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Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

arstechnica.com

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Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#131

Post by nickfromseattle »

nodamage wrote: post #120
adventured wrote: post #43

> No longer the Goliath it once was—in large part because of the ascendance of companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple made possible by a settlement Microsoft signed Hahaha, haha, ha. I'll just stop you right there, Dan Goodin. Microsoft is several times the goliath they were at their Windows monopoly / anti-trust days peak. If you had to pick the company that will be the most profitable tech company five years fr…

> The anti-trust agreement Microsoft signed is part of the reason for that massive boom in prosperity. This history doesn't sound right to me. Microsoft languished for a decade after that agreement, completely missing out on the mobile revolution in the process. Their resurgence seems to have mostly occurred in the past 5-6 years (since Nadella took over), so it seems kind of odd to credit an anti-trust agreement sig…

Balmer launched Office 365 and Azure, which are two of their biggest product lines today.

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#132

Post by specialist »

Gunax wrote: post #56

I don't agree with the article at all. I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that. Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire? Now if Microsoft had restricted users from in…

"...then I would agree it's anti-competitive."

Using dominance in one market to muscle into another is bog standard monopolistic practice, and nominally prohibited.

Conflating bundling with other anti-competitive strategies is unhelpful.

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#133

Post by quelsolaar »

aaron695 wrote: post #121
quelsolaar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping we we would find more "Inside bill's brain", then just toilets.

Toilets are a fucking big problem. Toilets are one of the reason why we left a past of disease and death from sewage contamination. Yet open defecation is a problem in so much of the world. So this is exactly what I wanted to see how he deals with. A hard problem that is so vital. How does his brain tackle that. Especially how it's unlikely a computer problem But they did totally miss the mark on talking about it, it…

If I got to spend days interviewing Bill, I would love to here about his projects to build toilets, and eradicate decises, but I would find the time to ask other questions too.

My feeling was that the documentarian got to make the documentary on the condition of not asking the hard questions about Bills past.

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#134

Post by colejohnson66 »

person_of_color wrote: post #105
noizejoy wrote: post #35

And sometimes I wonder, if that PR problem from so long ago eventually gave birth to current conspiracy theories linked to Bill Gates. Or maybe I’ve read too much Douglas Adams...

Zuckerberg and Gates think you can go from cutthroat business executive to kindly old sweater-wearing grandpa in twenty years. Average folk are smarter than the intelligentsia often give them credit for.

Do people not realize how long 20 years is?

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#135

Post by smt88 »

dependenttypes wrote: post #126
smt88 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the single language that had all these features?

Smalltalk and Erlang for everything except the "webapps" part. For that there was flash.

OK. Java did all of it, including the web apps.

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#136

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

icelancer wrote: post #123
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

".. filmed on purpose to make Gates look bad." It is routine to film in-person depositions.

Five under my belt. None with video.

How many times were you on the witness list for trial. Not all deponents are of equal importance or relative value. If Bill Gates was an important potential witness at trial, then there is every reason to tape his deposition.

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#137

Post by dependenttypes »

smt88 wrote: post #135
dependenttypes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smalltalk and Erlang for everything except the "webapps" part. For that there was flash.

OK. Java did all of it, including the web apps.

Yes, we know that.

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#138

Post by sk5t »

listenallyall wrote: post #97
sk5t wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time, both Java and standards-compliant browsers posed major threats to Microsoft, and Microsoft did a pretty good job of messing up both. Only in distant hindsight do ActiveX and MSFT's hobbled 1.1 JVM seem inconsequential.

Neither Java nor "standards-based browsers" are things the govt has any role or authority to protect. The govt (via anti-trust law) breaks up established monopolies, and very rarely. In fact, if Microsoft was indeed threatened by a programming language, or by a couple of nerdy academics (not even a company), that would greatly weaken the govt's case that they were a dominant monopoly.

Kind of a strawman argument by dint of hyper-narrow focus, isn't it? Sure, there are no laws granting the government authority or duty to nurture Java or browsers; however, what Microsoft did more generally was to squash potential competition by leveraging their extremely entrenched OS monopoly.

Java is (or was) much more than a programming language. Rather it was viewed as something more like an operating system. Write once run everywhere, etc. By comparison I don't imagine Microsoft worried much about Pascal or Delphi.

Further, it seems... difficult to argue that a company that crushes nascent threats can't be a monopoly.

Re: Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition

#139

Post by listenallyall »

sk5t wrote: post #138
listenallyall wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither Java nor "standards-based browsers" are things the govt has any role or authority to protect. The govt (via anti-trust law) breaks up established monopolies, and very rarely. In fact, if Microsoft was indeed threatened by a programming language, or by a couple of nerdy academics (not even a company), that would greatly weaken the govt's case that they were a dominant monopoly.

Kind of a strawman argument by dint of hyper-narrow focus, isn't it? Sure, there are no laws granting the government authority or duty to nurture Java or browsers; however, what Microsoft did more generally was to squash potential competition by leveraging their extremely entrenched OS monopoly. Java is (or was) much more than a programming language. Rather it was viewed as something more like an operating system. Wr…

> hyper-narrow focus

Lol -- you chose to focus on those 2 specific items, not me.

> squash potential competition

Virtually every single feature of Microsoft desktop OS'es could potentially be provided by an alternative provider. Many were and still are -- disk defragmentation, disk compression, anti-virus, firewall, web server, ftp client, image editing, database drivers, etc etc. People used to pay money for 3rd party utilities to expand beyond DOS's 640kb RAM limit... should Windows be prevented from handling memory management in order to not suppress competition? Seems like the most basic function of an OS. Early on, you couldn't print a spreadsheet in landscape mode without a 3rd-party utility... should the government disallow Windows from enabling landscape printing? Does Putty have an anti-competitive claim now that ssh is included in recent versions of Windows 10? How about accessibility features... should disabled individuals be denied use of standard Windows releases because the inclusion of a screen reader, magnification, etc would be anti-competitive with commercial alternatives?

> crushes nascent threats

Microsoft "crushed" neither Java nor web standards, both of which are doing fine and outlasted Internet Explorer, the focus of the government's case. Most of the problems Java does have, starting with poor stewardship, are entirely Sun/Oracle's own making.

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