Word: microsoft
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When federal prosecutors asked John D. Rockefeller for financial data in the suit that broke up Standard Oil, his lawyer's response was brief and to the point: "I'll see you in hell first." Microsoft hasn't been that dismissive of its own high-profile antitrust suit, but it's come close. Vice chairman Steve Ballmer declared, "To heck with Janet Reno," last year. And earlier this month a supremely self-assured Bill Gates told a meeting of 2,000 Microsoft shareholders that "the facts simply don't support the government's claim...
...Justice Department begins Week Six of its hard-hitting case, Microsoft's blithe confidence is starting to resemble a room-size mainframe computer that operates on punch cards: it's more than a little out of date. Executives from Intel, Apple and other high-tech leaders have been parading into federal court in Washington with tales of being bullied, bloodied and browbeaten by Microsoft. Even onetime skeptics among the experts following the case are starting to ask, What if the government actually wins this thing...
Government and antitrust lawyers are not the only ones testing Bill Gates's empire these days: Union organizers are circling. Microsoft's 260-acre campus is a cool place -- you work in jeans, play volleyball on breaks and get good pay, benefits, stock options and job security -- if you wear a blue ID badge. Those who wear orange badges (known as "A-dashes," for "agency," because of their e-mail address prefix) get no benefits, no stock options and no talk about getting on permanent staff...
...Microsoft job, says Mike Blain in the Communications Workers of America newsletter, "you come into Microsoft and interview with a guy. He wants to hire you, so he sends you to a temporary agency. They hire you and send you back." Now Blain, a former editor of technical material for Microsoft, is using e-mail and the Internet to help organize Microsoft workers under the CWA. Organizers have met with Microsoft employees and held meetings at the King County Labor Council. "Our labor is very much in demand," adds Blain, "and we're going to exploit that as much...
...fair to Boies et al, the DOJ still has plenty of juicy material to feed on. Its latest witness, economist Frederick Warren-Boulton, brought out one tasty tidbit Tuesday: Microsoft, he said, had an "astonishing" 38.5 percent profit margin -- more than any other high-tech firm in the Fortune 500. How, then, can this company claim that it doesn't derive benefits from its monopoly position? After all, there's one thing the AOL deal hasn't changed: 89 percent of those Netscape browsers are going to be viewed on a Microsoft-operated machine. Windows, too, is a beast that...