Bill Gates Vows to Battle Penalties
A day after Bill Gates displayed a kinder, gentler version of himself in federal court, the Microsoft Corp. chairman returned to the witness stand Tuesday--this time showing flashes of his impatience and evasiveness as he vowed to fight harsher antitrust penalties.
In his second day of testimony, Gates alternately dodged questions from the states’ trial lawyer Steve Kuney and, on occasion, acknowledged Kuney’s concerns about the software giant’s aggressive business conduct.
At one point, when Kuney tried to question Gates about Microsoft’s current business practices, the software mogul became so evasive--asking Kuney about which time period he was referring to--that presiding U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly interrupted and instructed him to focus on his present circumstances.
“Tell us about what you are doing now” with your business, Kollar-Kotelly said.
For a second day, Gates sparred with Kuney over the meaning of the word “interoperate.” During an exchange with Kuney over whether Microsoft was taking sufficient steps to make its flagship Windows operating system function better with software made by independent developers, Gates repeatedly questioned Kuney’s use of the word. “Interoperate generally relates to a specific specification,” Gates said. In the way “you use the term, I would say ‘compatible.’ ”
The emergence of a more combative Gates appeared to unsettle Microsoft lawyers who only a day ago were reveling in the software mogul maintaining his composure on the witness stand.
Microsoft’s lead trial lawyer, Daniel Webb, tried to avert some of the damage by voicing more than a half-dozen objections to Kuney’s questioning of Gates. Kollar-Kotelly sustained many of Webb’s objections. But the questioning appeared to take a toll on Gates, who at times lapsed into the petulance he displayed in a 1998 video-taped deposition that many legal experts said helped compound Microsoft’s antitrust woes.
The District of Columbia, California and eight other states want Microsoft to produce a modular version of Windows that can be customized by consumers and PC makers. The holdout antitrust enforcers rejected an out-of-court settlement reached between Microsoft and the Justice Department in November and are pursuing tougher restrictions on Microsoft’s conduct.
Under questioning, Gates termed the states’ proposed remedies vague and overreaching. He added that the states’ suggestion that Microsoft build a modular version of Windows was technically impossible and would force the company to pull the operating system off the market. “Whoever wrote this [remedy proposal] apparently wanted to make this extremely broad,” Gates said.
Although Gates at times continued to exude a cheerful air Tuesday, he bristled when Kuney began questioning him about how far he would be willing to go to modify his company’s business behavior.
After testifying Monday that Microsoft had ceased all 12 of the anti-competitive practices a federal appeals court cited Microsoft for last year, Gates acknowledged Tuesday that his company had not yet addressed the commingling of Microsoft software.
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington upheld a lower court finding that Microsoft effectively killed competition from competing Web browsers by mingling code for Windows with code for Internet Explorer--the software that enables PC users to browse the Web.
The appeals court said such commingling was anti-competitive and prevented computer makers from removing Microsoft’s browser and substituting competing products.
On Tuesday, Gates said Microsoft had not addressed the court’s concerns. When asked by Kuney what Microsoft would do if a judge ordered his company to comply with the states’ more stringent remedy proposal to produce a modular version of Windows in which software code is not commingled, Gates said he would fight.
That, Gates said, “can’t be done. We would make every effort on the legal front to make sure [the proposal] is not imposed as a requirement.”
