Having followed these events closely at the time, the Gates/Boies deposition videos are fascinating in their entirety; I’m overdue for a rewatch. Despite havin

Having followed these events closely at the time, the Gates/Boies deposition videos are fascinating in their entirety; I’m overdue for a rewatch. Despite having been a mild OS/2 and Java partisan, I agree with the general consensus in this thread that Gates gets a bad rap for surely following his expensive lawyers’ advice on how to respond during a deposition. Boies’ strategy was to assume that as a competitive CEO and logically-minded programmer, Gates would indeed follow that advice to an extreme that could be made to look evasive and sinister. It’s not an accident that they spend so much time arguing over definitions of industry terms or what some Microsoft VP means by “ours”. Boies at any time could have accepted Gates’ understanding and moved on, but instead keeps calmly needling on subtle distinctions to rile him up. EDIT: Yikes, now rewatching and I forgot that the first half hour of the deposition is Boies reading Gates carefully selected definitions out of the 1997 Microsoft Computer Dictionary and asking him if he accepts them as written. The idea that it was Gates who wanted to litigate terminology is nuts.