Government Lays Out Its Case Against Microsoft nytimes.com
After months of noisy prelude, the antitrust trial against the Microsoft Corp. opened in federal court Monday morning with a pointed personal attack on Bill Gates, the company's chairman, who testified in a taped deposition that he knew little if anything about the key charges leveled against his company by the Justice Department and 20 states.
"My only knowledge is the Wall Street Journal article; it surprised me" Gates said of reports of a meeting in which his company had offered its chief competitor in Internet software a chance to divide the market. Gazing directly at his questioner, brow furrowed, head tilted slightly to the left, he added, "I was not involved" in discussions of the key meetings.
But as the Justice Department proceeded with its opening argument over the next two hours, its lead lawyer in the case, David Boies, presented more than a dozen memos and e-mail messages written by Gates over the last three years, showing clearly that he and other senior Microsoft executives not only knew about the matters in question but had forcefully directed them.
Using memos and documents, the government portrayed a company obsessed with crushing its competitor, the Netscape Communications Corp., and willing to use every tool at its disposal, including threats and financial inducements, to force or persuade other companies to drop any planned or existing alliances with Netscape.
Gates told his questioner at another point in the deposition that he had not even read the government's antitrust suit. As to its central charge, illegal collusion to divide software markets, Gates said only: "I think somebody said that was in there."
Uh huh. Bill didn't even read the suit, but he had no problem telling everybody on the planet it was groundless. That's what happens when you act as your own attorney.
Gates also said that in 1995, "somebody came to me to ask if it made sense investing in Netscape." Shaking his head dismissively, Gates recalled, "I said it didn't make any sense to me."
Moments later, Boies displayed on a 10-foot video screen and enlargement of a memo in which Gates wrote to Paul Meritz, a senior Microsoft executive, that over time Microsoft might have to compete with Netscape. "But in the meantime we can help them," Gates wrote. "We can pay them some money."
We can make them an offer they can't refuse. Does Barksdale have any racehorses?
Leaving the federal courthouse Monday afternoon, William H. Neukom, Microsoft's senior vice president of law and government affairs, said that the government's opening presentation was "based entirely on loose and unreliable rhetoric and snippets that were not in any reliable context." Microsoft will offer its own opening remarks on Tuesday.
The unreliable context refered to here seems be the Mind of Bill, apparently gone prematurely but conveniently senile.
The government also proffered several memos from computer manufacturers complaining bitterly about Microsoft's licensing restriction that prohibited them from offering Netscape if they wanted to offer Windows.
"We're very disappointed," Hewlett Packard wrote to Microsoft last year. "This will cause significant, costly problems. From a consumer perspective, it is hurting our industry.
"If we had another choice of another supplier, based on your actions here, we would take it."
Nah, Microsoft is good for consumers, good for business, good for the world! Nobody really wants an OS that sucks less, anyway. The OEMs all love being kicked around and treated like dirt, Michael Dell explained that to the Senators. Intel has to be told which "innovations" the "consumers" really want. They want what Bill wants.
Cheers, Dan. |
