How Microsoft Sought Friends In Washington
Excerpt from article by John M Broder and Joel Brinkley from The New York Times, Sunday, November 7, 1999, Page 1
Washington, Nov. 6 – Twenty months ago, Representative Billy Tauzin walked into the office of William H. Gates 3rd, chairman of Microsoft, bearing a 10 inch by 10 inch white box and a warning.
Mr. Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the telecommunications industry, placed the box on Mr. Gates's desk. Inside was a lemon meringue pie, a reminder of another pie that had been thrown in Mr. Gates's face several weeks earlier by a Microsoft critic. The message to Mr. Gates, the richest man on earth and the leader of the digital world, was blunt: You need to make friends in Washington.
At the time of Mr. Tauzin visit in early 1998, the Justice Department was contemplating filing its antitrust suit against Microsoft.
"I told him he was being demonized," Mr. Tauzin said in an interview. "I said he had to win the antitrust case in court, but there was also the court of public opinion."
Mr. Gates apparently took Mr. Tauzin's message to heart – with a vengeance. While Microsoft and its executives contributed a relatively modest $60,000 to Republican Party Committees in 1997, those contributions shot up to $470,000 as part of the company's overall political contribution of $1.3 million in 1998. The 1998 figure included donations to political candidates, with the bulk of the money going to Republicans. This year, the company's contributions of nearly $600,000 have been more evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission records."
(Complete story in The New York Times, Sunday November 7, 1999, page 1)
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