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.
I've watched almost 2 hours of the deposition videos now, and I think Gates went far beyond trying to seek extreme clarity. The diversion in part 4 about document stamps is a case in point.
It is an adversarial process, so you must not rely on the usual expectation that colleagues will take the charitable interpretation of your words, but Gates being unable to even possibly understand what his own emails mean, is evasive to the point of raising suspicion.
"Raising suspicion" isn't really a concern in this context. And of course he understands what his own emails mean. Seeking extreme clarity when discussing them is not the same as not understanding them.
We seem to disagree about the seeking extreme clarity issue -- I believe he was intentionally obfuscating, or at least have that suspicion.
As for suspicion, from the article:
---
At one point, Thomas Penfield Jackson, the judge hearing the case, chuckled, too. When Microsoft lawyers argued during a closed-door session that the deposition was turning into a side show and government lawyers should be barred from showing any more segments during the trial, the judge denied the motion, saying: "If anything, I think your problem is with your witness, not with the way in which his testimony is being presented." Jackson continued:
"I think it's evident to every spectator that, for whatever reasons, in many respects Mr. Gates has not been particularly responsive to his deposition interrogation. Everybody at your table has reflected skepticism as the testimony is presented."
---
I'm characterizing the "whatever reasons" as suspicions. I suspect the judges did come to a conclusion on those reasons when it came time to deliver their opinion, and those reasons were damaging.
Any and all depositions are recorded, not just those the USG does. Generally just audio though, in my experience. It is one of the primary methods used to (attempt to) impeach witnesses, along with obviously being used to gather evidence. I handled multi-million dollar mesothelioma cases and we had both audio recording and someone transcribing the testimony of deponents at every deposition. Other firms occasionally filmed theirs. Which is just to say there is nothing unique or nefarious about Gates being recorded.
Edit, to add: maybe there are some novice or low-budget attorneys that don’t record them, but if you don’t record them it basically defeats the entire purpose.
"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."
Thanks for that.
But if we're being realpolitik about it - shouldn't the 'objective' be to use easy to understand arguments that work well as sound-bytes and zingers, and simpleton analogies so that both the generally uninformed congress, press and population at large will be convinced either directly or by the perpetuation of the 'easy to understand arguments'?
And then to be likeable, which is the #1 thing that will give credibility?
As you say, it's a 'PR stunt - meaning the objective is not 'clarity' - it's more like winning a political TV debate.
If you want to see a more recent example of how to handle a deposition, search the Marcus Limonis depositions on youtube. In my opinion he is an even better textbook case of how to handle a deposition.
Lemonis says "I don't recall" about 10000 times in the span of 3 hours. I understand it's excelent attorney advice, but should Gates have tried the same thing he would have looked even worse in the court of public opinion. His diversions have at least some tact compared to Lemonis' bluntness.
How many times were you on the witness list for trial. Not all deponents are of equal importance or relative value. If Bill Gates was an important potential witness at trial, then there is every reason to tape his deposition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft was working on the .NET framework to beat Java. They had J++ to replace Java which became J# and then C#. I think they got sued over it being too much like Java and had to change it.
Now Microsoft has open sourced .Net to run many languages on different platforms.
Of course. But it strengthens the argument. The govt's job is not to guess what might happen or how the market will react to new technology. It should only intervene as a last resort, when there is absolutely no market-based solution possible. It wasn't like the AT&T antitrust suit, where the defendant had existed, mostly unchanged, for 50 or so years.
It requires zero malice and zero plans to dominate the market to add ActiveX to IE. I have 1000s of plugins (which MS and partners did via OLE/COM etc...) and a new tech becomes popular (browsers) then it would be obvious to pretty much any engineer that I'd want to find a way make it possible to use those plugins in a browser.
There's no need to make up some story about them doing it to force people to be Windows only.
The same stuff applies all over. Why did Apple use Objective C as the core way to interact with MacOS X? To the person that distrusts Apple they'll claim it is solely to lock in developers. Some developer makes an app in Objective C, it's too much work to port. I'm pretty sure though the charitable view is it was inherited from NextStep. The person that distrusts Apple will still claim it was a choice that Apple could have chose something more compatible but stuck with it because it had lock-in benefits.
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.
On that front, you could argue that using tone and posture could be used as a deflection. Discussions around the case will often dedicate some of the time discussing this tone and posture. This makes it easier to claim that the opposition is biased against Gates over something that shouldn't matter.
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.
Between secureboot disabling, mokutil, and Microsoft signing Ubuntu and Red Hat kernels directly, I think it's pretty clear there's no desire for lock-in and that it's actually a security feature.
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.
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.
But to mock toilets in the way you have just done is to miss the point.
Billg is such a nerd problem solver (and I mean this in the most positive way) that he’s capable of investing and marshaling huge engineering focus on this outcast subject, just because he sees it as the crux of the actual problem.
He’s not thinking about Linux any more, he has moved on, there’s something more important to him, and that’s why he was willing to help make this particular documentary, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> [...] 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.
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.
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.
Its funny, Boies seems to want him to take the question very literally, but if you take the question very literally its asking how popular the term is in general in microsoft. Gates would have no knowledge of what words people use when he's not around, so if you have to take the exact literal meaning, he wouldn't know.
There's a reason we normally don't take questions as fully literal in day-to-day life.
I find myself running into this at work in many conversations. People imply that certain things are happening often. But they obviously have no numbers. Or people ask me for numbers on things that we have not investigated. I have however started getting better at getting those numbers. It feels so much better to make decisions on data but it's so much easier to make decisions off the cuff (for a while).
Of course bill has not run a survey of the commonality of the use of the term of proprietary api in microsoft communications, so "I do now have that data".
Not a great answer when you have turned over gigabytes worth of internal correspondence to the government. Surely almost any vaguely common term was used by someone at Microsoft.
Boies tries to pull Gates repeatedly during the deposition into this kind of trap.
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.
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.
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."
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.
That's why I think he should have taken his own interpersonal and forced that through.
Which browser was he concerned about? Internet Explorer. Why? Because it's their product - in the browser space, that one is literally his main concern.
Evoking a "That's not what i meant" response comes across rather differently than the wordplay shown here.
And having the attorney narrow the question to sth like "but out of IE's competitors, which one concerns you?" is the open door you're looking for.
("None really concern me in any sense of the word.", etc.)
Even in the Clinton case there was a good reason he was asking for clarification. In his grand jury testimony he had stated "There's nothing going on between us." If 'there is' is interpreted as 'there is currently', then the statement is truthful; if it is interpreted as 'there is and has always been', then the statement is false.
Similarly, his statement "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" wasn't technically a lie in the context of the case. The investigation lawyers had textualized the definition of 'sexual relations' to be limited to PIV sexual intercorse, which he hadn't engaged in. So in a legal context his statement of not having 'sexaal relations' and his admission to having an 'improper physical relationship', were in no way contradictory.
However, when you take the statements out of that context and put them in the context of public opinion, it appears to be a bold faced lie. The more you play the game, the worse it looks outside of that context.
Having been deposed once the other lawyer spent 12 minutes asking me questions around a thing. The crux of the matter was if I had been verbally informed of what a line item was or if it was illegal to charge for said line item. This line item was unmarked on my receipt but marked on a different customers receipt as an illegal item to charge for.
Lawyer tried constantly to get me to answer a question that would set them up. At the end they gave up and asked "did they tell you this item was for X and they were not allowed to charge for that". "No.". The deposition ended there.
Given it was not a huge deal litigation and the deposition took place in my lawyer's dining room it was actually an interesting experience and not really uncomfortable. It was akin to doing a programming interview. Actually a lot less was on the line.
There was a reason it was the dining room. The guy wanted to make you feel comfortable, forget all about the deposition and just have a chat... so he can nail you to the cross with your own words.
Way to read. MY LAWYERS room. The end of the deposition was THEIR lawyer realizing they had no shot. The settled a few days later which is what we wanted.
I watched a bit of the deposition online - they do actually discuss the definition of web browser for a bit (and reasonably so, it is the primary thing this is about)
Frankly, he should have immediately replied "Internet Explorer".
Because that's the browser his company makes, so, amongst browsers, that should have been his main concern. No need for wordplay, no looking at competition. Just the concern you'd expect from the CEO: a focus on their own product.
> "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.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
>Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation,
"Innovation" when used by Gates in this context means "profits."
And I think Bill's dislike for Java was only because it was a threat to the Windows OS monopoly. The appeal of Java, as I recall, was that you could run the same application on multiple platforms.
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.
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.
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.
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.