Gates blasts DOJ lawsuit in Economist essay

Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates blasted the U.S. Department of Justice and its "lawsuit on behalf of Netscape" in a three page essay thatwill be published this week in the Economist magazine. Gates says that thegovernment's case is flawed, since there are no laws against innovation.

"We are defending the legal right of every company to decide which featuresgo into its own products,” Gates writes. "The law says that every company--from the smallest startups to the largest multinational--should always work to improve its products.”

One of the strangest allegations to come out of the government lawsuit isthe claim that Microsoft offered to split the browser market with Netscape.Gates says this isn't true.

"[We had a meeting] to discuss various technologies Microsoft proposed sharing with Netscape, so that Netscape’s browser could take advantage of the cool new features we were developing for Windows 95,” Gates says. Heshared an email from Netscape's Marc Andreessen, who described the meetingas Mafia-like: "“Good to see you again today--we should talk more often,”Andreessen's mail reads. That's an odd sentiment considering his recenttake on the talks.

Gates also defended the Microsoft employee's email excerpts that the DOJused to show that the company was going after its competitors in a predatory fashion.

“When you consider that Microsoft provided over a million pages of internaldocuments and e-mails, it is not surprising that the government has been able to find a handful of statements--many by relatively junior staffers--that can be taken out of context,” Gates writes in his essay.

Gates' essay appears in Saturday's Economist