To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17739 ) 3/3/1998 4:55:00 PM From: Daniel Schuh Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Gates on the Defensive Before Senate nytimes.com Bill Gates spent nearly five hours on the congressional hot seat Tuesday, sidestepping repeated questions about whether Microsoft is a monopoly that engages in predatory and exclusionary business practices while insisting the industry remains highly competitive and Microsoft is in danger of being toppled at any moment. In his first appearance before Congress, the richest businessman in the world at times sounded more like a politician than a corporate chief executive, skillfully avoiding having to directly answer key questions from Orrin G. Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who compared the exchanges to "trying to pull teeth." Microsoft currently hold 90 percent of the operating system market share with its popular Windows system, but Gates refused to characterize that as monopoly, insisting instead that Microsoft products have a very short shelf-life and are constantly threatened by competitors. The hearing was the second in what Hatch says will be a series of antitrust oversight hearings of the software industry. The first was held in November, shortly after the Justice Department sued Microsoft, accusing it violating a 1995 antitrust consent decree by bundling its Internet Explorer browser into Windows.
