Bill Gates now has a permanent place in business-school case studies--not only for creating Microsoft, but for careless trash-talking in e-mail.
Gates' e-mail exchanges became a highlight of the 1998 antitrust trial, which ended with a consent decree after the U.S. Department of Justice failed in its bid to break up the company. "I want to get as much mileage as possible out of our browser and Java relationship here," Gates wrote in an August 1997 internal message. "Do we have a clear plan on what we want Apple to do to undermine Sun?"
Then-U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson used those e-mail exchanges to poke fun at Gates, calling him not "particularly responsive" when the Microsoft executive was quizzed about them during cross-examination. An appeals court later gave Jackson the boot, unanimously ruling that he had "seriously tainted the proceedings."
No wonder that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and President Bush have forsworn e-mail. "I've made an easy decision there," Bush said last year. "I just don't do it...Everything is investigated in Washington. And that's just the nature of the way here right now. And so we're losing a lot of history, not just with me, but with other presidents, as well."
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