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The API one seems even clearer to me:

    Boies: Mr. Gates, is the term proprietary API a term that is commonly used in your business?
    Gates: Let me give you …
    Boies: all I’m trying to do is …
    Gates: … the common meanings that those words could have and you can pick one of them and ask me a question about it
    Boies: no
    Gates: Do you want me to define proprietary API or not?
    Boies: No, I don’t want you to define proprietary API. I didn’t ask you to define proprietary API. I asked you a simple question about whether the term proprietary API was commonly used in your business. Now I’m prepared to sit here as long as you want to to answer questions that I haven’t asked. But I have a certain number of questions that I am going to ask at the end of these other answers. Now this is a simple question. You can say yes, no, or it is used in lots of different ways. But then I can choose what to follow up on. Or you can simply make whatever statements you want and I’ll go back to my question afterwards. Now, is the term property API a term that is commonly used in your business?
    Gates: I don’t know how common it is. It has many different meanings.

Maybe because I'm more technical, but it seems painfully obvious here that this could be an API without open implementation, without open standard or a private one and he avoided that one well and understandably. But I agree with the sibling comments, this was probably as much a PR campaign as an antitrust one.

Its funny, Boies seems to want him to take the question very literally, but if you take the question very literally its asking how popular the term is in general in microsoft. Gates would have no knowledge of what words people use when he's not around, so if you have to take the exact literal meaning, he wouldn't know.

There's a reason we normally don't take questions as fully literal in day-to-day life.

I find myself running into this at work in many conversations. People imply that certain things are happening often. But they obviously have no numbers. Or people ask me for numbers on things that we have not investigated. I have however started getting better at getting those numbers. It feels so much better to make decisions on data but it's so much easier to make decisions off the cuff (for a while).

Of course bill has not run a survey of the commonality of the use of the term of proprietary api in microsoft communications, so "I do now have that data".

The most funny thing is he could probably just have said something like.

No, we don't use that terminology much but other terms which might or might not have a similar meaning.

Because how often do you use the word proprietary API, and how often do you use internal API, Microsoft API, etc instead.

Not a great answer when you have turned over gigabytes worth of internal correspondence to the government. Surely almost any vaguely common term was used by someone at Microsoft.

Boies tries to pull Gates repeatedly during the deposition into this kind of trap.

If you haven’t been deposed this will look weird. But depositions are about “gotcha” moments, so your job as the person being deposed is to play the game and only answer questions with minimal information and force the attorney asking questions to really work for it. It’s about being purely logical. If they ask you what two plus two is, respond vaguely and ask for clarification. “Are you asking about numbers? Or objects? What does plus mean in the context of this question.” Etc.

To the public, it looks like another "It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is."

The general public hates lawyers. But it hates weasels even more. And CEOs acting like weasels even more than that. That's why congressional hearings are sometimes delightful to watch. It feeds our hatred of CEO "others."

There are plenty of CEOs who can talk to lawyers, even in a public forum, and do it well. Splitting hairs never looks good. It makes you look guilty.

Gates wasn't splitting hairs there, though. "Concerned about" could mean "concerned about as potential competitors we need to pay attention to", "concerned about as potential competitors who might gain more market share than us", "concerned about as potential competitors we might need to stifle", "concerned about as a potential danger to our browser monopoly", "concerned about as potential competitors who might develop features users want which we should also look into developing", etc.

Any company offering a product could be said to have executives who are concerned about competing products. It could range from malicious, anti-competitive behavior to simply wanting to provide a good experience.

That's why Gates wanted the lawyer to use less charged, ambiguous language. I personally believe he was engaging in unethical anti-competitive behavior, but you're going to have to nail him on it fair and square, rather than playing word tricks with him.

>The general public hates lawyers. But it hates weasels even more. And CEOs acting like weasels even more than that.

The lawyer was the one employing weasel words, there, by definition [1]. "Paying attention to" or "aware of" would be a much more fair and clear phrase.

>Splitting hairs never looks good. It makes you look guilty.

Yes, and the lawyer was probably aware of that and deliberately exploiting the ability to create such a perception. Either you fall into the trap and later are pointed to as sounding guilty, or you demand rigor and sound guilty in the moment. It's a double bind.

[1] Oxford definition of "weasel words": "words or statements that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading."

You can act like a weasel and not employ weasel words. They're two different concepts. Nobody stated that Mr. Gates was using weasel words.

On the contrary, he's making sure that Boies isn't going to weasel meaning into his responses. Demanding that questions be more precisely-worded than they are.

> Gates wasn't splitting hairs there, though. "Concerned about" could mean...

That's why I think he should have taken his own interpersonal and forced that through.

Which browser was he concerned about? Internet Explorer. Why? Because it's their product - in the browser space, that one is literally his main concern.

Evoking a "That's not what i meant" response comes across rather differently than the wordplay shown here. And having the attorney narrow the question to sth like "but out of IE's competitors, which one concerns you?" is the open door you're looking for.

("None really concern me in any sense of the word.", etc.)

The question cleverly prevented that - it said "non-Microsoft browsers"

Missed that. I stand corrected.

Even in the Clinton case there was a good reason he was asking for clarification. In his grand jury testimony he had stated "There's nothing going on between us." If 'there is' is interpreted as 'there is currently', then the statement is truthful; if it is interpreted as 'there is and has always been', then the statement is false.

Similarly, his statement "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" wasn't technically a lie in the context of the case. The investigation lawyers had textualized the definition of 'sexual relations' to be limited to PIV sexual intercorse, which he hadn't engaged in. So in a legal context his statement of not having 'sexaal relations' and his admission to having an 'improper physical relationship', were in no way contradictory.

However, when you take the statements out of that context and put them in the context of public opinion, it appears to be a bold faced lie. The more you play the game, the worse it looks outside of that context.

The NYT has an amazing video where they got actors to play out the transcript of one of these sorts of depositions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE

Having been deposed once the other lawyer spent 12 minutes asking me questions around a thing. The crux of the matter was if I had been verbally informed of what a line item was or if it was illegal to charge for said line item. This line item was unmarked on my receipt but marked on a different customers receipt as an illegal item to charge for.

Lawyer tried constantly to get me to answer a question that would set them up. At the end they gave up and asked "did they tell you this item was for X and they were not allowed to charge for that". "No.". The deposition ended there.

Given it was not a huge deal litigation and the deposition took place in my lawyer's dining room it was actually an interesting experience and not really uncomfortable. It was akin to doing a programming interview. Actually a lot less was on the line.

There was a reason it was the dining room. The guy wanted to make you feel comfortable, forget all about the deposition and just have a chat... so he can nail you to the cross with your own words.

Way to read. MY LAWYERS room. The end of the deposition was THEIR lawyer realizing they had no shot. The settled a few days later which is what we wanted.

> took place in my lawyer's dining room

their lawyer would (hopefully) not have that motivation

"It’s about being purely logical. If they ask you what two plus two is, respond vaguely and ask for clarification."

That's not 'logical' it's exactly the opposite of 'logical'.

Yes. Just reading the snippet you included, I'm on Bill's side here. "Concerned" can mean all sorts of things!

If he answers "Netscape Navigator", then the Boies will continue on with the meaning that Gates was viewing them as a competitive threat.

If he answers "None", then Boies can go down the path of Microsoft not giving a damn about interoperability with 3rd-party software.

Exactly. If he would have questioned the word 'browser' then he would have played games.

I watched a bit of the deposition online - they do actually discuss the definition of web browser for a bit (and reasonably so, it is the primary thing this is about)

Frankly, he should have immediately replied "Internet Explorer".

Because that's the browser his company makes, so, amongst browsers, that should have been his main concern. No need for wordplay, no looking at competition. Just the concern you'd expect from the CEO: a focus on their own product.

The question was phrased to avoid that response:

> Boies: What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996?

My bad, I stand corrected.

The question was specifically about non-Microsoft browsers.

Yeah they kind of lost me with this line: "For more than six minutes, Gates is unable to concede even the most basic of facts."
Is that the goal he's shooting for? To concede as many facts as possible to a hostile interrogator as quickly as possible?

> "The lack of experience played right into the government’s hand. Instead of portraying a leader in control of his domain and confident in his case and his company’s legal and ethical righteousness, the courtroom videos showed a side of Gates that had never been on public display before. He was petulant, petty, flustered, and dour. He was ineffectual. He was, in a word, beaten."
The article may come off a little bit too harsh on Gates, but it is essentially right in that the US Gov strategy may have been to score a PR win on Gates and Microsoft. In that way, Gates came across as more on the defence than he perhaps needed to be in the situation. The deposition ended up being a low point from the public's perspective, though any damage has mostly been undone in the 2+ decades since.

The opening question here pre-supposes he was concerned. Unless the prior discussion had Gates explicitly saying he was concerned (which I assume it didn’t based on Gates asking about a document using the term), then it makes complete sense to me to respond with a question rather than an answer. I’d have probably gone with “When did I say I was concerned about non-Microsoft browsers in January 1996?”

Yes it seems like a leading question.

You appear to “get” the law game. Unfortunately, you don’t get the Internet game:
Ars is a Conde Naste property intended to get clicks to boost ad revenue potential.
It’s a ‘zine for Internet culture addicts, not a useful legal, engineering, or science forum.

Maybe it sounds different in person, or perhaps this was the umpteenth time it happened and the lawyer was getting frustrated, but on reading that snippet it seems like the lawyer was being the jerk. Just expand upon what you mean already.

Yeah, I actually would have asked the exact same thing: What do you mean "concerned about"? "Concerned" in what manner, and in regards to what possible aspects of those browsers? I can't imagine why anyone would answer such an overly-broad, open-ended question like that.