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Two Faces of Bill (1/21/98)
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In an irony almost too heavy to bear, Bill Gates yesterday praised competition in the computer industry while speaking via satellite to a financial conference in London. According to a Reuters story, he publicly claimed that he and Microsoft are "the biggest believers in what competition can do to drive this market forward."
Now, of course he has a point. For instance, would Netscape's software be as advanced as it is today if Internet Explorer weren't constantly kicking it in the butt? And if the Mac OS had never existed, Windows 98 would probably be more like DOS 9.2. But Microsoft isn't fooling anyone about its plans to "compete" its competitors clean out of the market; Netscape's marketshare, for instance, has been dropping like a stone since Microsoft has been requiring the preinstallation of MSIE on every Windows box shipped, and now Netscape is laying off employees. What frankly floors us about Bill's assertions is how he can make these rosy pro-competition statements while his company is embroiled in various anticompetition investigations on no fewer than three continents. There's the whole Department of Justice thing here in the U.S. (not to mention the lawsuit by Sun, the accusations by Ralph Nader, and several state antitrust investigations brewing), the ISP-bundling issue in Europe (which Microsoft seems willing to back down on), and threats of government action in Japan.
"We have really harnessed competition to help ourselves and help our customers," says Uncle Bill. And with competition like that, who needs competitors?
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/21/98 episode: January 21, 1998: (Sorry—this was before we started writing intro text for each episode!)
Other scenes from that episode: 378: Think Big, Think Secret (1/21/98) Remember last year's deal between Apple and Microsoft? So far, not much visible has come from it, other than the imminent release of Office 98 for the Mac (which, to be honest, was already in the works as Office 97 at the time)... 379: Whipping Boy Extreme (1/21/98) Uh-oh, Don Crabb's going off about the Newton again. For a technology that launched the whole PDA category, he says, Apple sure has been kicking it around for the last few years. High prices, marketing strategies that span the range between "lousy" and "non-existent," spin-offs that get spun back in, rumors of cancellation just before each new product's rollout-- you know the drill. But it's the price structure of the Newton MessagePad that makes us take issue with Don's claim that the Newton "still dominates its product category."...
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