World War 3.0 by Ken Auletta

Author:Ken Auletta [Auletta, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Industries, Litigation, Corporate & Business History, nonfiction, Computer Industry, vl-nfcompvg, Antitrust, United States - Trials, Computer Software Industry, Law, Antitrust Law, Commerce, Computers, Antitrust Law - United States, Law and Legislation, Computer Software Industry - Law and Legislation - United States, United States, Etc, Business & Economics, History, Monopolies - United States, Monopolies, General, Microsoft Corporation - Trials, United States - Trials; Litigation; Etc, Microsoft Corporation - Trials; Litigation; Etc
ISBN: 9780375503665
Google: EqUVAQAAIAAJ
Amazon: 0375506799
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-01-01T17:04:51+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Nerds in the Bunker

BEFORE THEY PRESENTED their witnesses, Microsoft was certain that they would incontrovertibly prove their facts. Afterward, the company’s leadership was furiously mad—mad at Boies, whom they depicted as a demagogue; mad at Judge Jackson, convinced he would rule against them, though they were careful enough to not say this aloud; mad at the government; and mad at their enemies in Silicon Valley. Most of all, perhaps, they were mad at the media.

Their rage started at the top, with Bill Gates. And when Gates gets angry, a Microsoft insider who saw him regularly admitted, “he will lash out.” Gates was incredulous that the press had settled on a David-versus-Goliath story line that lionized Boies. After Joseph Nocera penned a scathing account of Microsoft’s first several witnesses in his biweekly Fortune diary, Jim Cullinan, a member of the Microsoft public-relations team, dispatched the following solecistic e-mail to him:

To say I was upset and depressed by your last diary would be an understatement. The fact that you and the rest of the press are in love with Boies and overlook his mistakes and troubling change of story on the steps on a daily basis. Any effort to point of Boies’ flaws makes you guys protect him like a pride of lions. . . . We look at you guys because you all want Boies to get our witnesses and give him credit where none is due. You guys have no idea that a guy who knows nothing about this industry is reinterpreting our internal documents and changing the meanings to fit his story. It is ridiculous and all of our mistakes and errors in video production don’t change the facts.

Microsoft felt more than picked on by the media. They thought reporters portrayed their video errors as a deliberate trick rather than as a comedy of errors. They groused about a sneering press, about the negative spin of too many accounts from the trial, about the hostile questions their people fielded on the courthouse steps each afternoon, about how the press swooned over David Boies. The government produced an e-mail snippet featuring a careless Microsoft statement and out popped sinister headlines. It didn’t seem to matter whether Microsoft was actually a monopoly. The press acted shocked—shocked!—at their words, not just their actions, yet such bluster was commonplace in the industry and usually passed unremarked when voiced by others. Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy were outrageous big mouths, yet they seemed to amuse reporters, Microsoft fumed.

Microsoft thought reporters behaved like lemmings. A story appeared on the front page of The Washington Post on February 15 about the possible remedies the Justice Department and the states contemplated if Microsoft should lose, and suddenly nine cameras joined a battalion of scribes to quiz Neukom. Microsoft botched a video demonstration—which altered no facts and, arguably, was not the most substantive event of that day—and the media blew it up into a trial-transforming event. ABC News, which had not been in the courtroom for weeks,

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