To all,
Washington Post article on interview they had with Mr. Gates prior to his testimony.
Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates
Monday, March 9, 1998; Page F10
Last week, before he testified before Congress, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates sat down with a group of Washington Post editors and reporters to talk about monopolies, innovation and the Justice Department investigation of his company. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.
washingtonpost.com
A few interesting points from Mr. Gates:
"Now I'm quite confident of winning the lawsuit. . . . In terms of the size of the company, I think people think we're a lot bigger than we are. Microsoft has a tenth as many people as IBM does. We have a fifth as much revenue as IBM does. If you take companies in the computer industry, we're not even in the top 10 in size of companies.
We're, at this point, less than 5 percent of software industry revenues. We're less than 1 percent of overall computer industry revenues. Can we continue to grow? Well, as we've always said, not at the rate that we've grown in the past when we started the company from nothing. "
"Now the fact that you've got [Sun Microsystems chief executive] Scott McNealy, who hates PCs, thinks they're an evil thing, never should have been created, he's kind of a high-price, low-volume guy -- you know, I didn't expect to have him sitting there at that time. . . . Go talk to people at MIT, go talk to anybody who's involved in this Internet stuff. They all saw that the browser and the operating system would go together. So for them to act like that's some surprise is a little unusual. But, despite that, you know, I get to go and explain my point of view."
I'd say Mr. Gates has McNealy pegged correctly as a "high-price, low-volume guy". In fact it sounds a lot more monopolistic than the "low-price, high-volume" MSFT model. Now who is calling who a monopolist? ;-)
Regards,
Brian |
