Bill Gates: 'I Was Naive At Microsoft,' Didn't Realize Success Would Bring Antitrust Scrutiny (cnbc.com) 85
Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates told CNBC on Wednesday morning he had been naive about the government scrutiny that comes with getting large when he was running Microsoft and said the chance of Big Tech antitrust regulation is "pretty high." CNBC reports: "Whenever you get to be a super-valuable company, affecting the way people communicate and even political discourse being mediated through your system and higher percentage of commerce -- through your system -- you're going to expect a lot of government attention," Gates said in the "Squawk Box" interview. Last week, the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust released a report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google hold monopoly power.
"I was naive at Microsoft and didn't realize that our success would lead to government attention," Gates said, referring to Microsoft's antitrust challenges from more than 20 years ago. "And so I made some mistakes -- you know, just saying, 'Hey, I never go to Washington, D.C.' And now I don't think, you know, that naivete is there." Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in the middle of the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case, which charged the company had tried to monopolize the web browser market when it bundled Internet Explorer with Windows. The company settled with the DOJ in 2001.
"The rules will change somewhat," Gates said in contrast about the possibility of future regulation. "I'd say the chances of them doing something is pretty high." "We have to get the particulars," said Gates when asked about the risk of additional regulation cutting down on innovation. "Is there some rule about acquisition? Is there some rule about splitting parts of the companies, either -- to create open availability of those resources?" Anti-competitive "killer acquisitions" was one of the House subcommittee's concerns, and the report looked into whether Facebook acquired Instagram to eliminate a competitor. Splitting up such acquisitions may be one possibility of future regulation. "We're in uncharted territory here," said Gates.
"I was naive at Microsoft and didn't realize that our success would lead to government attention," Gates said, referring to Microsoft's antitrust challenges from more than 20 years ago. "And so I made some mistakes -- you know, just saying, 'Hey, I never go to Washington, D.C.' And now I don't think, you know, that naivete is there." Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in the middle of the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case, which charged the company had tried to monopolize the web browser market when it bundled Internet Explorer with Windows. The company settled with the DOJ in 2001.
"The rules will change somewhat," Gates said in contrast about the possibility of future regulation. "I'd say the chances of them doing something is pretty high." "We have to get the particulars," said Gates when asked about the risk of additional regulation cutting down on innovation. "Is there some rule about acquisition? Is there some rule about splitting parts of the companies, either -- to create open availability of those resources?" Anti-competitive "killer acquisitions" was one of the House subcommittee's concerns, and the report looked into whether Facebook acquired Instagram to eliminate a competitor. Splitting up such acquisitions may be one possibility of future regulation. "We're in uncharted territory here," said Gates.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
It had nothing to do with success and everything with his illegal anticompetitive behavior.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Anti-trust laws are subject to interpretation. But MS was playing fast and loose on many fronts, using deep pockets to buy out or kill competition.
Healthy capitalism requires competition. Monopolies and oligopolies almost always drift away from competing on merit, and use size and bullying instead. After all, bullying is a common skill honed on many playgrounds and smaller siblings. Bullying merely requires power; but merit requires skill, brains, and discipline. Corporations will take the easier road sooner or later, it's human nature. [youtube.com]
Gates seemed to value winning above all else, and rationalizes away MS's anti-competitive behavior, typically with some form of "but we did good work". Arrogance blinds him to the real issue.
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Re:Let's be real about anti-trust (Score:5, Insightful)
For local firms, the state or city probably should be the ones regulating such, not the Federal Gov't. Whether they do or not largely depends on the local political culture.
I didn't follow AT&T close enough, but IBM opened up most of the PC architecture largely because of anti-trust fears, and that spawned the PC clone revolution, known as "Wintel" or "x86" today. In short, scrutiny worked: open standards and competition proliferated in PCville. It even runs Linux and Emacs.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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IBM was struggling a bit in the later 80's such that maybe they felt the regulator pressure was reduced.
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The decree was in place when IBM rolled out the PS/2 line in 1987 with all of the "open" features of the original 5150 PC mostly closed down.
The PS/2 had a proprietary bus, which other parties had to license. But in practice, it sucked, and nobody wanted to use it which is why only a handful of PC manufacturers ever bothered to implement it. While other manufacturers came out with buses which supported autoconfiguration without update floppies, PCs were floundering with MCA and EISA buses. Apple's NuBus, Commodore's Zorro, Sun's SBus, and basically every other expansion bus out there did autoconfiguration from ROM. But the PS/2 had an ordinary k
Re:Let's be real about anti-trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Anti-trust regulation is a bookend to capitalism, a threat to be wielded against large enterprises that might get large enough to threaten government supremacy through the exercise of perfectly legitimate business practices
OK right wing moron, now read Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations and learn what Capitalism is;
It it when the government regulates the market to protect small business and new entrants from the entrenched powers. Anything that an entrenched power does to use their existing position to gain an advantage is anti-Capitalist. That is what Capitalism is supposed to stop, because then market success is determined by Capital and Competition instead of back-room bullshit.
LURN US SUM WERDS!
Banning those harmful practices is the fucking reason capitalism was invented. They are not "perfectly legitimate" unless your economic system is Feudalism.
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If it's really Capitalism, then yes. You have to believe in Jesus if you want to be called a Christian.
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Do you really think people in Congress or in the Justice Department are consulting "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations"?
No, but Democrats who study the economy follow people like Stigliz, and Georgist public policy theory. (That's Henry George, an American writer)
It is based on taxing use of Land and the Commons, something Adam Smith approved of because it doesn't create economic inefficiency.
An Adam Smith True Believer should be quite happy with economics based on Georgism, especially when it is also based on information theory and a desire for economic efficiency, as with Stiglitz.
But I do expect people who claim to be Cap
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What they did at the time was perfectly legal...until they were declared a monopoly. None of their practices would have been illegal were they not declared a monopoly.
Wrong. They were a monopoly which is what made the behavior illegal. They didn't need to be declared a monopoly for it to be illegal. Being declared a monopoly just made it easier for their victims to sue them as they just had to prove that what was done to them would be illegal behavior for a monopoly and the MS did it, they didn't have to prove the monopoly existed other than to point at the existing ruling.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
However the bar for what is unethical and what is illegal changes when you become a monopoly and it is applied retrospectively.
In other words it was ILLEGAL.
Re: Bullshit (Score:2)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. BS.
I interned at MS in 1998. The corporate motto, plastered on memes around the offices was "world domination". Literally. They knew exactly what they were doing, and claiming they couldn't imagine any possible repercussions is far from believable.
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I think you're missing the point that Gates was making (and the parent missed the significance of it). You are more than welcome to try and dominate the world. You are more than welcome to try and use all sorts of tactics to achieve that. What you can't do is both at once.
Anti-trust laws hinge on the illegal abuse of market power. If you don't have market power you can do all sorts of things (including bundling of products). Microsoft didn't get in trouble because they bundled Internet Explorer with Windows
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Except he did bribe the right people and the antitrust lawsuit went away.
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I think Gates' comments were probably reflective of some kind of on-the-spectrum tunnel vision of him personally. I'm sure he had people around him (lawyers, mostly, but probably more experienced executives who had moved from other industries) who were probably strongly suggesting Microsoft have a bigger lobbying presence in DC.
I think most technology people, but probably Gates even more personally, thought of what they were doing as so novel that it was mostly outside the boundaries of most existing busin
Harm Done by Microsofts Anti-Competitive Monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
I am bitter to this day about what Microsoft did. Their anti-competitive behavior held back widespread adoption of far superior operating system technology. For example, NextStep [wikipedia.org] existed in 1989. It was BSD Unix based and used vector graphics (PostScript) for its display. It later became the codebase for Mac OSX. It's hardware abstraction was so good that the system was able to be relatively easily ported from the PowerPC processor to Intel, and then to ARM (for the iPhone and iPad). Again, this system existed in 1989. I am not arguing that NeXT should have won the OS wars. Rather I mention it to show the level of OS technology that was possible at the time.
Meanwhile, most of the public was stuck with years of buggy and insecure Microsoft operating systems. I would say that conservatively, Microsoft's illegal anti-competitive behavior held back the widespread adoption of quality operating technology by at least ten years, and arguably more. I remember working in an office on a company's Access 97 database. Crashes were frequent and frustrating. I remember having conversations with office staff where they said their desktops were crashing or giving blue screens. They said they rebooted and still it didn't work. I would respond saying something like "well there's your problem...you only rebooted twice. Reboot four or five times while praying to the computer gods, and then your problem will be fixed". Multiply that frustration by all the office workers worldwide that had to suffer with Microsoft's horridly unstable architecture, and you will imagine why I hate Microsoft so much. And I have no respect for Bill Gates, even despite his attempts to copy Alfred Nobel with his charity work. Bill Gates has done great harm to the tech industry.
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I am not arguing that NeXT should have won the OS wars. Rather I mention it to show the level of OS technology that was possible at the time.
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Yes, thank you.
Microsoft's behavior in the 90s and early 2000s was straight out anti-competitive and harmful to the advancement of computing. People forget that because Gates has given a lot of money to charity, but a lot of that money was ill-gotten gains.
Microsoft held back improvements in operating systems. They held back improvements in web browsing. They torpedoed any competitors to MS Office. They pushed poor standards merely because they were the standards that would give Microsoft more lever
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What really galls me, based on the original article, is that Bill Gates appears to be saying that his big mistake was in not pulling more political levers so that he could get away with his illegal anti-competitive behavior. Even now, "nice" Bill Gates shows no remorse for the harm done by his actions. I don't care that he is donating so much money. In my opinion, the harm he did far outweighs his charitable actions. I have little respect for him. I don't even think he was a good designer. Under his helm, M
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Exactly.
Bill has a 4-mile long freight train full to the brim with manure and he's peddling that shit like it's going out of style!
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It had nothing to do with success and everything with his illegal anticompetitive behavior.
Not true. Anti-trust laws hinge on the illegal abuse of market power. Without market power the same actions would be otherwise perfectly legal. If you're a small weak little company that is struggling to build up a customer base, you can do all sorts of things that a large incumbent can't.
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It had a lot to do with success.
Microsoft didn't start up as a goliath. They fought and scrapped their way up the chain. Even as they got bigger, it's not like all the other companies (IBM, Oracle...) weren't doing their best to exploit their positions. Business is like politics in the sense that most of time all the players are pushing the line. Even if you 'win' with anti-competitive tactics... chances are you've just beaten your competitors who try use similar anti-competitive tactics. There's still succ
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So really Bill thinks that his dreadful business practices were fine and that he never realised he had to play within the law, and that what he should have done is go to Washington to grease some palms so he could have gotten away with it.
And today, he wants to save the planet with his "charitable" trust (that has increased its wealth quite considerably, and tax free), and we believe him.
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Eddy Curry was at MIPS when Gates and Allen first sold them their BASIC interpreter, and Eddy told me that Bill would often tell people that he wanted a monopoly. That was his gauge of success.
-jcr
Yes, but that's not what Gates is talking about. He's is expressly talking about the naivety that as a monopoly he can't do the things he could if he weren't. E.g. if Windows wasn't some dominant monster in the OS world then bundling a browser wouldn't have lead to an anti-trust case against them. That was his naivety.
It wasn't the success that was the problem (Score:3)
Paraphrasing (Score:5, Insightful)
Paraphrasing what Gates really means:
"I forgot to buy off all the right regulators as Microsoft got huge on my criminal behavior. Now I know better."
I'm shocked, shocked (Score:2)
That anti-competitive behavior is going on at Microsoft!
(guy hands Bill a wad of cash)
Your earnings, sir!
BS... (Score:4, Insightful)
"I was naive at Microsoft and didn't realize that our success would lead to government attention," Gates said, referring to Microsoft's antitrust challenges from more than 20 years ago.
Said the person who was using literal tactics from Rockefeller while being investigated for said tactics in 1994...
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He was never naive about antitrust (Score:4, Insightful)
Big fat lie there Gates.
You were the one that decided the direction to go was âoeAll Microsoftâ and to actively screw any company that was in the way.
Worse, Microsoft still act this way.
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That's not a lie. He never said he wasn't trying to screw others. He said his mistake was the naivety of not realising that once you get to a certain size and dominance that your actions come under increased regulator scrutiny. You can screw whoever you want providing you don't have any significant market power.
Beat them at their own game (Score:3)
Re: In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
Please go back to your chan site. Slashdot is not a forum for Sinophobes. ____ Sent from my Huawei
Notice how Microsoft is trying to look righteous (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nadella is no better than Gate, check out his pattern of behavior and how hard he's trying to look like the good guy.
I'm curious on the specifics. You say no better: So please point to what is bad. You say try to look righteous, so please point out what MS is doing that is based on looks rather than careful market strategy.
There are massive differences between Gates and Nadella. Gates attempted to eliminate all competition (there's a reason MS killed Novell). Nadella fosters competition and then proceeds to monetise their efforts (there's a reason MS is contributing heavily to FOSS). Neither of these are attempts to look
Just Another Multi Billionaire (Score:4, Insightful)
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The fact that he got dinged for it is evidence that he's not rewriting history and that he was actually naive at the amount of regulator attention that his actions would bring.
This isn't re-writing history, this is saying "lol dude I fucked up".
Success! (Score:5, Informative)
* Stacker, now called MICROSOFT-R-US-space after reviewing the source code for a possible merger and soon releasing their new product, or so I heard
* DR-DOS has "problems" running Windows 3.1, or so I heard. (Nice nebulous error message, actually. I saw it.)
* Undocumented APIs that only Microsoft code could use, or so I heard. (Well, read the Undocumented Microsoft Calls book, anyway..)
We won't mention the bi-yearly revision of Microsoft Word (finally Office) that effectively forced everyone to upgrade with New and Improved file formats for document interchange purposes. (Just because you can't open documents that someone sent you, you shouldn't be so stingy.)
I suppose that's success, making your widgets just odd enough so that other "compatible" widgets won't be, or even better giving the indications of instability.
Embrace, Extend, then Extinguish. It's a good job if you can get it. Kinda like kudzu [wikipedia.org] or Honeysuckle [wikipedia.org].
mod parent up (Score:2)
I also witnessed it.
Re:Success! (Score:5, Informative)
None of which even got them investigated.
The real destruction of competition was to have Windows and any applications that ran atop it, for sale from the same company, at all.
I worked for a corporation with thousands of desktops. The IT staff, IBM fans all, adjusted quickly enough when they had to take over a PC fleet, and brought IBM wisdom with them: always expect the platform maker to use control of it to screw all competition for the platform or anything dependent on it. So they immediately moved aggressively: "Out strategic direction is to become an all-Microsoft shop", period.
"Strategic", in business, means "not subject to cost-benefit analysis". It didn't matter any more if WordPerfect was the better wordprocessor, 123 the better spreadsheet, Borland the better development tools. It was a better strategy, overall, to have "one vendor relationship". "Lower Total Cost of Ownership", a phrase that was never proven, or even subjected to a test, simply assumed. Because they knew there would be endless grief for THEM if we used competitors on top of a MS platform.
It was anti-competitive for every application, used by large corporations, that had a Microsoft offering in the space.
But, nope: that was all OK until the new area of web browsers came up, and they were caught saying specifically, "we'll cut off their air supply". If not for the stolen election of 2000, Gore's justice dept would have continued the case that would probably have broken them up. Don't even debate that they broke anti-trust laws; the court had them cold.
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The real destruction of competition was to have Windows and any applications that ran atop it, for sale from the same company, at all.
Every computer company worth noticing has sold application software. They didn't all pull shit like using secret APIs while publishing APIs which literally had library functions which did no more than adding a delay to the secret API functions.
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What took MS down a notch wasn't ActiveX vs the web, but the fact that more and more apps simply became websites and escaped the stranglehold of the Windows Ecosystem and anyone - no matter what OS, could use these web applications.
The fact that apps like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Google Docs, Google Sheet etc became a reality and you could do most of your email work, word processing, spreadsheet work, calendaring etc without buying Windows and office licenses reduced MS's grip on the market.
Never forget (Score:3)
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
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Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
Knife the baby
Whack Dell
Cut off their air supply
I'm going to FUCKING KILL GOOGLE!
rationalization (Score:2)
Its interesting how we rationalize. Sounds like he would just cover his tracks better if he did it over again, be less obviously illegal.
"Success" (Score:2)
Yeah, well, you know, Hitler could have worded his experience with humanity the same.
Clearly, what matters is the impact of your "success" on others, dear psychopaths. ;)
One thing is different (Score:2)
The web destroyed Microsoft's vision (Score:5, Informative)
> Probably this is because they missed the boat on the Internet for a long time.
When the web happened, Microsoft had just invested several years and ton of money into a new computing paradigm. They already had the original OLE, Object Linking and Embedding. They expanded in that concept and did some cool things. They idea is that with their then-new system, any program could run inside of any other program. So for example you could have a video inside of a Word document, or an Excel spreadsheet in a PowerPoint presentation or whatever. You could update the spreadsheet in Excel and it would be updated in the PowerPoint. You could also link from any type of document to any other type of document, and it would automatically open the right program. This was really cool in 1994.
Microsoft started imagining all the different things that could be eventually be done based in this idea - people would love it and it might just revolutionize computing the same way the GUI did.
This new version of OLE, called COM, took a lot of really complicated work under the hood, and a lot of work by programmers to develop compatible programs. With all that work, an Excel spreadsheet could contain an MS Paint picture and link to a Windows Media Player song and to a Word document.
Then ... [img src=somepic.jpg] happened.
And href=otherfile.html
Microsoft spent a billion dollars on a complex way for a Word doc to link to a pic, they were betting on that being the future. Then Berners-Lee and Netscape show up with the same thing, except you can link and embed documents that are anywhere in the world - just by typing "href=http://lee.oxdord.edu/suckitbill.html"
That really fucked up Microsoft's plans. At first they briefly tried to stop the web from happening. When it became apparent that wasn't going to work, they rebranded their new version of COM as a web technology, renaming it "ActiveX".
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With as much arguing as we so in Slashdot, your gracious post is a breath of fresh air.
Re: The web destroyed Microsoft's vision (Score:2)
You just told the history of OLE through ActiveX and Web nothing.oh and left out Java??
https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-... [cnet.com]
Java is what kept ActiveX from taking everything over, not href=crappytable.html
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Microsoft was powerful, but there were limits. Nobody was going to swallow the security fiasco that was ActiveX. OLE/COM was never particularly useful either--I wanted to drag something in and close the existing file, it embedded it instead. No, No, NO!!! I never wanted to embed a video on my spreadsheet. It was such a "because we can" technology that ignored the "should we?" question.
Of course people accepted Flash, Applets, JavaScript, etc. and those have caused security issues--by accident though.
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"apply Common Carrier regulations"
That's often a very foolish idea. A common carrier e-mail or social media provider couldn't filter out spam. A common carrier 'store' couldn't refuse to carry junk.
Personally, not having infinite free time and patience to get rid of crap manually, I don't much mind when it's done for me, and if I were to doubt the skill or agenda of the third party I'm relying on, it's easier to go to a different one than deal with a world in which I cannot rely on anyone.
In my experience
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My understanding was that common carriers are still allowed to block attacks. To compare it to real-world mail, a common carrier might have to carry mail any sender to any recipient, but they don't have to accept packages that are smoking or leaking acid. Also, there's no reason that a common carrier can't provide metadata on the data it carries, allowing the client to make informed decisions about the data when it arrives. Obviously the carrier has more information about, for example, the sender of spam th
Re: One thing is different (Score:2)
The general reasons a common carrier can refuse service are if it poses a danger, if there is no capacity, or if it requires special treatment (like a ferry does not have to change its route just because you want to go somewhere other than its planned destination). Spam or shovelware won't qualify.
And when do you draw the line? If an App Store has to carry every program submitted to it, does a supermarket have to accept any product it has room for? (if you didn't know, the stores actually charge the manufac
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The general reasons a common carrier can refuse service are if it poses a danger, if there is no capacity, or if it requires special treatment (like a ferry does not have to change its route just because you want to go somewhere other than its planned destination). Spam or shovelware won't qualify.
Falsified addresses would certainly qualify, which eliminates most spam and makes the rest easily filterable.
Cant believe (Score:1)
Compatibility (Score:1)
No APIs that only Microsoft code could use? (Score:1)
Brad Silverberg [slated.org]: Aug 1992: “*the biggest advantage our apps group has is access to the operating systems source. as long as this continues, the issue will never go away.*”
Dennis Adler [groklaw.net] 1992: “*Stop trying to pretend that we did not do this to gain a competitive advantage, however slight.*”
Rob Steele [archive.org] Mar 1997: ‘the new MAPI32.DLL that is deployed as part of Office 97 breaks Group
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I didn't realize! (Score:2)
I didn't realize that lying in a deposition is against the law!
QUite simple (Score:2)
Seems pretty straight-forward.... (Score:1)
like electricity or the internet or communications, it needs to be treated as a public utility.
Consider health as well. It is deeply beneficial to have society as health as can be.
A proper health maintenance mechanism in society could far better handle pandemics.
This does not mean that health companies cannot innovate and benefit from capitalization of same.
Yet, when 8-m