Bill Gates became the Department of Justice’s star turn in absentia at the antitrust trial yesterday, as the government rolled the first substantial portion of the CEO’s videotaped deposition. The DoJ used about one hour of approximately eight hours of testimony, with additions and deletions requested by Microsoft, to lay out three major accusations. First, that Microsoft had engaged in talks with Apple Computer Inc with the intention of undermining Sun Microsystems Inc’s work on Java. Second, that Microsoft had tried to stop Apple developing its QuickTime technology, leaving the multimedia playback field open to Redmond. And third, that Microsoft had made its continued support for Office 97 on the Mac conditional on Apple making Internet Explorer its default browser. On tape, Gates was asked whether there had ever been any discussions within Microsoft about trying to undermine Sun because of what Sun was doing in Java. Gates replied that the company worked with customers to see what it took them to license Microsoft products and that was in competition with other firms, including Sun. Then he was asked if he had held discussions with Apple to get it to agree to help undermine Sun. He said that there had been some discussion about what runtime APIs Apple would support…ours or some of Sun’s. However, he claimed not to have been involved in the discussions. Lead DoJ attorney David Boies then showed Gates an email, which the witness agreed he had written. The email, dated August 8 1997, to Paul Maritz and others, read Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun? Gates, when questioned on this, said that he didn’t remember sending the memo and didn’t remember what he had meant by the statement. The Java issue arose again later, with Boies questioning Gates on a April 14 1997 email from Microsoft’s Ben Slivka, arranging to review some pretty pointed questions that Gates had about Java. Boies then went on to claim that one of those questions was, according to the email, how do we wrest control of Java from Sun? Gates replied that he doubted he would have put it in those words, but did agree that there was an issue around the popularity of Sun’s runtime APIs versus our APIs.
