
Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition - CrankyBear
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-spectacular-failure-that-was-the-bill-gates-deposition/
======
icelancer
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.

~~~
angrais
Could you please expand on WHY posture/tone/etc are important? W

~~~
gilrain
Could you explain how it is possible not to understand that posture, tone, etc
are important?

~~~
angrais
I am aware that posture, tone etc are important factors in communication. My
question above asked WHY they are important in this context. Specifically, why
the OP thinks they are important given they have been in such a scenario.

------
twoodfin
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.

------
Gunax
I don't agree with the article at all.

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
> 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.

~~~
listenallyall
That's a pretty poor argument for govt intervention. Why? Because all of that
Windows-only stuff existed, and the market ultimately rejected it. ActiveX
controls? Yeah I remember those. Same with Java applets, Flash, Silverlight.
The government didn't need to get involved in getting rid of any of these.

~~~
sk5t
At the time, both Java and standards-compliant browsers posed major threats to
Microsoft, and Microsoft did a pretty good job of messing up both. Only in
distant hindsight do ActiveX and MSFT's hobbled 1.1 JVM seem inconsequential.

~~~
listenallyall
Neither Java nor "standards-based browsers" are things the govt has any role
or authority to protect. The govt (via anti-trust law) breaks up established
monopolies, and very rarely.

In fact, if Microsoft was indeed threatened by a programming language, or by a
couple of nerdy academics (not even a company), that would greatly weaken the
govt's case that they were a dominant monopoly.

~~~
sk5t
Kind of a strawman argument by dint of hyper-narrow focus, isn't it? Sure,
there are no laws granting the government authority or duty to nurture Java or
browsers; however, what Microsoft did more generally was to squash potential
competition by leveraging their _extremely_ entrenched OS monopoly.

Java is (or was) much more than a programming language. Rather it was viewed
as something more like an operating system. Write once run everywhere, etc. By
comparison I don't imagine Microsoft worried much about Pascal or Delphi.

Further, it seems... difficult to argue that a company that crushes nascent
threats can't be a monopoly.

~~~
listenallyall
> hyper-narrow focus

Lol -- you chose to focus on those 2 specific items, not me.

> squash potential competition

Virtually every single feature of Microsoft desktop OS'es could potentially be
provided by an alternative provider. Many were and still are -- disk
defragmentation, disk compression, anti-virus, firewall, web server, ftp
client, image editing, database drivers, etc etc. People used to pay money for
3rd party utilities to expand beyond DOS's 640kb RAM limit... should Windows
be prevented from handling memory management in order to not suppress
competition? Seems like the most basic function of an OS. Early on, you
couldn't print a spreadsheet in landscape mode without a 3rd-party utility...
should the government disallow Windows from enabling landscape printing? Does
Putty have an anti-competitive claim now that ssh is included in recent
versions of Windows 10? How about accessibility features... should disabled
individuals be denied use of standard Windows releases because the inclusion
of a screen reader, magnification, etc would be anti-competitive with
commercial alternatives?

> crushes nascent threats

Microsoft "crushed" neither Java nor web standards, both of which are doing
fine and outlasted Internet Explorer, the focus of the government's case. Most
of the problems Java does have, starting with poor stewardship, are entirely
Sun/Oracle's own making.

------
jasoneckert
The 2019 documentary "Inside Bill's Brain"
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv29JKmHNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv29JKmHNY))
definitely focused a part on how Bill still hates talking about this
deposition.

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.

~~~
quelsolaar
I was so disappointed with that documentary. 3 hours, with\ bill, and no real
questions about the antitrust stuff, or about Microsoft stance on Linux and
open source, His relationship with Apple and Steve jobs, His relationship with
Paul Allen and Steve Balmer, the birth of X-Box, the war against Lotus123, and
Word Perfect, the original deal with IBM, and the failed tablets, WinFS,
Microsoft Bob, and loads of other things that would be interesting to get his
take on.

~~~
bananamerica
That was really not the focus of the doc. As the title implies, they wanted to
take a peek in the interesting ideas going on in his mind right now.

~~~
quelsolaar
I was hoping we we would find more "Inside bill's brain", then just toilets.

~~~
aaron695
Toilets are a fucking big problem.

Toilets are one of the reason why we left a past of disease and death from
sewage contamination.

Yet open defecation is a problem in so much of the world.

So this is exactly what I wanted to see how he deals with. A hard problem that
is so vital. How does his brain tackle that. Especially how it's unlikely a
computer problem

But they did totally miss the mark on talking about it, it was what I wanted
exactly to see and was disappointed it was so disappointing.

Maybe we couldn't tackle it. But I have seen other specials where he had made
a unique start on the problem.

~~~
quelsolaar
If I got to spend days interviewing Bill, I would love to here about his
projects to build toilets, and eradicate decises, but I would find the time to
ask other questions too.

My feeling was that the documentarian got to make the documentary on the
condition of not asking the hard questions about Bills past.

------
DavidSJ

      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.
    

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/business/longterm/micr...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/business/longterm/microsoft/documents/gatespart8a.htm)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE&t=38m07s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE&t=38m07s)

~~~
ImprobableTruth
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.

~~~
DavidSJ
Sure, but he's clearly being evasive. He could simply have said: "I didn't
type it; I marked it as high importance."

~~~
_-___________-_
Yep, he could have been less evasive, and then they'd have a recording of him
saying "I marked it as high importance."

Being evasive like this is only a problem in depositions to the extent that it
gives the media fuel to make the general public hate you. It's pretty much the
optimal strategy in terms of the deposition itself.

~~~
DavidSJ
Not if it makes the judge hate you, too.

------
chance_state
The entire thing is on YouTube. Part one starts here:
[https://youtu.be/m_2m1qdqieE](https://youtu.be/m_2m1qdqieE)

Worth a watch imo.

~~~
bawolff
Thanks for linking. That was interesting.

I only watched the first little bit, but I could understand how this could
play badly for PR, but i'm pretty sympathetic to gates here. Seems like they
want to use layman simplified definitions of tech concepts, then catch him up
on technical nitty gritty.

~~~
Gunax
Clearly Gates sees where this is going: first ask him to agree to the
definition, then reveal that the definition doesn't include 'viewing HTML' (or
'editing text files', or 'creating images' etc.).

Of course we all know that dictionary definitions are meant to introduce
someone unfamiliar to the topic, and not to enumerate every possible function.
Using that logic I could say that 'cars don't have air-conditioning' since the
definition of an automobile is "A self-propelled passenger vehicle that
usually has four wheels and an internal-combustion engine".

------
Sebb767
> [...] 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.

~~~
8note
Wasn't David a king?

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
I think at the point he defeated Goliath David was still just a shepherd.
There may have been a prophecy he would become king but I don't think he had
even been anointed.

------
Erlich_Bachman
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.

~~~
pwned1
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.

~~~
reaperducer
To the public, it looks like another "It depends on what the meaning of the
word ‘is’ is."

The general public hates lawyers. But it hates weasels even more. And CEOs
acting like weasels even more than that. That's why congressional hearings are
sometimes delightful to watch. It feeds our hatred of CEO "others."

There are plenty of CEOs who can talk to lawyers, even in a public forum, and
do it well. Splitting hairs never looks good. It makes you look guilty.

~~~
meowface
Gates wasn't splitting hairs there, though. "Concerned about" could mean
"concerned about as potential competitors we need to pay attention to",
"concerned about as potential competitors who might gain more market share
than us", "concerned about as potential competitors we might need to stifle",
"concerned about as a potential danger to our browser monopoly", "concerned
about as potential competitors who might develop features users want which we
should also look into developing", etc.

Any company offering a product could be said to have executives who are
concerned about competing products. It could range from malicious, anti-
competitive behavior to simply wanting to provide a good experience.

That's why Gates wanted the lawyer to use less charged, ambiguous language. I
personally believe he was engaging in unethical anti-competitive behavior, but
you're going to have to nail him on it fair and square, rather than playing
word tricks with him.

>The general public hates lawyers. But it hates weasels even more. And CEOs
acting like weasels even more than that.

The lawyer was the one employing weasel words, there, by definition [1].
"Paying attention to" or "aware of" would be a much more fair and clear
phrase.

>Splitting hairs never looks good. It makes you look guilty.

Yes, and the lawyer was probably aware of that and deliberately exploiting the
ability to create such a perception. Either you fall into the trap and later
are pointed to as sounding guilty, or you demand rigor and sound guilty in the
moment. It's a double bind.

[1] Oxford definition of "weasel words": "words or statements that are
intentionally ambiguous or misleading."

~~~
reaperducer
You can act like a weasel and not employ weasel words. They're two different
concepts. Nobody stated that Mr. Gates was using weasel words.

~~~
function_seven
On the contrary, he's making sure that Boies isn't going to weasel meaning
into his responses. Demanding that questions be more precisely-worded than
they are.

------
1vuio0pswjnm7
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."

------
adventured
> 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.

~~~
nodamage
> 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.

~~~
nickfromseattle
Balmer launched Office 365 and Azure, which are two of their biggest product
lines today.

------
noizejoy
And sometimes I wonder, if that PR problem from so long ago eventually gave
birth to current conspiracy theories linked to Bill Gates.

Or maybe I’ve read too much Douglas Adams...

~~~
person_of_color
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.

~~~
colejohnson66
Do people not realize how long _20 years_ is?

------
stakkur
Bill Gates was the prototype for the amoral shitshow that is Mark Zuckerberg.
Cory Doctorow has a great thread on Twitter today about this very topic:
[https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1304811968398729218](https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1304811968398729218)

~~~
voxl
That twitter thread reeks of bias, I couldn't finish or take it seriously at
all. If you want to convince me of something don't go around painting people
as evil capitalist masterminds...

~~~
tingol
Do you have counter arguments to what was said in the thread or are you just
projecting your own bias? It is pretty well known what kind of shitty things
MS did to get where it is, if someone sprinkles insults on top of it on
twitter does not make it less true.

~~~
bawolff
"Shattered" the law is pretty questionable. MS (Feel like i should write M$
for /. nostalgia) had some underhanded bussiness tactics, no doubt (some of
which probably werent even illegal, just scummy), but im not sure shattered
the law is a reasonable description. That's something i would reserve more for
organized crime. Microsoft never extorted people, planted listening devices,
hired hitman, etc. The rabbit hole of crime goes down very far, microsoft did
not stoop anywhere near that far.

~~~
dencodev
The difference is that the mafia has never managed to extort and murder and
then be told they did nothing wrong by law enforcement. The mafia also never
attempted to make the law say they did nothing wrong (outside of small scale
bribery or threats). "Shattered" is more appropriate here because Microsoft
did (and does) try to get favorable legal treatment that extends outsides the
bounds of what the law intended on a national level with far reaching
implications of what others can also get away with.

------
dontbeabill
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.

What a inspiration.

~~~
dependenttypes
Java was never a form of innovation.

~~~
bawolff
Java was very innovative at the time, with byte code and JIT, a more clear OO
design relative to C++, embeddable safetly sandboxed web apps, memory safety
in a "professional" language, cross platform binaries (in a non scripting
language) etc.

The mid 90's was a long time ago. What was exciting then is not exciting now.

~~~
dependenttypes
Everything that you mentioned was already available at the time in other
languages. This is not innovation.

~~~
bawolff
But to what extent was it available in a polished package?

For example, everything in rust was available in other languages, i would
still say it was innovative because it brought all that together into a
polished package that made the right tradeoffs for mainstream usage.

~~~
dependenttypes
> But to what extent was it available in a polished package?

To a large extent. Both Smalltalk and Erlang were mature at that point in
time.

> everything in rust was available in other languages

I am not doubting you but are you aware of any other language with affine
types? I am not.

------
Hickfang
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.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE)

Groklaw has some interesting Microsoft Files:

[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009122612211929](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2009122612211929)

~~~
american_aurora
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.

~~~
echelon
Who should they hire or what should they cultivate to do better?

