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The API one seems even clearer to me: Boies: Mr. Gates, is the term proprietary API a term that is commonly used in your business? Gates: Let me give y

The API one seems even clearer to me: Boies: Mr. Gates, is the term proprietary API a term that is commonly used in your business? Gates: Let me give you … Boies: all I’m trying to do is … Gates: … the common meanings that those words could have and you can pick one of them and ask me a question about it Boies: no Gates: Do you want me to define proprietary API or not? Boies: No, I don’t want you to define proprietary API. I didn’t ask you to define proprietary API. I asked you a simple question about whether the term proprietary API was commonly used in your business. Now I’m prepared to sit here as long as you want to to answer questions that I haven’t asked. But I have a certain number of questions that I am going to ask at the end of these other answers. Now this is a simple question. You can say yes, no, or it is used in lots of different ways. But then I can choose what to follow up on. Or you can simply make whatever statements you want and I’ll go back to my question afterwards. Now, is the term property API a term that is commonly used in your business? Gates: I don’t know how common it is. It has many different meanings. Maybe because I'm more technical, but it seems painfully obvious here that this could be an API without open implementation, without open standard or a private one and he avoided that one well and understandably. But I agree with the sibling comments, this was probably as much a PR campaign as an antitrust one.

dathinab 6y ago
The most funny thing is he could probably just have said something like. No, we don't use that terminology much but other terms which might or might not have a similar meaning. Because how often do you use the word proprietary API, and how often do you use internal API, Microsoft API, etc instead.
- twoodfin 6y ago
  Not a great answer when you have turned over gigabytes worth of internal correspondence to the government. Surely almost any vaguely common term was used by someone at Microsoft. Boies tries to pull Gates repeatedly during the deposition into this kind of trap.
grogenaut 6y ago
I find myself running into this at work in many conversations. People imply that certain things are happening often. But they obviously have no numbers. Or people ask me for numbers on things that we have not investigated. I have however started getting better at getting those numbers. It feels so much better to make decisions on data but it's so much easier to make decisions off the cuff (for a while). Of course bill has not run a survey of the commonality of the use of the term of proprietary api in microsoft communications, so "I do now have that data".
bawolff 6y ago
Its funny, Boies seems to want him to take the question very literally, but if you take the question very literally its asking how popular the term is in general in microsoft. Gates would have no knowledge of what words people use when he's not around, so if you have to take the exact literal meaning, he wouldn't know. There's a reason we normally don't take questions as fully literal in day-to-day life.

dathinab 6y ago

The most funny thing is he could probably just have said something like. No, we don't use that terminology much but other terms which might or might not have a similar meaning. Because how often do you use the word proprietary API, and how often do you use internal API, Microsoft API, etc instead.

twoodfin 6y ago
Not a great answer when you have turned over gigabytes worth of internal correspondence to the government. Surely almost any vaguely common term was used by someone at Microsoft. Boies tries to pull Gates repeatedly during the deposition into this kind of trap.

grogenaut 6y ago

I find myself running into this at work in many conversations. People imply that certain things are happening often. But they obviously have no numbers. Or people ask me for numbers on things that we have not investigated. I have however started getting better at getting those numbers. It feels so much better to make decisions on data but it's so much easier to make decisions off the cuff (for a while). Of course bill has not run a survey of the commonality of the use of the term of proprietary api in microsoft communications, so "I do now have that data".

bawolff 6y ago

Its funny, Boies seems to want him to take the question very literally, but if you take the question very literally its asking how popular the term is in general in microsoft. Gates would have no knowledge of what words people use when he's not around, so if you have to take the exact literal meaning, he wouldn't know. There's a reason we normally don't take questions as fully literal in day-to-day life.