Don't let the sweater-vests and the (dilettantish) "education reform" work fool you: Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry, presiding over a vicious monopolist that shattered the law in its greedy quest for billions and permanent, global dominance.
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Microsoft's illegal conduct was so blatant, persistent and obviously wicked that it prompted serious enforcement action from the DoJ's antitrust division, which Reagan neutered and which every president since has whittled down even further.
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The most notorious moment in that last-of-its-kind enforcement action was the multi-day, video-recorded deposition of Bill Gates himself, in which he conducted himself so badly that the video went analog-viral, airing on newscasts and being passed hand-to-hand on VHS.
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Today on @arstechnica, @dangoodin001 revisits that momentous week in 1998 when Gates covered himself in everlasting shame and gave us a peek behind the curtain at the private persona of a swaggering monopolist.
Goodin's piece was occasioned by Microsoft's intervention in the Epic-v-Apple affair, in which a Microsoft exec decried Apple's abuse of its "complete monopoly over the distribution of apps … to coerce app developers into using Apple’s payment platform."
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Gates's deposition is a reminder of how far Microsoft's position changed between 1998 and now. As Goodin writes, Gates's plan for the deposition was to obstruct, paint the DoJ as technically incompetent, and to "deny even the most basic of premises in the government’s case."
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This was a brutally stupid plan. It failed SO BADLY. Government lawyer would ask Gates questions like "What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996" and Gates would claim not to know what "concerned" means.
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It was the Fat Tony defense: "What's a truck? What's a murder?"
It was so stupid and blatant that people in the gallery started laughing aloud at Gates's obstruction (after all, part of his defense was that he was a genius whose mind could not be understood by mere govvies).
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The deposition really revealed Gates's expectation that he would be deferred to and even worshipped in the manner that his absolute authoritarian rule over Microsoft had accustomed him to.
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As Ken Auletta noted, Gates had never had to sit for a job interview or suffer other routine indignities.
Goodin: "he had little or no experience tolerating—let alone encountering—dissent, criticism, or challenges to his authority."
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But even with a better strategy, Gates would have still been in trouble, because he put a bewildering array of radioactively illegal conduct in writing, and the DoJ had it all in black and white:
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* A conspiracy to force Intuit to bundle Internet Explorer and break compatibility with Netscape
* A conspiracy to modify Windows so Netscape-rendered content would appear "degraded"
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* A conspiracy to make an incompatible version of Java that only ran on Windows, with the goal of "wresting control of Java away from Sun"
* A conspiracy to get Apple to break compatibility with Netscape, tying Microsoft Office improvement to Apple's sabotage of Netscape
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With all this evidence, the fact that Microsoft escaped serious sanction tells you just how degraded antitrust law has become (it's gotten weaker and worse since). But just as telling is the impact that antitrust enforcement had on Microsoft's conduct.
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It's undeniable that the reason web companies like Google survived the 2010s is that Microsoft had lost its nerve, after years of traumatic DoJ investigation and litigation.
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Gates admitted this last year, saying the reason Microsoft didn't bid for Android was they were "distracted" by the antitrust action:
But that action had ended YEARS before Android. When Gates says he was "distracted," he means he was terrified.
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And as @superwuster pointed out, it probably made them a better company. Monoplism makes companies act like mafias, stupid and lazy, with an emphasis on abusive commercial practice rather than technical or organizational excellence.
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When AT&T was broken up in 82, corporatists cried that America was sacrificing its "national champion" just as Japan was eroding America's technical dominance, and without AT&T's monopoly power, America's tech industry was done.
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Instead, breaking up AT&T opened the space for THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and a generation-long American dominance of a system that has become a planetary nervous system, a source of prolonged American dominance and trillions in GDP.
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In other words: Fat Tony is a shitty businessman.
People express dismay at that 2016 photo of Trump with tech's leaders around a Trump Tower boardroom table, aghast that these people who run our tech world were willing to meet with a racist bully.
If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.
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In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in *Perspectives on Politics*:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues.
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When a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay.
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Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Their favorite scam, the "leveraged buyout" is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
> One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.
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My latest *Locus Magazine* column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Stories about major change usually focus on a *group*, but groups rarely achieve big, ambitious goals. Think about all the goal-oriented groups in your orbit, with missions like alleviating hunger, or beautifying your neighborhood, or changing the health-care system.
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