ask for clarification. “Are you asking about numbers? Or objects? What does plus mean in the context of this question.” Etc.
> "The lack of experience played right into the government’s hand. Instead of portraying a leader in control of his domain and confident in his case and his company’s legal and ethical righteousness, the courtroom videos showed a side of Gates that had never been on public display before. He was petulant, petty, flustered, and dour. He was ineffectual. He was, in a word, beaten."
The article may come off a little bit too harsh on Gates, but it is essentially right in that the US Gov strategy may have been to score a PR win on Gates and Microsoft. In that way, Gates came across as more on the defence than he perhaps needed to be in the situation. The deposition ended up being a low point from the public's perspective, though any damage has mostly been undone in the 2+ decades since.
The opening question here pre-supposes he was concerned. Unless the prior discussion had Gates explicitly saying he was concerned (which I assume it didn’t based on Gates asking about a document using the term), then it makes complete sense to me to respond with a question rather than an answer. I’d have probably gone with “When did I say I was concerned about non-Microsoft browsers in January 1996?”
Maybe it sounds different in person, or perhaps this was the umpteenth time it happened and the lawyer was getting frustrated, but on reading that snippet it seems like the lawyer was being the jerk. Just expand upon what you mean already.
Yeah, I actually would have asked the exact same thing: What do you mean "concerned about"? "Concerned" in what manner, and in regards to what possible aspects of those browsers? I can't imagine why anyone would answer such an overly-broad, open-ended question like that.
This is probably why Zuckerberg will never testify in a federal court. Like Gates, he has "never groveled for a job or sufffered many of the indignities most of us suffer on a regular basis."
> No longer the Goliath it once was—in large part because of the ascendance of companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple made possible by a settlement Microsoft signed
Hahaha, haha, ha. I'll just stop you right there, Dan Goodin.
Microsoft is several times the goliath they were at their Windows monopoly / anti-trust days peak.
If you had to pick the company that will be the most profitable tech company five years from now, who would you pick? Apple? Facebook? Google? Amazon?
It's Microsoft. They'll be the most profitable company on earth five years from now.
Operating income the last four quarters:
Microsoft: $53 billion
Apple is at $67 billion and barely growing. Their operating income has increased by a mere 11-12% in the last four years. Microsoft's operating income increased by about 140% over that time.
Google? They're going to soon have half the operating income of Microsoft. In terms of profit centers they've entirely failed to branch out from search advertising; that dog has largely seen its day, their growth potential in search advertising is rapidly heading toward zero (and Google is soon going to lose all of China for Android; it's a 100% guarantee they will move off of Android as soon as possible, nothing will stop that outcome now). Google as a corporation is a zombie, it walks around headless, directionless, with the least talented management team among major tech companies. Larry and Sergey are entirely responsible for that mess.
Amazon has 1/3 the operating income of Microsoft and will never catch up; and AWS will eventually be spun off anyway. Facebook's growth rate is going to continue to trend downward. Facebook applied the brakes to their thin operating model several years ago, and has gone on a massive cost expansion since. Under the former thin model, Facebook had a distant shot at catching Microsoft in profit, now they don't.
The anti-trust agreement Microsoft signed is part of the reason for that massive boom in prosperity. In pushing for anti-trust action, Silicon Valley did Microsoft a huge favor. It forced Microsoft to be aggressive about looking for other ways to make money that weren't locked to their Windows monopoly position. If that hadn't happened, the odds were drastically higher than Microsoft would have rotted away over time, stuck permanently on Windows and following its erosion of prominence. In the future, Microsoft will make as much money just off of Azure Linux-based services as they do Windows in total.
Also, conveniently, Microsoft is the only tech giant not being pursued for anti-trust right now. They have a wide open field to expand into. Karma is a bitch, Silicon Valley; you helped create something in Redmond that is far more powerful than Microsoft circa 1998, and while it grows unencumbered, your tech giants are all going to be tied down by the government, with every move and acquisition closely scrutinized.
> The anti-trust agreement Microsoft signed is part of the reason for that massive boom in prosperity.
This history doesn't sound right to me. Microsoft languished for a decade after that agreement, completely missing out on the mobile revolution in the process. Their resurgence seems to have mostly occurred in the past 5-6 years (since Nadella took over), so it seems kind of odd to credit an anti-trust agreement signed 15 years prior.
Zuckerberg and Gates think you can go from cutthroat business executive to kindly old sweater-wearing grandpa in twenty years. Average folk are smarter than the intelligentsia often give them credit for.
Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation, yet when innovation came in the form of Java, the first thing Gates did (as proven by evidence) was to seek a way to destroy it. (because he was a man-child annoyed because he didn’t invent it, and couldn’t find a way to compete honestly). So he did what big bully’s do, he crushed Sun and got all his big boy friends to help.
Watching the video is even more revealing. Future historians will be amazed as to how a border-line aspergers case got away with engineering a virtual monopoly on computing.
I do not know if I would describe it as "border-line aspergers," but there were several obvious things that his prep team/PR should have addressed (e.g., hair, suit, posture, lack of explicit cues for listening to question vs. thinking about response).
I always find it infinitely surprising that these billion-dollar companies with all their prestige are constantly making simple but serious mistakes in every field of activity they are present in.
[+] [-] icelancer|5 years ago|reply
If you've ever been deposed (and I have), then you know that Gates' approach was close to optimal when dealing with lawyers.
Bill's biggest mistake was having a terrible attitude and bad posture when answering questions. He made it too personal. Otherwise, the strict answers were mostly ideal and are often used as tutorials by attorneys to show those two things:
1) How not to have the posture/tone/etc in your voice when answering questions, but...
2) ...that this is an adversarial discussion and you should seek extreme clarity every single time.
[+] [-] twoodfin|5 years ago|reply
Despite having been a mild OS/2 and Java partisan, I agree with the general consensus in this thread that Gates gets a bad rap for surely following his expensive lawyers’ advice on how to respond during a deposition. Boies’ strategy was to assume that as a competitive CEO and logically-minded programmer, Gates would indeed follow that advice to an extreme that could be made to look evasive and sinister. It’s not an accident that they spend so much time arguing over definitions of industry terms or what some Microsoft VP means by “ours”. Boies at any time could have accepted Gates’ understanding and moved on, but instead keeps calmly needling on subtle distinctions to rile him up.
EDIT: Yikes, now rewatching and I forgot that the first half hour of the deposition is Boies reading Gates carefully selected definitions out of the 1997 Microsoft Computer Dictionary and asking him if he accepts them as written. The idea that it was Gates who wanted to litigate terminology is nuts.
[+] [-] Gunax|5 years ago|reply
I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that.
Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire?
Now if Microsoft had restricted users from installing another browser in Windows, then I would agree it's anti-competitive. And this is much more akin to what Apple is doing.
The author wants to paint MS as hypocritical, but aside from being accused of anti-competitive practices, there are no similarities.
And second, I despise how one's deposition attitude plays so much into the media's narrative. It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude, agreeable or flippant, sloppy or well-dressed. The only that that matters are legal facts.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|5 years ago|reply
There was a reason it was browsers.
At the time there was rather a lot of software written against the Win32 API and nothing else. It was a moat. You needed that software, so you needed Windows. The web threatened to bridge the moat -- if people write web applications for Netscape, and Netscape runs on not only Windows but Mac and Solaris and everything else, no more moat.
So the strategy with Internet Explorer was to make it the dominant browser on Windows (which was 90% of desktops), and then add all kinds of IE-specific features and get web developers to use them, so their web pages only worked in IE. Then the user gets a dependency on a web page with an Active X control that runs on Wintel but not Mac/PowerPC or Solaris/SPARC, so they have to use Windows. And they have to use IE, which enables more web developers to target IE instead of open standards.
The problem wasn't that it was free. The problem was that it was free and non-standard and the non-standard bits were tied to Windows.
[+] [-] listenallyall|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotresearcher|5 years ago|reply
The legal system is made of people, and people are exquisitely sensitive to social stuff. It's just not expedient to ignore that.
[+] [-] jtbayly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|5 years ago|reply
Another thing I've learned is that modern CEOs are now expected to both be sucessfull businesspeople, and also humane enough to look good in a deposition and be skilled at deflecting questions.
[+] [-] tus88|5 years ago|reply
Well apart from the OS installed on the device you are buying from an OEM.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
Using dominance in one market to muscle into another is bog standard monopolistic practice, and nominally prohibited.
Conflating bundling with other anti-competitive strategies is unhelpful.
[+] [-] jasoneckert|5 years ago|reply
He makes it very clear in that documentary how much he regrets that he wore his disdain for the antitrust suit on his sleeve, as it played directly into the prosecutor's hands.
[+] [-] DavidSJ|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE&t=38m07s
[+] [-] ImprobableTruth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chance_state|5 years ago|reply
Worth a watch imo.
[+] [-] Sebb767|5 years ago|reply
This is a 29 year old company with a four-digit number of employees worth 17.3 Billion USD. Fortnite alone seems to have been a quite solid share of the App Store's gaming revenue. This is not a "David".
Sure, Apple, Google and Microsoft are worth one to two orders of magnitude more. But this is like seeing a small person fighting a bigger person from the perspective of an ant.
[+] [-] 8note|5 years ago|reply
Goliath would have only been up to like double David's size anyways, so orders of magnitude sounds bigger than the David/Goliath difference.
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|5 years ago|reply
If you are on the other side of this, it is your job to prevent this use of language and make sure that they don't manage to implicate yourself in any way, by nonchalant use of words. Being vigilant about your use of specific words in specific contents, and about querying what exactly they are trying to say by each question seems like a good default approach to the problem of not giving your opponent attorney more ammunition than they should fairly have. I imagine Mr. Gates was used to mistreatment by lawyers and simply speaks their language at that point.
[+] [-] Sebb767|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwned1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] function_seven|5 years ago|reply
If he answers "Netscape Navigator", then the Boies will continue on with the meaning that Gates was viewing them as a competitive threat.
If he answers "None", then Boies can go down the path of Microsoft not giving a damn about interoperability with 3rd-party software.
[+] [-] rdiddly|5 years ago|reply
Is that the goal he's shooting for? To concede as many facts as possible to a hostile interrogator as quickly as possible?
[+] [-] j1vms|5 years ago|reply
The article may come off a little bit too harsh on Gates, but it is essentially right in that the US Gov strategy may have been to score a PR win on Gates and Microsoft. In that way, Gates came across as more on the defence than he perhaps needed to be in the situation. The deposition ended up being a low point from the public's perspective, though any damage has mostly been undone in the 2+ decades since.
[+] [-] zeroimpl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cntrpt9293|5 years ago|reply
Ars is a Conde Naste property intended to get clicks to boost ad revenue potential.
It’s a ‘zine for Internet culture addicts, not a useful legal, engineering, or science forum.
[+] [-] unishark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amatecha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibyat|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fluffything|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|5 years ago|reply
Hahaha, haha, ha. I'll just stop you right there, Dan Goodin.
Microsoft is several times the goliath they were at their Windows monopoly / anti-trust days peak.
If you had to pick the company that will be the most profitable tech company five years from now, who would you pick? Apple? Facebook? Google? Amazon?
It's Microsoft. They'll be the most profitable company on earth five years from now.
Operating income the last four quarters:
Microsoft: $53 billion
Apple is at $67 billion and barely growing. Their operating income has increased by a mere 11-12% in the last four years. Microsoft's operating income increased by about 140% over that time.
Google? They're going to soon have half the operating income of Microsoft. In terms of profit centers they've entirely failed to branch out from search advertising; that dog has largely seen its day, their growth potential in search advertising is rapidly heading toward zero (and Google is soon going to lose all of China for Android; it's a 100% guarantee they will move off of Android as soon as possible, nothing will stop that outcome now). Google as a corporation is a zombie, it walks around headless, directionless, with the least talented management team among major tech companies. Larry and Sergey are entirely responsible for that mess.
Amazon has 1/3 the operating income of Microsoft and will never catch up; and AWS will eventually be spun off anyway. Facebook's growth rate is going to continue to trend downward. Facebook applied the brakes to their thin operating model several years ago, and has gone on a massive cost expansion since. Under the former thin model, Facebook had a distant shot at catching Microsoft in profit, now they don't.
The anti-trust agreement Microsoft signed is part of the reason for that massive boom in prosperity. In pushing for anti-trust action, Silicon Valley did Microsoft a huge favor. It forced Microsoft to be aggressive about looking for other ways to make money that weren't locked to their Windows monopoly position. If that hadn't happened, the odds were drastically higher than Microsoft would have rotted away over time, stuck permanently on Windows and following its erosion of prominence. In the future, Microsoft will make as much money just off of Azure Linux-based services as they do Windows in total.
Also, conveniently, Microsoft is the only tech giant not being pursued for anti-trust right now. They have a wide open field to expand into. Karma is a bitch, Silicon Valley; you helped create something in Redmond that is far more powerful than Microsoft circa 1998, and while it grows unencumbered, your tech giants are all going to be tied down by the government, with every move and acquisition closely scrutinized.
[+] [-] nodamage|5 years ago|reply
This history doesn't sound right to me. Microsoft languished for a decade after that agreement, completely missing out on the mobile revolution in the process. Their resurgence seems to have mostly occurred in the past 5-6 years (since Nadella took over), so it seems kind of odd to credit an anti-trust agreement signed 15 years prior.
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Google internet search, Apple king of Mobile, Facebook Social.
They are all tech but in a way their core businesses are totally unlike one another.
So long as 'Web Browsers happened' - anti-trust or not - then history would be just the same.
[+] [-] andrekandre|5 years ago|reply
how so?
[+] [-] noizejoy|5 years ago|reply
Or maybe I’ve read too much Douglas Adams...
[+] [-] person_of_color|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stakkur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dontbeabill|5 years ago|reply
What a inspiration.
[+] [-] dontbeabill|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Gunax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hickfang|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE
Groklaw has some interesting Microsoft Files:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009122612211929
[+] [-] american_aurora|5 years ago|reply
I always find it infinitely surprising that these billion-dollar companies with all their prestige are constantly making simple but serious mistakes in every field of activity they are present in.