Free Bill Gates by Jonathan Gatlin

say, you know, “What are the dynamics here?” As they look at it, what they’re going to find is that we’re all just, you know, fighting to get our message across and get these new products out as fast as we can. And it’s exactly what government should look to in a market—U.S. companies doing very, very well and not being at all complacent.
    —B ILL G ATES , to Charlie Rose, 1996
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    The Justice Department case, led by Anne Bingaman, who had been appointed head of the Antitrust Division by President Clinton, went on for another year, and was finally settled with a consent agreement approved by Bill Gates. It essentially changed the kind of licensing agreement Microsoft could demand from computer makers; from now on they could send out computers that had other companies’ operating systems without still having to pay a fee to Microsoft. This was claimed to “level the playing field,” but the press took the view that Gates had just been given a slap on the wrist.
    All consent decrees have to be approved by a federal judge, who is assigned cases by lottery. The judge in this case was Stanley Sporkin, who also thought the consent decree was a slap on the wrist, and threw it out on February 14, 1994, infuriating not only Bill Gates but also Anne Bingaman. On appeal, with Microsoft and the Justice Department now on the same side, Sporkin’s decision was overturned by a three-judge appeals panel, and Sporkin was chastised for having overstepped his authority. The case came to an end three days before the launch of Windows 95 on August 24, 1995.
    Not only was Bill Gates temporarily free of government interference and about to present the world with what would become the most successful computer software ever devised, but the two men who had been his greatest enemies were gone from Borland and Novell. Phillipe Kahnresigned—or was forced to resign by the board of directors—as head of the company he had founded a dozen years earlier, leaving on January 11, 1995. Kahn even showed up at the Windows 95 launch celebration; he had started a new company and needed to mend fences with Microsoft. As for Raymond Noorda, he had been gone from Novell for a year, retiring at the age of seventy, his memory failing.
     
     
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    S cott hates PCs and he hates the fact that customers like PCs. When PCs were selling six million units a year he said that it was a stupid idea. Now PCs are selling seventy million units a year, and Scott’s trying to tell corporations that they should just rip PCs away, that flexibility and empowerment is bad stuff. If he’s using my image as part of that attack, then fine.
    —B ILL G ATES , returning the compliments of
Sun CEO Scott McNealy, 1996
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    Of course there were still plenty of competitors who disliked Bill Gates and regarded Microsoft as a dangerous gorilla of a company. The three who came to the fore to challenge Gates most openly were Jim Barksdale, the new CEO of Netscape, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, and Larry Ellison of Oracle Systems Corporation. Barksdale is the most diplomatic of these competitors, and he can afford to be—Netscape beat Microsoft to the punch with an Internet browser, which still outsells Microsoft’s version more than two to one. Ellison had said that “everybody hates Microsoft,” but that is clearly wishful thinking. Scott McNealy is the most outspoken. He told Newsweek , “There’s two camps, those in Redmond, who live on the Death Star, and the rest of us, the rebel forces.” This is what McNealy told Newsweek in May of 1997. Of course, back in December of 1995, he had agreed to license Java—a computer language developed by his company that would become the standard for creating visual and audio effects on Internet web pages—to Microsoft. That was just good business. It would help establish Java as the standard, bring in plenty of cash, and prevent Microsoft from developing a rival language.
    While such agreements between rivals—even