Rocky: in further response to your question: here is a clip from a news item yesterday quoting Bill Gates on the settlement.
``The settlement goes further than we might have wanted,'' Gates said, but it ``is the right thing to do.''
``The settlement will help strengthen our economy during this difficult time and ensure that our industry can continue delivering innovations to the marketplace.''
As you are well aware, this is not an expression of any truth, or of what Gates really thinks, but is rather a code for what he really thinks, the code used by corporate executives and PR flacks everywhere. And it's not a code that takes a supercomputer to crack...it's readily crackable by anyone who has read the Wall Street Journal or watched CNBC for 30 days.
Decoding, Gates says in that quote: "This settlement is a total victory for us. We got everything we wanted and then some. Microsoft fought the law and Microsoft won."
There is no other interpretation possible except by a Microsoft fanatic used to Orwellian doublethink, or someone who is still naive and hasn't cracked the code yet.
And yes, Sun executives use the same code, except that McNealy sometimes slips and says what he really thinks, and I'm sure he catches hell for it from this PR people. Even Ballmer occasionally slips, e.g., his famous "I say to heck with Janet Reno" gaffe.
--QS |
