To: TheRainmaker who wrote (20840 ) 9/7/1998 3:39:00 AM From: Daniel Schuh Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 24154
Witness Lists Suggest Strategies of Microsoft, U.S. nytimes.com I know this isn't worth much, Tim, that liberal rag the NYT being so, uh, ill-informed, compared to the authoritative Stokely Carmichael. Quotes here are again for amusement only.Absent from the Microsoft witness list is Gates, known as a brilliant and energetic executive who is involved in every important decision made at the company. Gates was omitted from the witness list, Murray said, because the eight executives included were those on the "front lines of each of the issues raised in the government's case; Bill Gates was not as directly involved in these issues." Yet the Justice Department and states contend that Gates is the central figure in Microsoft's strategy in the Internet software market, and his memos and e-mail correspondence are a key part of the evidence in the case. One person who was at the recent videotaped deposition of Gates said that Microsoft's lawyers might have determined that putting him on the stand could hurt them more than it helped. "He's so argumentative and contentious," this person said, "that Gates kind of took himself out of contention." During the deposition, Gates not only professed to many memory lapses but, this person said, disputed seemingly innocuous facts like definitions of computing terms that appeared in Microsoft's own documents. Gates, this person said, also professed not to know the level of Microsoft's sales and profits and not to know the share of the operating system market held by Microsoft's Windows. Don't know much about history Don't know much biology Don't care much about the stock price All I care about is "great software". Cheers, Dan.