Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Oh well, the back half of the episode is about the incredible story about how Microsoft rebuilt itself in a completely new market into now again the most valuable company in the world. But let’s just talk about what the actual cost was, not in terms of money. It certainly didn’t actually impact Internet Explorer or Windows. XP was a huge success. Sells over half a billion copies, gets used over its lifetime on probably a billion PCs. It unifies windows under the NT architecture, has the Bliss wallpaper, amazing. But the true cost is what it did culturally and emotionally to Microsoft. We talked to all these people and God I was like death being there. To believe for 16 months that the company was going to be broken up, for Bill to have this really embarrassing video of him all over the press, and to have the narrative change about bill change, about the company, change about for every employee working at the company, to oh you’re the best and brightest in America, to you guys are evil and why are you working at this company. It exposes the difference, too, in the legal strategy of both sides where Microsoft’s strategy was to refute point by point every allegation brought against them, to the point where they were trying to refute Netscape. We don’t view Netscape as an existential threat to us. And they should have just probably acknowledged, Bill literally wrote a letter that got published, a memo saying that Netscape is a competitive threat born on the Internet, but they wanted to refute every single point and knock of an inch. Meanwhile, all David Boies and the DOJ wanted to do was destroy Microsoft’s credibility, so that every time they brought a witness there were emails or there was a deposition that basically called into question, are they really telling the truth on the stand? Can they really not remember that? And it just blow by blow made Microsoft look like they were duplicitous. And that has to leak into the company culture. That has to make you on the one hand feel like your government is attacking you. But on the other hand, start to question and say why did we do this again? I thought we were just trying to make the best software. Were we trying to do something illegal and I just didn’t know about it? It’s worth talking about some of the other pieces of fallout. It did slow Microsoft down. There were huge amounts of protocol documentation that needed to happen. If anyone’s running a software company, you know that if your iteration times are slower and you just have permanent new drag on your development process, you are going to fall behind. I think that was one that was felt by a lot of employees and managers who suddenly can do less with the same amount of resources that they have. There was also a bunch of private lawsuits—Sun, AOL, Real Networks. Microsoft was paying out billions of dollars in these private settlements that followed the DOJ, their civil suits. Not to mention state attorney generals were also suing Microsoft left and right and international.…

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