Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…And certainly went a long way towards shaping the decision, but also shaping more importantly public opinion about Gates and about Microsoft. How did this hold up, though? Didn’t Microsoft appeal the change from recordings not being allowed for depositions to recordings being allowed? That is a great question, David, and one of the things that I read to prepare for this episode is a book called World War 3.0, which is exclusively about this trial, and the author has this comment on it. “Microsoft feared that Judge Jackson was a foe. He had made a number of pretrial rulings deemed hostile to the company. They were especially unhappy that he modified the pretrial order, that depositions shall only be submitted in transcript form, issuing a new order, allowing videotaped depositions. Microsoft suspected that justice had somehow prevailed on Jackson to amend his earlier court ruling. Jackson categorically denied this, but does not recall exactly why he issued the October 9th ruling. They groused, but only in the most unguarded private moments because they were terrified of offending him that Jackson was biased and would rule in favor of the government.” Your question of how does it hold up? I guess there was no formal challenge of that change in rule, and part of it probably was just because they realized they had a long way to go with the judge and didn’t want to agitate too much. Wow. Interesting. It also sounds like maybe they didn’t realize yet how disastrous these tapes getting out was going to be for Bill and for the company.…

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