says Gates
Bill Gates claims the aim of the United States government’s anti-trust action is `to embarrass us every day’, writes Jane MartinsonBill Gates, the world’s richest man and chair of Microsoft, has accused the United States government of conducting a show trial against his software company in its landmark monopoly case, which re-opened in Washington this week.
In an extraordinary e-mail exchange with The New Yorker magazine Gates said that the government had turned the case into “a show trial with the primary goal of embarrassing us every day”. The trial, which is investigating claims of Microsoft’s abuse of its monopoly position, resumed after 15 months of hearings.
The New Yorker paints a picture of a petulant, often childish man who realised that the government was winning the publicity relations war last December and set about trying to change his company’s image.
Some time after Gates had ordered his lawyers to become more accessible to reporters, a senior executive allegedly drafted a set of “image attributes” to be pedalled.
Among these were “Microsoft cares about making a difference in my community”.
A crucial e-mail, setting out Gates’s preferred public image for Microsoft and understood to have been sent in late February, coincided with a frenetic publicity push by the William H Gates charitable foundation which hinted that the Microsoft founder’s fortune would be used to rid the Third World of disease.
But such an account is unlikely to diminish Microsoft’s reputation as an organisation which likes to maintain a vice-like grip on the industry.
The case details the compilation of dossiers on journalists and a “hardcore” mentality among the 31 000 employees of the company in Redmond, Seattle.
Microsoft and the Department of Justice started to present their “findings of fact” to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in Washington on Tuesday.
This stage of the trial is set to last until September 10, when each side can argue against the other’s findings. The judge is not expected to announce his verdict until later in the year.
Although confident that Microsoft’s behaviour was normal business practice Gates regrets that the company was unable to settle with the government before it launched its case in May 1998.
“I wish we could have settled,” he said. “I wished that at the time … We’ve always wanted to settle this thing.”
Gates is understood to believe that any settlement talks were defeated by the government’s desire for Microsoft to seek permission for any new development.
In a rapidly changing world such demands could not be acceptable, he said. “You have to have a business left when you settle.”
One of the options open to the judge is to break up the company.
Chris Shilakes, Microsoft analyst at Merrill Lynch, said last week that the company “could be more dangerous if split into smaller bits”.
Gates’s latest New Yorker profile offers illuminating insights into the life of the man who dropped out of Harvard to write software, including modelling his engagement party on The Great Gatsby and appearing himself as the decadent central character.
But the notoriously badly coiffed, scruffy multibillionaire can also irritate fellow executives, barking at them: “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
A man worth $100-billion raises eyebrows with behaviour which allegedly includes “rocking, volatile outbursts and jumping”, but also handwrites cards to friends, says the magazine.
Gates has clearly woken up to the fact that some in the outside world view Microsoft as arrogant and overly sure of itself. He appears to have ordered a fresh set of “image attributes” which have been promptly leaked: “Microsoft cares about making a difference in my community.”
Others include:
l “Its charitable giving improves the lives of many people.”
l “Microsoft is honest.”
l “Microsoft is a leader in good corporate citizenship.”
l “Microsoft is a company I trust.”
l “Microsoft is a generous and supportive corporate citizen.”