WASHINGTON - Day One of Ralph Nader's Microsoft worryfest amounted to a frenzy of spin-doctoring and media manipulation. One highlight: Scott McNealy, chief executive officer of leading Redmond antagonist Sun Microsystems, took time during a half-hour presentation to try to guess how news reports might treat his talk.
"'He's just trying to create a Java monopoly. He just wants to be Bill,'" McNealy predicted others would say or write about him, after beginning his remarks with the enervating line, "This is an impossible speech to give."
While conference organizer Nader and other speakers kept insisting that the conference was intended to "start a dialog" about Microsoft, the bulk of the presentations were open, or at best thinly disguised, attacks staged by Microsoft competitors.
In some cases, these were cast as remedial education for an East Coast audience believed to be ignorant of Microsoft's true power.
"I don't think people here really know what's going on," said Robert Purcell, a vice president at electronic auto-sales company Consumers Car Club, near the end of the day's events.
Besides McNealy and Purcell, today's speakers included Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich, Rosati attorney (and Wired coverboy) Gary Reback, Netscape general counsel Roberta Katz, and Sybase CEO Mitchell Kertzman, appearing live via remote TV hookup.
Reback in particular went for the melodramatic touch, saying, "I want you to think about the schoolchildren" after describing how the profile of Bill Gates in Microsoft's Encarta had changed from even-handedness to puffery when it became the leading electronic encyclopedia.
Microsoft's refusal to participate openly in the conference fueled a tit-for-tat letters campaign today between Nader and Microsoft chief operating officer Robert Herbold. The software superpower released a letter from Herbold to Nader dated today that denounced the conference as an "ambush."
"You and your staff rejected our suggestions for several respected industry participants and observers who could have presented a balanced view of Microsoft's business practices and products," Herbold wrote. "For us to participate in this kind of an environment would be like walking into an ambush with sharpshooters on every hilltop."
Asked to back up Herbold's claims, however, a Microsoft spokesperson attending the conference could not name a specific industry figure who had been rejected by Nader's group.
Nader fired back in his own letter to Herbold, writing that "Microsoft doth protest too much, and too late."
Microsoft spokesman Greg Shaw labeled the day's proceedings "disingenuous," and cited in particular McNealy's response to an audience question about Sun's attempt to control Java standards.
McNealy said there were three approaches to standards development - closed-door (á la Microsoft, in McNealy's view), committee-driven, and what McNealy called the "open-control model" Sun had adopted with Java. "We didn't wait for consensus, because consensus is dead," McNealy said.
"Open-control model - I never heard that before," Shaw said sarcastically.
"There were no surprises. This was the Spanish Inquisition without the funny hats," said John Pinette, another Microsoft spokesman, summing up the day's events.
