Bill Gates answers questions about Java during a deposition (1998) [video]
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So in the 90's Sun Microsystems created Java, which has two components, the programming language and the runtime. The runtime (the Java you install) lets you run things written in Java on any device regardless of OS or CPU architecture. Write once, run anywhere. This was a huge threat to Microsoft. Why write Windows programs when you could write Java programs and they'd run on any computer?
So Microsoft wrote their own Java runtime called the MS JVM, and made it part of Windows, it extended Java to do Windows-only things, meaning there were now "Java" apps that could only run on Windows, destroying the whole point of Java.
This became part of the antitrust trial because it ruined Sun's product. In a separate case, Sun sued Microsoft and won.
Although adding ReSharper to the party doesn't hurt.
After joining Microsoft, Hejlsberg led the company’s efforts in Visual J++
[...]
Hejlsberg helped make Visual J++ the most popular
and most productive Java IDE in the late '90s.
To MS's credit, .NET did aim to be a true multi language runtime, back to Project 7. They got feedback from many people to make sure many languages could be accommodated (looks like they've since given up on this goal). Ironically, the JVM, with it's strictly less capable VM, boasts far more languages targeting it's runtime. Probably because Microsoft worked against releasing it for other platforms and is still a bit standoffish.
According to Don Syme's blog posts, certain "product team members" said that "generics is for academics only." However, he did not name Anders Hejlsberg as being one of them.
Here's the blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2011/03/15/10141602.as...
Also see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2012/07/05/more-c-net-...
Also see the story from the other side: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/scottwil/archive/2007/10/24/working-...
I wonder if MSR's implementation of generics in .NET 2.0 was why F# got bundled into Visual Studio as a first-class language. IronPython, IronRuby, etc. never got that type of internal buy-in and got spun-off instead.
I've no real clue why F# was productized, but I'd like to think it was because MS realized it has to stay competitive. F# is probably the most advanced language with that level of tooling, support, libraries, etc. I know F# is the only reason I continue to target the CLR. At the same time, MS's F# support certainly feels like it's just lip service, even while their flagship language lacks basics like a REPL. (I know, Roslyn will cure all.) I've yet to see any marketing suggesting F# would be a better choice for many projects; only esoteric sciencey and maths usages see suggested.
What'd really be forward would be for MS to support Rust or a project like that. (I believe they hired the guy behind BitC but I don't think it was for language design.)
This is not true. C# got functional features thanks to the work of Erik Meijer and his team.
His paper "Confessions of a used programming language salesman" about this work, is very well known in the compiler design community.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.118....
Yeah, LINQ was what got enterprise developers slowly started into the FP world.
Is it simply better language features ( typing, generics, etc.?), or does the argument also include .NET and the CLR?
Will Microsoft open up development on unix systems (not mono)? I've interpreted signals from the CEO as an indication this could happen. What about visual studio?
C# the language is superior in essentially every way to Java. Far less code = less bugs. F# takes it up another notch, while allowing you to keep interop.
Microsoft has had plenty of opportunity to officially support Mono, but they have not. Their patent promise only extends to Mono as long as you don't run into other issues with Microsoft. If MS wanted, they could, at any time, start really supporting Mono and work to unify runtimes. But anything's possible.
By that measure, APL programs must be the least buggy in existence.
I'm not sure if K generalizes well. It may be that plenty of software has edge cases that must be handled that don't have any elegant representations. I have a hard time believing such little code can actually work that well. But it seems impressive enough that I plan on learning it some and making sure I'm not massively missing out on something because it seems foreign.
From my own experience, less code certainly means less bugs. Even with denser code. Simply having to jump around to find stuff (due to more lines) seems to cause more problems
From this perspective, just factoring out imperative code into a named subroutine becomes a pain point because it adds new symbolic content - a new name, things being passed in, things being returned, things that were in scope suddenly falling outside of it. It is no longer an "organization tool" - you can add a level of block scope and a comment for that instead, and navigate the resulting large functions with code folding. And classes - well, classes become something to avoid!
APL style simply moves this concept down to the per-character level of thought and advocates additional care towards certain measures of readability. "It is more likely," says the APL programmer, "that you will see a typo in a 2 character name than in a 10 character name." The language aids in this process by providing tools that drastically condense common operations and encouraging their use as the default.
I just hit a major bug due to that kind of thing, where stuff wasn't clear due to messy size of the code (customer insisted on C#). If the relevant sections had been sitting on screen, then I most likely would have noticed or never even made it in first place.
I also started working with a new hire, one that isn't an FP proponent, and I'm shocked at the variable names. Even iterating a list of entry objects: I'd naturally write the list as 'es', and the current item 'e'. Versus 'entriesToProcess' and 'current entry'. Or even 'entries' and 'ent'.
People's objections there seem to be that 'entries' is more readable than 'es'. While that may be true in isolation, I'm not sure it matters when working on a codebase above a few hundred lines. The amount if context is likely to be high enough that you're not going to be plucking one line out for changing, and the local context (and typing) should make it apparent it's a plural of e.g. entries, not employees.
Ah, and then there's still the inferior, type erasure based generics. There is nothing on par with C#'s awesome async-await. There's no yield return semantics (when used properly, you can create very clean and robust code thanks to it). You've got to deal with the infamous checked exceptions (I think it's the consensus these days that this wasn't such a good design choice after all). No single-root type system (so you've got Integers and ints, and the latter aren't objects) etc. And there's more, even little things like var keyword or partial classes that don't exist in Java (like many language features, partial classes can be used for evil, but it's very helpful for dealing with autogenerated code). Operator overloading. Nasty and weird syntax for annotations (in compare to C#'s attributes).
Some of these can be a matter of taste for sure and I'm not interested in language flamewars :) I write both Java and C# for living, just personally I prefer the latter.
It would be real big if Microsoft purchased Xamarin and made it free (or much cheaper). They've really gained momentum in recent time and it feels like they are getting recognition from MS now.
C# feels like Java done right. Many of Java's shortcomings can be masked with a great IDE (making setters and getters) nobrainers - but I prefer C#.
Take a look at this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/omervk/scala-for-c-developers
It draws some parallels between C# and Scala.
It's also vb.net, f# and so much else. Even node.js is integrated now! In short, it's a very adaptable IDE (with a lot of features also).
But it isn't Windows anymore since Owin.
What's also nice is that they are innovating the platform for integrations with popular (opensource) like features. Eg. The scaffolding of Rails got integrated into Asp.Net MVC in it's own way. NodeJS selfhostable option is adapted into .Net as "Owin". SignalR is their realtime component, you got live IDE features when developing webapps (it uses SignalR in the background)
It's kinda a mix of "all worlds" :)
At the 32 minute mark it comes to a head where Gates is reading a 3 line mail for a while, rocking back and forth. The email written by Gates read: "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do, to undermine Sun".
Prior to that document being produced in the video, Gates spent a good 10 minutes or so on the arguing the use of the words, "competitive threat" and "undermine" and so forth.
Gates also admitted to speaking directly with Steve Jobs on the phone. This was clearly anti-competitive behaviour.
The next line of questioning then goes into pedantic details about Microsoft's discussions with Apple and the same game continues.
There is no law, implied, explicit, or otherwise that suggests CEOs of competing companies can't, or even shouldn't talk with each other.
While there are many areas that are off limits to competitors (setting price levels, dividing markets, reducing supply) - there are lots of valid reasons for competitors to communicate on a regular basis around issues like standards, purchasing agreements, licensing agreements, etc...
I'm sure that Boo-Keun Yoon (CEO of Samsung) and Tim Cook have frequent conversations trying to settle their differences.
As per the email, the phone call (which in itself cannot be proved but more matter is shared later on when Microsoft CFO/Treasurer met with Jobs and other documents came to light).
The more important question is, was there anything that prevented Sun or anyone else from implementing those in the other OSes? Otherwise it looks like programs are limited to the most basic level everywhere. I do remember the MS JVM was significantly faster than Sun's. So the solution was to slow it down or for Sun to make it's own faster?
It's in Microsoft's interest to make things run faster on it's own OS. For example of a similar issue, see Flash on OS X and Jobs' memo regarding how it sucked and made OS X look bad and refusal to allow it in iOS. How is that a good thing and what MS did bad?
Instead of improving the JVM, Sun decided to make money by suing MS. No wonder that bloated piece of slow crap that looks like crap is dying a slow death and stopped being relevant.
I remember using a popular bittorrent client called Azureus that ran on the JVM. My laptop would get super hot and slow to a crawl. Also remember how J2ME made mobile Java development a complete hell before Windows Mobile and iPhone came on the scene?
http://www.zdnet.com/three-billion-devices-run-java-yeah-but...
This is not true, actually. JDK1.1 1997 had JIT. MS had basically exposed the Variant and COM, the windows handles and part of WinAPI. Overriding paint(Graphic) on a native AWT component (say java.awt.Button) did nothing either and so on.
>>Instead of improving the JVM, Sun decided to make money by suing MS. No wonder that bloated piece of slow crap that looks like crap is dying a slow death and stopped being relevant.
JDK1.3 with hotspot compiler (May, 2000) had the fastest JIT by far.
> It was the fastest Windows-based implementation of a Java virtual machine for the first two years after its release.[1] Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, sued Microsoft in October 1997 for incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard.[2]
Which is the fastest JVM after 1997 is essentially a moot point after the lawsuit was filed.
I also like how Apple completely sidestepped such kinds of situations in iOS by disallowing third party SDKs and alternate browser engines. If there can be no Netscape or Java, there is no threat and no need to kill something and potentially get into trouble. Same with Google and Chromebooks.
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flas...
The clause was removed just 5 months later; there were rumors that potential antitrust issues were involved:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/05/apples-compiler-policy-...
History repeats itself.
> The more important question is, was there anything that prevented Sun or anyone else from implementing those in the other OSes?
Yes, they made calls to native microsoft frameworks etc.
> I do remember the MS JVM was significantly faster than Sun's.
Lets dig out the binaries and do a perf test.
> So the solution was to slow it down or for Sun to make it's own faster?
This comment makes no sense. No idea what you mean by it.
> It's in Microsoft's interest to make things run faster on it's own OS.
This isn't about performance
> How is that a good thing and what MS did bad?
Who said it is any different?
> Instead of improving the JVM, Sun decided to make money by suing MS.
Yea they just abandoned the JVM in 2005. Hasn't changed since.
> I remember using a popular bittorrent client called Azureus that ran on the JVM.
Java for front end had requirements that most desktops of the time failed to meet. So what?
> Yes, they made calls to native microsoft frameworks etc.
Uhm, yes, that's how you run things on another platform. You have to call that platform's APIs. Sun's JVM won't be able to create an AWT window without calling WinAPI's CreateWindow. They have to call the native APIs at some point or another.
The simple facts of the case are that Sun license the Java brand to someone who wants to implement a JVM/API but you have to pass the TCK/JCK testsuite to keep the license. MS would have failed that.
How does this differ from what Google did with Android, effectively leading to "Java apps that can only run on Android"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google
Sun settled with Microsoft before a verdict was reached, so the question of IP and if alternate implementations of a language syntax is allowed wasn't answered then.
In the antitrust suit, all that was answered was that Microsoft used its advantage with its operating system monopoly to push its version of the Java runtime. The effect was that Microsoft were not allowed to bundle their runtime, but had to offer users the choice - they were not found to be violating Sun's IP in implementing a runtime.
Syntax of a programming language not being IP protected is probably a good thing for developers, regardless of what you think of the Microsoft situation. The API being protected is a separate issue, as is the trademark on the name (which applied in the Microsoft case but not in Google's since they didn't use the trademark term in their implementation)
But in the case you cited, the API was found to be not protected (which is also the proper ruling in my opinion).
"If Sun doesn't want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language - or - 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way"
http://www.fosspatents.com/2011/07/judge-orders-overhaul-of-...
One wonders how much better the world would be if Google had hired some first employees that preferred expressive languages.
Microsoft was a Java licensee, and Sun claimed the license required them to implement the standardized Java interface. Sun sued over the license and antitrust issues.
Google isn't a Java licensee. Oracle sued over copyright issues.
Java also seems nonsensical for Sun. How were they supposed to make money off it? Especially as a hardware company, it seems a bit odd to target all platforms. And in the end, how could Microsoft not buy Sun for a measly $2BN?
The incentive for Sun probably was in part that they wanted their high end workstations to stay relevant and maybe eventually develop cpu's that accelerated java execution.
The concept of run anywhere, from a code execution standpoint, is fine. That doesn't preclude using platform specific APIs to make the application better. Like using C# but targeting iOS's UI toolkits. Or using signals from a Mono application.
While MS may have certainly intended to fragment Java, the core concept of platform specific APIs isn't inherently a bad thing.
Also note that during this time, MS supported Windows on non-Intel architectures so I'm not sure about the x86 comment.
I'm all for it and see Java as doing quite a bit of good (despite the terribleness of the language and brain-damage it's inflicted on developers, which is a great bit of bad). I just don't get how it helped Sun, and I suppose, history shows it did not.
The way he responds is almost like he is playing a high-level chess match, which is unfortunately absolutely necessary because the person deposing him is fishing for a simple "yes" answer to a question without all the context he already provided (so that this can be introduced in a dramatic way such that even if those deciding the case get the full context later they will have already made up their mind that "Java == Competitive Threat" based on the introduction).
Having been on a 6 week long jury trial that included a lot of these sorts of deposition "revelations" where people (who you'd think would be smarter, though it is difficult to adjust for how much stress this sort of questioning puts them under) said something that sounded terrible in local context (but innocuous in the wider context that the defense later showed), the local context that is introduced first is really all that sticks with a lot of people, if the majority of the people on my jury were any indication.
In this case, all of his answers are smart, which isn't that surprising since like him or not Bill Gates is clearly a really smart fellow (and one who was surely coached for this up-front by a crack legal team).
The case was Fleischmann v. DJO, San Diego County Courthouse, late July to August 2013, presided over by Judge Joel M Pressman.
The plaintiff lived in Colorado and the case involved a lot of care-givers from that area as well as "expert" witnesses from as far as Alaska, but the company he was suing was based in San Diego. Given the high number of witnesses unable to attend a trial so far from where they are based, we had to deal with a lot of deposition-based testimony, some of them shown to us in video form and some read aloud in reenactment by lawyers. And even in cases where the depositions aren't directly shown to the jurors they are still highly used by lawyers in an attempt to get present-at-the-trial witnesses to contradict their deposition statements.
You might want to tone down the accusations of lying when you don't really know what you're talking about (or I guess you can just use a nicely green throwaway account to hide behind).
Q: Did you send this email Mr. Gates, on or about Aug 8, 1987?
A: I don’t remember sending it.
Q: Do you have any doubt that you sent it?
A: No it appears to be an email I sent.
Q: You recognize that this is a document produced from Microsoft’s files, do you not?
A: No.
Q: You don’t?
A: Well how would I know that?
Q: Well, you see the document production numbers down at the bottom?
A: I have no idea what those numbers are.
Q: Do you recognize this as the form in which email has been printed out by Microsoft?
A: I don’t know what that means. All email printed by anyone looks just like this. So the fact that it looks like this doesn’t give me any clue as to who printed it.
Q: Well, let’s begin with that sir. E-mail printed out by other people are not stamped with Microsoft confidential stamps and Microsoft document production numbers. You would agree with that?
A: That has nothing to do with printing out.
Q: Do you understand my question sir?
A: Nope.
Q: Okay. Do you see down at the bottom where there are “confidential” stamps, and a stamp that says “Attorneys only”, document production stamps? Do you see those?
A: I see the stamps. I can’t characterize whether they’re document production stamps. To me they look more like you’d see on a prisoner’s uniform.
Q: You don’t have any knowledge about these stamps, it is your testimony? You don’t know what they are?
A: I’ve never seen a stamp like that. I’ve never used a stamp like that.
Q: Haven’t you seen stamps like that in every single one of the documents that you’ve been shown during this deposition?
A: (To counsel) Can you get me all the exhibits?
Look at it another way - which of those question would you have answered differently? Perhaps the only error he made was when he said, "I've never seen a stamp like that" - he should have said, "I don't recall ever having seen a stamp like that."
Also, opposing counsel gets to use notes while you don't. In my case, I was questioned about emails that, printed, where most of a ream of paper. They where trying to trip me up, get me confused, etc, and I was essentially being quizzed on the emails, content, and timeline of very stressful events that occurred over two years -- all without notes. I really wanted to point out that I write things in emails because my memory is fallible. That's why date stamped written records are useful.
My lawyer also had me answer all date questions in a formula, again to avoid misstating things. Instead of saying, eg, X happened in August, I had to say X happened around august, or around fall, etc. It seemed like clarity was your enemy -- opposing counsel could get you to make mistakes on minor details (did X happen at the end August or the beginning of September? who knows; that's why I use a calendar) and then use that to claim the major details where unreliable.
* From the NYTimes article introducing the video:
In this short film, I sought to creatively reinterpret the original events. (I’ve not been able to locate any original video recordings, so I’m unsure how closely my actors’ appearance and delivery resembles the original participants.) My primary rule was the performance had to be verbatim -- no words could be modified or changed from the original legal transcripts. Nor did I internally edit the document to compress time. What you see is, word for word, an excerpt from what the record shows to have actually unfolded. However, I did give the actors creative range to craft their performances. As such, this is a hybrid of documentary and fiction. We’ve taken creative liberties in the staging and performance to imbue the material with our own perspectives.
Later on around the 30 minute mark is when Bill Gates begins to stutter and constantly avoids directly answering the correctly phrased questions.
Can anyone clarify how this lawyer system works in regard to the involvement of fields they are not intimately familiar? I mean, I know certain lawyers specialises in tech or corporate matters, but it is entirely unrealistic for someone to both be knee-deep in matters of the law and technology (or any other matter they are not necessarily trained in). Do they consult with tech experts? Study up? Guess their way through?
I'm just reminded of what i see as totally botched lawmaking in fields where it seems a certain level of education in that field would be required to make sound decisions on it's behalf. Might be of other reasons than education (i.e. privacy vs government power), but watching this I can't help but feel there's a correlation.
I assume the chasm is only getting greater the more layers of abstraction we add to our technology stack. We're already seeing situations where the only one who can discuss a given case properly, is the accused himself.
There is a difference between the common incompetence of elected officials and the existence of competent lawyers in high profile cases.
I actually did work related to this sort of matter a number of years back. I was admittedly working with top-level lawyers but my impression was that they were very sharp and understood the basic issues pretty well.
> What did you mean when you asked Mr. Maritz whether or not, "We have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun"?
The Fifth Amendment doesn't help you here (for those of you who think it might). You can only use that to avoid incriminating yourself criminally and, then, it does not simply permit you to give whatever answer you want. When you invoke the Fifth you have to refuse to answer the question, you can't just lie.
And while perjury may be a stretch in most cases, there is also the matter of the jury's opinion of you as a witness (assuming that the case eventually goes to trial and you get confronted with your own deposition transcripts). If they think your memory seems a tad selective, then they're apt to assume that any fact you've "forgotten" is the worst possible fact for you. There are also concerns like civil/criminal contempt and other sanctions against your side in the litigation.
There is also the small matter of morality. Many of us think that you shouldn't lie in a deposition even if you can get away with it.
Depositions are sworn testimony. Even if you'd prefer not to answer the question, you have sworn to be truthful. Responding "I don't remember" to a question just because you'd prefer not to answer would violate your oath.
Therefore, i think he is handling the situation rather well.
> "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun?"
> "I want to get as much mileage as possible out of our browser and Java relationship here. In other words, a real advantage against Sun and Netscape."
And in a conversation Bill participated in:
> "Apple wants to keep both Netscape and Microsoft developing browsers for Mac -- believing if one drops out, the other will lose interest (and also not really wanting to pick up the development burden.) Getting Apple to do anything that significantly/materially disadvantages Netscape will be tough. Do agree that Apple should be meeting - the spirit of our cross license agreement and that Macoffice is the perfect club to use on them."
It's a very different Gates from the philanthrope we see today, but back in the 90ties he was a bit of a dick.
It's a bit slow to watch it all, but the entire thing appears to be transcribed here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micro...
IMO Gates the businessman is just a ruthlessly competitive adversary. I don't even see a conflict between him then and his philanthropic activities now.
It was also covered pretty well at Groklaw http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107...
Well, anticompetitive adversary.
> I don't even see a conflict between him then and his philanthropic activities now.
He certainly seems to be pretty good at both jobs.
Touche
>He certainly seems to be pretty good at both jobs.
I agree, and I am glad he gave us a likeable trait within his lifetime, unlike many of his robber-baron contemporaries and predecessors.
Q And first let me ask a general question, and that is: Did you believe that from Microsoft's standpoint it was desirable to have as many pure Java applications as possible?
A We weren't focused on that as a goal, no.
Q In fact, is it fair to say that you preferred fewer pure Java applications to more pure Java applications?
A We preferred more applications that took advantage of our APIs, and so we worked with ISVs to maximize the number that took advantage of our APIs.
Q And your APIs were not pure Java APIs; correct?
A No. Some were, and some weren't.
Q Yes, sir, some were, and some weren't. But the APIs that you wanted people to use were APIs that were not pure Java APIs; correct, sir?
A No. We were glad to have people use both.
Q Were you indifferent as to whether they used your pure Java APIs or your proprietary APIs?
MR. HEINER: Objection.
THE WITNESS (Bill Gates): You've introduced the word proprietary, and that completely changes the question. So help me out, what do you want to know?
Q BY MR. BOIES: Is the term "proprietary API" a term that you're familiar with, sir?
A I don't know what you mean by it.
Q Is it a term you're familiar with in your business?
A I really don't know what you mean. You mean an API that you have a patent on?
Isn't that a good question? An API is essentially a function header.
eg. void print(string Text);
How can it be proprietary unless it was patented or something? See Oracle vs. Google.
While talking to a court one has to be exact. Perhaps the lawyer meant an API implementation that is copyrighted?
If the lawyer had said "Yes", he could have answered "No": Gates knows that patents don't really apply.
Otherwise the lawyer would have had to define it, which runs the clock down on how long Gates had to actually answer questions.
>If the lawyer had said "Yes", he could have answered "No":
No to what? The original question was whether Gates was indifferent to developer usage pure vs. proprietary APIs.
This was an attempt by the lawyer to color the APIs as proprietary while asking about pure Java vs. Microsoft's API functions and Gates wanted to know exactly he meant by that term before giving an answer to the question which could imply that was agreeing with the lawyer that the API was "proprietary", which could mean different things to different people.
It's like a lawyer asking "Do you like the brand of the beer you stole?",
The proper answer is "What do you mean, stole?".
Not, "No, I don't like Budweiser".
[0] Your legal system may varies but it's often about judging the intention and then the consequences.
If the lawyer can prove or make BG admits JAVA is a threat then BG's actions against JAVA can be seen as deliberate rather than accidental or unfortunate.
Because the "Oops I didn't think tweaking JAVA API so it works only on Windows would hurt SUN that is trying to sell a JAVA thingie that works everywhere" card wouldn't work that well and it would established deliberate questionable practice.
In this case it might or might not be something like that.
I think the government ultimately dropped that angle.
I talked it over with a law-school friend of mine and he agrees that the initial deposition was handled very badly by Gates, so much so that it is used as an example of "what not to do in a deposition" in law schools. I wonder what people here are praising Gates about. :)
Edit: Here's another article: http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...
Besides, what was the outcome of the trial? If I understand:
- It started in May 1998,
- In April 2000, it was judged that Microsoft acted consistently in an anti-competitive wat,
- In June 2000, judge Jackson orders the break-up of Microsoft into two companies. It was reverted in September 2001, presumably because it doesn't make sense anymore.
- In November 1998, Microsoft is ordered to stop selling products which contain an incompatible version of Java. Sun wins this ruling.
- In 1997, Microsoft is ordered not to require OEMs to ship IE with Windows.
It looks to me that all those interviews have led to very little outcomes. Any expert's opinion on this?
"""
Indeed. I mean, people think that Gates is being so clever with his pedantic word-play jargon games, but they are forgetting is that the Federal prosecutor is smarter at word games, is well versed in law, and can easily pick out minutiae. He would have just made Gates wait 6 hours and ask the question again and again and again, until finally, he writes up a report saying how uncooperative Mr. Bill Gates was during the deposition (whose entire point is that you are supposed to cooperate) and thus making the case of plea bargaining even harder. (He is quite smart. Probably top of the class at Harvard law knowing how federal prosecutors are hired.)
The whole idea of a deposition is you try and co-operate. If I were a judge do you see why I'd take a very dim view of that tape? The article is cnn's main story from that year.
But as a sign of how worried Microsoft is about the effect of the videotape, the company brought in a hired gun to talk to reporters about how depositions are typically combative and involve "jousting" and, in that sense, how Gates' deposition was "unremarkable.""
It might seem quite funny and clever to you but an average American outside the Valley probably sees it very different - an overpaid arrogant CEO.
"""
As for how come there was very little outcome, apparently it's a fairly well established claim in various law journals that the whole reason MSFT case failed was because after 9/11, they didn't seem to want to go after an American champion. Or MSFT would've been broken apart. Prosecuting them changed as political priorities changed. (Date of settlement is November '01). And a Republican revival started around the same time.
Also note that Gates retired a few months later. Official reasoning was given as him feeling burned out, apparently.
Europe wasn't so lenient. Microsoft paid more than $2bn in fines for Windows Media Player and for not giving the choice of web browser in some versions of the OS. Nellie Kroes was the leader here. Including €561 for skipping the browser choice dialog, which was mandatory because of a settlement of Microsoft, for 14 months in 2009.
This is 3%-6% of their worlwide revenue ($30bn circa 2002, $60bn circa 2009).
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_comp...
http://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global-...
I wonder if European trial customs are a bit more intuitive and less based on the preciseness of contracts/laws than in US, leading to shorter, more intuitive decisions?
[1] - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx
My attention perked as I expected to hear a familiar phrase from Pinky & the Brain, and it would have fit the context.
Gates does an impressive job of staying sharp through incessant questioning. The opposing counsel has a job to do, but it's unpleasant to experience.
That was my whole problem with the antitrust trial... it amounted to a bunch of anklebiting by well-intentioned but hopelessly unqualified people.
No. Of course not. I was pointing out the irony of HN user enupten's criticism of the lawyer deposing Gates, while knowing little about being a lawyer. My remark relies upon my assumption that enupten is more likely to be some sort of a techie than a lawyer (and not both).
OTOH, you can't possibly accept MS' weak argument that their hands were forced by engineering decisions, rather than engaging in illegal anti-competitive business practices for the sake of harming their competitors. The mere fact that the government's lawyers and judges were not well suited to create their own competing software products isn't proof that they were wrong about the legality of MS' conduct.
>That was my whole problem with the antitrust trial... it amounted to a bunch of anklebiting by well-intentioned but hopelessly unqualified people.
I was disappointed in the results of the trial as well. What outcome(s) would you have preferred?
I believe that any other consumer-friendly OS, if exposed to the same critical scrutiny that Windows faced, would have fared just as badly in the quality and security areas where Windows has traditionally taken most of its bashing. Windows didn't win over OS/2, MacOS, and Linux because of any skulduggery on Bill Gates's part (and yes, I agree, there was plenty of legitimate skulduggery to accuse Microsoft of perpetrating.) It won because the others sucked even more.
Moreover, I believe that the network effects that arose from the dominance of Windows were far more beneficial than the sort of meaningless competition that prevailed in earlier personal computing eras, where everyone was selling proprietary hardware and OSes that were just different enough from everyone else's to make life annoying and expensive for independent developers. Modern mobile developers don't know how lucky they are that they only have to target two 800-pound gorillas.
So I disagreed strongly with the DoJ's antitrust efforts, and would have even without the involvement of figures like Judge Jackson whose legal talents would have been better spent adjudicating parking tickets. The whole process made me pretty cynical about antitrust actions and our legal system in general.
If I had been in the same scenario, eventually I would have responded:
"Are you trying to obtuse or are do you simply lack basic comprehension skills?"
He's also from the very beginning been strongly opposed to free software.
Who is we? Who are you speaking for? Are you speaking for me? Are you speaking for millions of people his foundation and charity work touched?
Step out of your little bubble and leave your childish comments there.
MS didn't crush people - it crushed companies. There's a big difference.
Companies run by robots, I suppose.
However, it is entirely possible for these people to get another job.
A company is not a person, a person is not a company. Attacking one should not be considered the same as attacking another, our entire economic system is based around the abstraction of organization so as to shield people from legal liabilities incurred by simply pursuing trade. You can't have it both ways, to both enjoy the legal benefits of a corporate structure, and then to be able to claim public sympathy when you get beaten in the market.
Corporate personhood is a dangerous legal concept that Americans believe in for unfathomable reasons, and it causes all sorts of ethical problems, particularly legalization of political manipulations that are considered corruption in other parts of the world.
As for his foundation and whatnot, it could be said that a fairly large number of people, given the sort of financial resources he has, would help "millions of people". Actually, a lot of extremely wealthy people do use their financial resources to help vast numbers of people. Often, they just make donations instead of creating foundations, since other foundations may already exist to do what they want.
As such, it is quite reasonable to disregard the "millions of people his foundation and charity work have touched", as many others would have done the same in his place.
What are you dealing with? Get real, you are sitting on HN waiting for your Uber.
Buggy products? Who has bug free products? Name one bug free product from 10 years ago. Is it going to be some half ass Linux desktop distro? The new bi-weekly 'Windows Killer'?
Lack of free choices 10 years ago was completely normal. Using free alternatives in 2000 as a desktop was laughable at best. Even now, in a golden age of OSS where you have tons of cool tools and cheap processing power. Mature projects have issues with finding quality contributors. I'm not talking about a random jQuery plug-in, etc.
Market spoke and it's 100% clear. I was around when there was a 'movement' of getting Linux distros to every office. That was a decade ago and the only viable competitor that made it into the space was Apple. They borrowed some of their base from *BSD. Which is mostly a server workhorse. Ironic.
Why are you bringing up DRM? What does it have to do with Microsoft? Learn about business schematics and history of it.
> As for his foundation and whatnot, it could be said that a fairly large number of people, given the sort of financial resources he has, would help "millions of people".
It's not about raw $ it's about % of wealth and focus. Handing off money to a foundation for a write off is not 'charity work'.
TLDR: You have no idea how different the technology space was 10 years ago. I can say this with extreme confidence.
I used a combo of Linux & FreeBSD as my desktop OS exclusively from ~2000 to 2005 (when I bought my first mac). For the 4 years prior to that range I only ever booted into Windows to play games.
>As such, it is quite reasonable to disregard the "millions of people his foundation and charity work have touched", as many others would have done the same in his place.
Steve Jobs quote:
>Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology
Also, throwing money at charities is far less effective than try to affect change by working full time on it. If money was the solution, the tens of billions given to Africa would've solved the issues.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/everything-youve-read-about-v...
Also, perhaps you believe more FUD against Windows 7's perceived DRM, but it was also debunked.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/02/oh-the... Perhaps you need to read from more varied news sources than just Slashdot, Groklaw and Boycott Novell/Techrights.
And what have you got to say about Palladium implementation by Apple?
That wouldn't be so bad if it worked with few problems, but somehow, I always seem to get caught up in the DRM bugs in Microsoft's implementations.
How about Chrome on Mac OS 9, or Mac OS X 10.1?
http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/australian-technology/the-w...
Not to mention Chrome developers "trying to enforce their own web standards":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184912
Progress on web standards have always been spearheaded by browser implementations before being standardized, there were many non standard extensions that Netscape implemented that IE had to add support back in the day. IE6 was a particularly bad issue because major browser releases were tied to Windows releases and Longhorn/Vista had to be reset and delayed.
Relevant Revolution OS snippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c&t=6m40s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
They may not have been written by him, but they accurately describe and predict the observed behaviour of Microsoft w.r.t. Free Software under Gates' leadership.
And that's just what MS did to Free Software. Under Gates, Microsoft were just as ruthless towards other competitors, seeking to undermine them in a number of ways (unfairly leveraging their monopoly position, dumping, sabotaging) rather than competing in the marketplace on the merits of their products. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish