Caught about 30 minutes of the senate hearing on C-SPAN. Missed the opening statements. Hope they re-run it later. Gates and McNealy both looked good, with Barksdale and Dell less so.
No real hardball questions either way that I saw, though the senators seemed pretty well prepared.
Hatch asked about the "exclusiveness" of the ISP contracts, but it looked like the MSFT loosening action yesterday defused that issue effectively. Hatch was not as abrasive as I'd expected from recent sound-bytes.
Leahy (or was it Hatch?) asked about the channel licenses on the desktop, and Gates and Barksdale gave their stock answers.
An Ohio person had his staff call Dell and ask for pre-loaded Navigator, and was told no for vague "Microsoft" reasons. Michael Dell answered that they do pre-load it but only for large corporations that request it.
Thurmond asked about the "chinese wall" between apps and systems and Gates responded that no, apps talks to systems but externals also talk to systems, and mentioned that MSDN is a huge store of information on MSFT systems. No followup from Thurmond. I wonder if he understood his own question.
Ted Kennedy asked Gates if he thought Barksdale and McNealy's complaints were just sour grapes. Bill didn't really answer. Kennedy also said what MSFT has accomplished was "magic", but then senators like to be flowery.
Stewart Alsop came across as pretty pro-Gates, stating that the industry needs a dominant OS and has chosen MSFT. He also said he thought with IE4 MSFT had passed NSCP, at which point Barksdale told him to "stop dissing my product".
Barksdale said he didn't think Windows would be de-throned in his lifetime. McNealy said Windows was the best asset after the English language, and suggested that getting users to switch was like trying to get them to speak Dutch. He also said he wasn't targeting PC markets, to which Gates said "that's not what he says outside the hearing room".
All of the panelists said flat out that new laws or regulation are not needed in the software industry, in a way I believe will be hard to spin. It will be interesting to see if Hatch tones down his musings on an "Internet Commission". |
