News: More resources for advanced hellraising -- for those who know where they don't want to go, ever.
By
Keith Hammond
December 23, 1997
Bill Gates is accused of cheating against his competitors, blackmailing foreign companies, even killing a trout farm near the Microsoft campus in lovely Redmond, Wash. -- and you can read all about it in cyberspace, that frontier of personal computing that Gates doesn't yet utterly dominate. Populated largely by the users of Gates' products, the Web is a vast repository of Microsoft information and anti-Microsoft sentiment. Where does a Gates-hater begin? Here:
U.S. v. Microsoft It's the antitrust litigation everyone's yapping about -- watch it unfold at the Department of Justice Web site. Dig Bill's dastardly tactics: One U.S. motion reveals how Microsoft tried to snow the feds by stamping every single document it submitted as "Confidential," including
"photocopies of articles and advertisements of magazines of general circulation, e.g., Business Week, Fortune, HomePC, PC Magazine, and PC Week. Furthermore, each of these documents were submitted with a cover letter from Microsoft requesting the United States 'accord it the highest level of confidentiality protection available under compulsory process.' These blanket requests, applied as they were to plainly public materials and business records alike, left the United States with no guide as to what documents Microsoft really considered confidential commercial information."
Circle the Wagons For a look at Microsoft's damage control strategy against its monopoly critics and its antitrust troubles, check out the PR counteroffensive being mounted by the company and its affililated Association of Microsoft Solution Providers (AMSP).
Scrooged Not content with his $35 billion fortune and $50 million house, Gates is now assiduously stealing the overtime pay of temps in his software factories. As we write this, just days before Christmas, Microsoft and other firms in the Washington Software and Digital Media Alliance (WSDMA) are sneaking a new labor rule through the state Department of Labor and Industries that would strip most software temporary workers of their OT. A previous sneak attack, piggybacked on a farm bill, died in the state legislature earlier this year. Microsoft already uses some 3,000 to 5,000 "permatemp" contractors to avoid paying benefits; now the richest man on earth is taking away their time-and-a-half for toiling 50 to 55 hours a week in his code mines.
Richer Than Everyone How much is the world's largest personal fortune worth right now? Check the real-time Bill Gates Wealth Clock for the current size of his stack, keyed to Microsoft's stock price.
Microsoft State University Microsoft, GTE, Fujitsu, and Hughes Electronics are now trying to privatize the computer infrastructure of the vast California State University system in a multi-billion-dollar consortium called the California Education Technology Initiative (CETI), a for-profit corporation that would be the exclusive provider of Internet and PC technology for all CSU campuses. Student protests have prompted hearings in the state legislature scheduled for January 6. The San Francisco-based watchdog group NetAction has set up an automated fax server to send protest letters to the statehouse.
Hometown Ranters In Seattle's own Eat the State!, a weekly journal of anti-authoritarian news and humor, editor Maria Tomchick blasts recent media coverage of Microsoft: The real story, she says, is how Microsoft -- and its competitors -- are jockeying to remake today's "shareware" Internet into tomorrow's proprietary toll system for their own profit. ETS! also publishes the bimonthly Microboeing Watch, tracking the number of news stories that Seattle's daily papers lavish on the aircraft behemoth and the software giant.
